Gardener

Postcard from Florida (2)

2012-02-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

The weather down here has been wonderful—with temps in the 70’s and 80’s most of the time, although the last two nights temps have fallen to the mid-thirties. But, if I was a resident of the state of Florida, my temperature would be rapidly heating up right now.

The state legislature is considering a bill that would require schools—starting in the 6th grad—to counsel students to choose college majors in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM courses) over courses in things like psychology, anthropology, and the liberal arts. Why? Because majors in STEM fields make more money and have more employment opportunities. Incoming college students would receive special information about degrees with the “highest full-time job placement and highest average annualized earnings.”

Florida’s businessman governor , Rick Scott, has made this bill a top priority, having proposed earlier bills that actually penalized many of the liberal arts fields.

I have no objection to telling students which jobs offer the best employment opportunities. But when the state counsels students to seek first the jobs that will make the most money, it is moving into the area of religious education.

Unfortunately the state is promoting a pagan religion—not Christianity. Jesus tells his followers to “seek first the kingdom of God.” He says “lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.” He says “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

So, in the state of Florida, a young person who wants to pursue a career that enables him to effectively serve his fellow humans—become a teacher or social worker or pastor or counselor—will be advised to seek personal wealth instead of the public weal.

Counseling young people to set their hearts on earthly treasure is a violation of a student’s religious liberty, just as intrusive as counseling young people to get abortions.

This Florida bill is just one more indication of how the business paradigm dominates and perverts every aspect of American culture. Some might blame the STEM bill on an over-reaching state government seeking to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives, and that may be a secondary cause, but the primary culprit is the business mind that puts dollar signs on every human endeavor.

The promotion of greed and the commodification of all of life has become, I think, the great evil our time, so pervasive that almost no one notices it or sees it as evil.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

2012-02-06T13:15:00.000-08:00

What does one do all day down in responsibility-free Florida? Well, I just read a marvelous book about the financial collapse of 2008, The Big Short by Michael Lewis, Norton, 2010. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t even attempt to read a book about the complex workings of Wall Street, but this book is a character-driven narrative. It has a plot, and even though you know when the climax will occur and what it will be, the journey to it is marvelously engaging.
So it reads like a novel—but a novel that is packed with information, not only info about the technical stuff of the Wall Street bond market, but about the greed, mendacity, arrogance and stupidity of a great many of the highly-paid officials of Wall Street investment corporations.
Lewis follows the lives and investments of three small time investors (and the companies they form) who, at least four years before the collapse of 2007-2008 saw that the entire world of sub-prime mortgage bonds was a house made of cards. He walks along side them as they discover more and more about how little anyone on Wall Street really knows about the complicated instruments they are so blithely selling, tracing their growing flabbergastation at each new revelation of stupidity. What drives this narrative also, is our curiosity about how their gamble to short these CDOs eventually turns out.
Here are a few quotes or paraphrases that get at the heart of the story. The three “characters in this story by mezzanine CDOs to sell short.
What is a mezzanine CDO? Wall Street investment banks conned the rating agencies [Moody and Standard and Poor] into blessing piles of crappy loans; this enabled the lending of trillions of dollars to ordinary Americans; ordinary Americans happily complied and told the lies they needed to tell to obtain the loans; the machinery that turned the loans into supposedly riskless securities was so complicated that the investors had ceased to evaluate risks; the problem grew so big that the end result was the crash that culminated in September, 2008 (243).
But worse than that, “the credit default swaps, filtered through the CDOs were being used to replicate bonds backed by actual home loans. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. . . . They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money they couldn’t afford. They were creating them [the CDOs] out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses in the financial system are so much greater than just the subprime loans (Steve Eisman quoted by Michael Lewis in The Big Short , 143).
The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were on the wrong end of the gamble, yet “all of them, without exception, either ran their public corporation into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by they United States government. [Yet]they all got rich” (256).
To explain how this could happen, Lewis, in his conclusion, takes us briefly to 1981.
“John Gutfreund [CEO of Salomon Brothers]had done violence to the Wall Street social order—and gotten himself dubbed the King of Wall Street—when, in 1981, he turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into Wall Street’s first public corporation. . . . He and his partners not only made a quick killing: they transferred the ultimate risk from themselves to their shareholders. . . . The shareholders who financed risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing. . . . All that was clear was that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.
“No investment bank owned by its employees would have leveraged itself 35:1, or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine CDOs to be sold to its customers. The short-term expected gain would not have justified the long-term expected loss (Lewis 257-258).
Lewis concludes that nothing has been fixed on Wall Street because the financial institutions are still public corporations, and so the people running them do not bear any of the financial risk. Think what would happen if you could engage in risk free gambling.

What Kind of President Does Dordt Need?

2012-01-20T07:27:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I received my copy of the Calvin Spark which contained a wonderful interview with philosopher Alvin Plantenga. Among other things, Plantenga was asked what qualifications he would look for in a new president for Calvin College, and he mentioned three. One I've forgotten but the other two struck me as really significant. His second qualification was that the president have a thorough knowledge of and commitment to the Reformed tradition. His first qualification was that the president have "a deep love and respect for the life of the mind" (I'm quoting from memory). I felt a sort of thrill when I read this and thought what a wonderful thing it was that someone still recognized that colleges are more than institutes for job-training, that the most wonderful thing that can happen at a college occurs when a young person suddenly become genuinely excited about an idea, can't wait to dig into it more deeply.

This morning I was reading a book called Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott and I read: "students come to a college education expecting nothing more than a set of paper qualifications that will enable them to earn a decent salary. The idea that they might be there to grow as human beings, to be inducted into an ancient culture, to become somehow more than they are already is alien to them. They expect instant answers but they have no deep questions."

I know that there will always be some students who come to college only to be equipped to get a well-paying job. But some come hoping to be introduced to a larger world, eager to grow, asking deep questions. I worry that as colleges--Dordt as much as any other, I fear--become more and more commodified, more and more shaped and squeezed into the business model, education/jobs being the product we sell, teachers the salespeople and students the consumers, any concern for the life of the mind, for the very impractical activity of wrestling with big ideas for the sake of the idea and the wrestle, will be easy to dispense with.

And, finally, it will be the president who sets the tone and direction of the college. A president whose primary focus and concern is enrollment numbers and constituent giving will not be a president who creates a hospitable climate for the cultivation of the life of the mind.

New Year's Eve Partiers Sing Let Youth Praise Him and Old Blue Psalter Songs

2012-01-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

The eight of us sat around the table, our chili bowls empty, the salads gone, but still sipping wine as we waited for the old year to disappear. Someone mentioned favorite old hymns, so I whipped out the eight copies of the Old Blue Psalter we keep on the bottom shelf of a china closet, passed them around and our guests began calling out their favorites—most of them songs that are not found in the Gray Psalter (the one that helped kill psalm singing). We sang some of the psalms and hymns from Old Blue until someone suggested “Peace Be Still.” But, of course, that’s not in the Blue Psalter. It’s in the Let Youth Praise Him book.
Now, if you are not familiar with the Let Youth Praise Him, it is probably because you are under sixty or over seventy-five or did not go to a CSI Christian School, for the LYPH was the songbook in Christian schools between 1950 and 1965. But if you are in that age-bracket and went to Christian school, you will probably be a little jealous of what ensued after the mention of “Peace Be Still”—a wildly enthusiastic sing-along of one old favorite after another.
Some of them were sweet little songs for little children like this one:

Dropping, dropping falls the rain, from the sky,
Gazing through the window pane, we wonder why
Everywhere, flowers fair, shed their fragrance on the air,
Every day, praising God, for his care.

But of course this sweet little song lightly carries in its lyrics that most weighty concept we call the providence of God. And this one invites us to spend our lives spreading joy and goodness:

Give said the little stream, give away, give away,
Give said the little stream as it hurried on its way.
I’m small I know but where ever I go
The fields grow greener still.
Singing, singing all the day, give away oh give away.
Singing, singing all the day, give oh give away.

There are over 150 songs in this book, yet most of us, it seemed, remembered best the same ten or fifteen. The two we sang most enthusiastically (wildly, really, and perhaps the wine contributed to that) were “Peace Be Still” and “Then Jesus Came.” It is clear why we loved them. They are a couple of the most dramatic songs in Christian hymnody—both the words and the music—the kind of songs that kids of any generation would beg to sing. I can’t give you the music, but here’s verse one of “Peace Be Still”:

Master the tempest is raging! The billows are tossing high!
The sky is o’ershadowed with blackness, No shelter or help is nigh;
Carest though not that we perish? How canst thou lie asleep,
When each moment so madly is threatening A grave in the angry deep.
Refrain:
“The winds and the waves shall obey My will. Peace, be still, peace be still.
(And here begins the amazing crescendo as we climb up the scale) Whether the wrath of the of the stormed-tossed sea,
Or demons or men or whatever it be, No water can swallow the ship where lies the Master of ocean
and earth and skies; (And now, slowly and almost pianissimo)They all shall sweetly obey My will; Peace be still! Peace be still! They all shall sweetly obey My will, peace, peace be still.”

It was a great song to sing as a 10-year-old, and it is still a kick to sing it at 69.

What strikes me as most profound about our response to the LYPH songs is that they had attached themselves to the very core of our being. Here we were, all of us 60 or older, from eight different Christian schools and in an instant we were transformed into sixth graders in Mrs. Hoogwerf’s classroom, absolutely delighted to be singing these songs. Most of us had not thought of or sung these songs for many, many years. Yet we knew the words. We knew the tunes. We knew when to crescendo and when to diminuendo (if that’s a verb). Nobody forced us to memorize them—we learned them without trying because we loved to sing them. And I believe that a good bit of the theology contained in these songs (“Everyday praising God for his care.”) must have caught in some of the good soil of our subconscious and become part of us.

Judging by our joyous nostalgia on New Year’s Eve, I might even offer a bit of educational advice: Christian schools should make the creation and use of a school hymnal a high priority in their educational endeavors. And they might just start with a few of these old chestnuts from the Let Youth Praise Him.

Why Corporations Lobby (Bribe?) Politicians

2012-01-06T06:54:00.000-08:00

Here's a story from NPR that reveals a pretty bsic flaw in our system of government:

"Corporations don't lobby Congress for fun. They lobby because it helps their bottom line. Getting a regulation gutted or a tax loophole created means extra cash for the corporation. But getting laws changed can be very expensive. How much money does a corporation get back from investing in a good lobbyist?
It's a messy, secretive system so it was always hard to study. But in 2004, economists found a bill so simple, so lucrative, that they could finally track the return on lobbying investment.
The American Jobs Creation Act benefited hundreds of multinational corporations with a huge, one-time tax break. Without the law, companies that brought profits earned abroad back to the U.S. had to pay a tax rate of 35 percent. With the law, that rate dropped to just over 5 percent. It saved those companies billions of dollars.
In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.
That high of a payoff surprised even Alexander:
RA: I was not expecting it to be that big at all. I thought I needed to go check my math.
AB: So after the fifth or sixth time checking you were like, oh, this is the number?
RA: After the twentieth time of checking.
The American Jobs Creation Act is just one example. Not every lobbying effort has a return of 22,000 percent. There are companies that probably lose money lobbying — they spend limited resources on lobbyists and see no benefit in return.
But the company-lobbyist-politician ecosystem, Scholz says, is a problem:
We have a situation where we, in essence, invite corporations to buy their own tax rate through lobbying... which ultimately corrupts both the companies and the politicians."

A Lesson in Grace...or Diplomacy

2012-01-02T08:20:00.000-08:00

On Fridays I go to read with my friend Charlie, and this week we read through much of the poetry in Purpaleanie and other Permutations by Sietze Buining (English prof Stanley Wiesma), a minor Christian Reformed classic that came out in 1978. Purpaleanie was all the rage in CRC circles 30 years ago and eventually was shaped into a lovely play by Dordt theatre prof Vern Meyer. Purpaleanie is a collection of free (very free) verse poems told by a young Sioux County farm boy of the ‘40’s celebrating and critiquing the rural Christian Reformed Dutch-American folk of his time.
One poem that I did not remember from my earlier readings of the collection (and viewing of the play) struck me as most profound. I find the “lesson” of the poem, the non-arguing acceptance of criticism by the pastor, to be a potent challenge to my own way of dealing with unfair criticism. It is titled “Diplomacy” but I would have called it “Grace.” Here it is:

Diplomacy

Prayer
and fasting
went into the critique
as well as insomnia and loss
of appetite, not to mention the effort
of a carefully kept notebook.
Is it any wonder
Asa’s voice quavered now that he confronted
The dominie face to face in the parsonage?

“On
June 5
in the morning
you said that immersion
shows what happens in baptism
every bit as well as sprinkling.
On June 12 you said in the evening
that God loves everybody. You were on
John-three-sixteen again. On June 19 you quoted
the Pope—about the need for peace. On June 26
you asked the Presbyterian minister to pray.
He used to be Reformed, but even the sister-
in-law he was visiting says he doesn’t read
the Bible anymore—not after meals he does-
n’t. And your Fourth-of-July sermon was
anti-American. When Jesus said ‘My
Kingdom is not of this world,’
the founding fathers hadn’t
even written the Constitu
tion yet.”
Asa
folded away
his notebook and afterwards
he wondered how it had all happened
so fast.
Any one of the charges was enough
certainly to get the Consistory to reprimand Dominie.
And who knows? To get Classis to censure him or get Synod
to silence him forever?
But the dominie had asked,
“Is that your whole list, Asa?”
“Ja, Dominie.”
“Well, Asa, those were certainly
foolish things for me to
preach. I’ll try to
be more careful.
Bear with me.
And now we
consider
the case
closed,
Asa.”

The case was closed
because the Dominie
said so. Asa’s in-
somnia and loss of appetite
disappeared because the case was closed.
The prayer and fasting disappeared because
the insomnia and loss of appetite disappeared.
And Asa sold his farm and studied to be a dominie
because a dominie can call a case closed to avoid a fight
and thus do a world of good.

A Few of My "Bests" from 2011

2011-12-31T15:16:00.000-08:00

A Few of my “Bests” from 2011
Best Fiction:
· Olive Kitteridge and Abide with Me by Elizabeth Stroud
· Hannah Coulter and A World Lost by Wendell Berry
State of Wonder by Ann Padgett
Best Non-fiction:
· Desiring the Kingdom by James A. K. Smith
· Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibbon
· Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction by Richard Mouw
· Mountain beyond Mountain by Tracy Kidder
· Not Sure: A Pastor’s Journey from Faith to Doubt by John Suk
Best Movies (Most of them from Netflix)
· Incendies directed by Denis Vilenueve
· In a Better World directed by Susanne Bier
· Brighton Rock directed by Rowan Joffe
· The Tree of Life directed by Terrance Malick
· Of Gods and Men directed by Xavier Beauvois

Are American Christians Victims?

2011-12-22T05:45:00.000-08:00

I am a Christian. I have lived in America my entire life, and I have never experienced discrimination because of my Christian beliefs. Oh, I have received “looks” from time to time when I have made some sort of faith statement in a venue that was essentially secular. But nothing close to discrimination if by that word we mean a showing of prejudice against a particular individual or group.
So I was somewhat put off by Nancy French’s statement in her conversation with Dr. Zylstra on KDCR, Dordt College radio last week that the people who most often experience discrimination in America are evangelical Christians. The statement was made in the context of a political discussion, and the example given was that often Christians are not given positions as judges because of their faith. I have heard this discrimination lament from others as well but I don’t believe it.

How does one know something like this, that it is Christians who most often experience discrimination? Is someone adding up the jobs denied? Is it even possible to know why a position is denied? Is it possible to know all the occasions in which discrimination occurs?

Yesterday evening on the nightly news I heard two stories about discrimination, one involved a Chinese American serving in Afghanistan in the military who was so hazed and tormented by his fellow soldiers that he committed suicide or possibly was killed. The army has arrested eight soldiers in this case of discrimination that let to death. The other story was about a class action settlement by Bank of America which has agreed to pay a whopping $335 million in a case that accused it of widespread discrimination against qualified Latino and African-American borrowers on home loans.

Both of these stories involve minorities who experienced discrimination, and it is my belief that the people who experience discrimination most often in this country are ethnic minorities. And, perhaps, religious minorities. I don’t claim to be able to prove that but it fits with what I know and read about American culture.

It is especially surprising to me to hear Christians depicted as victims in a discussion of the current Republican Party primaries and caucuses. As I listen to the candidates talk about their Christian faith, one can’t wait to out-do the next in testifying to the importance of his Christian faith—unless his name is Mit Romney. Certainly no politician from either party would dare end a speech without saying “God bless America.” (Imagine, if a Muslim candidate who was running for office said, “Allah bless America.”)

I understand that Ms French works in some capacity for Mit Romney. And she spent much of her time on the air talking about why Christians should vote for Romney in spite of the fact that he is a Mormon. But I did not hear her say that Mormons like Romney and Huntsman were victims of discrimination. Puzzling.

A final note: We live in a world where Christians are frequently tortured and even killed for the sake of the gospel. That is a fact. And because it is true, American Christians ought to be careful about playing the victim card.

Reply to Gary

2011-12-12T07:18:00.000-08:00

Good to hear from you, Gary. I hope you and your family are well.

I agree with you that the church is obliged to care for the poor. My question is who picks up the slack when the church fails. It is a fact that the church does not (has not, has never) come close to meeting the basic human needs of the poor. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP and others were begun by the government because of unmet needs. I cannot imagine the degree of suffering and death that would occur if the government did not step in.

Here are some words from John Calvin. If the church took them seriously, it might be able to fulfill its obligations to the poor. Calvin urged his fellow Christians to engage in "a liberal and kindly sharing of [what we possess] with others. . . . Let this, therefore, be our rule for generosity and beneficence: We are stewards of everything God has conferred on us by which we are to help our neighbor, and are required to render an account of our stewardship. Moreover, the only right stewardship is that which is tested by the rule of love. Thus it will come about that we shall not only join zeal for another’s benefit with care for our own advantage, but shall subordinate the latter to the former" (Institutes III. Vii.5).

And Calvin says this in his exposition of 2 Corinthians 8: 13-14: “God wills that there be proportion and equality among us, that is, each [person] is to provide for the needy according to the extent of his means so that no [one] has too much and no [one] has too little.” I know, I know, the Republicans have been calling this kind of talk “class warfare” whenever President Obama even tiptoes near this kind of thinking. 

A Few Responses to the Comments

2011-12-09T18:46:00.000-08:00

I really like what Dan says about the debates on health care being “dominated by affluent white people whose position in life means they have no idea about what life, sickness and death looks like up close in their cities.” Bill Moyers interview with Wendell Potter touches on this: www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html

I attended church in the poorest neighborhood in the city of Muskegon, MI, and served as a deacon in that church for a number of years. Most of our deaconate work involved neighborhood people who came to us in desperation because they had no money for food for their family—often because their welfare check was delayed for some reason. For several years I worked with a family—grandmother, four kids, amputee grandfather—who depended entirely on the social services system, but because the system let them down from time to time, we would have to buy them food or go to the DSS and advocate for them.

I suppose those eighteen years at Bethany CRC, Muskegon had a great deal to do with my position on the need for government programs for the poor. As a church we were able to help the poor in emergencies, but are contribution was a drop in the bucket. And Bethany was far more committed than most churches to helping the poor. I was back there last summer and learned that since the economic collapse of 2008, Bethany has two “deacons” who spend two days a week listening to requests for help from community people and deciding who they can help and with how much money. They are busy all day.
*****
Anonymous 1 asks what the responsibility of the individual is. Obviously, it is to do as much as she can to take care of herself and her family. But as I said, if she is unemployed or earning a base salary that precludes paying health insurance premiums, then others must help her out. “The “let’em die” option that some Tea-partiers expressed at one of the debates is not acceptable to a Christian.

Does God mandate us to participate in a government that runs social programs? You are assuming, I suppose, that those programs are unbiblical—something I’ve seen no Biblical evidence for. I’ve never been quite sure how far we can take Christ’s “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Perhaps it applies to this question. I would say that if a government asks you to do something that is clearly incompatible with fundamental Biblical beliefs, you should refuse. Some Christians, for example, are pacifists for Biblical reasons, and refuse to go to war. Good. But I suppose if one is going to claim to be a pacifist, he should be ready to bear the consequences.

Does God need our money? Of course not. He is almighty. Can loaves be broken to feed thousands? We know that God has done that. I am a gardener, and every time I plant a bean seed I expect God to multiply that bean seed into thirty or forty beans. But I believe God expects me to plant and water and weed that bean seed. That’s the system he has set up. When he wants his word spread around the world, he says “Go ye” to his people and uses what Paul calls “the foolishness of preaching.” Does he need people to help him? Of course not. But when he want the earth cared for, he makes humans his stewards. When he wants justice done, he says to humans, “do justice, love kindness, walk humbly.” I don’t mean to preach, but lately I have heard this argument so often and it goes contrary to a basic Biblical principle: God uses his people to do much of his work. And if they do not feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit the prisoner, the consequences are pretty dire.

Finally, Anonymous 1 wants me to identify myself. I am a reluctant Democrat who does not know what this ‘sub-culture of academics’ is. She/He make academic sound like a dirty word. I would be pleased to be called an academic, though I'm not sure I am one.
******
Ross: Thanks for the kind words. You say the debate is not about whether we care for our fellow humans through government, but the way the question was both framed and answered at the Santorum speech, it WAS about that. And as I listen to the TV debates, Perry, Paul, Bachman and Santorum, outspoken Christians all, seem to espouse a belief that government has no business getting involved in health care or other aid to the poor. I heard this idea from quite a few Dordt students also, and I hear it from old guys like me who love their medicare.

I agree with you, of course, that there is massive waste in government’s management of some entitlements and we have to begin to cut back. On the other hand, according to Wendell Potter of Cygna (a major medical insurer), Medicare spends something like 3% of its revenue on administrative costs while private insurance companies spend about 20%--the difference being that the insurance companies have to include their profits in their costs.

Santorum Takes His Gospel of Individualism to Dordt College

2011-12-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

“You go to Dordt College and you ask me that question?” Rick Santorum said to Ryan Walters, Dordt College freshman, when Santorum spoke in Sioux Center recently. And the question that Santorum seemed amazed at was this: “If not for our [government] social programs, how can we take care of our poor?” Santorum asked the audience who should take care of the poor, and the answer he got first was “the church,” and then, the answer he wanted, it’s up to “the individual” to take care of himself.

Before we parse those three answers, I want to comment on Santorum’s amazement at Walters question. Why was he so amazed? I can only speculate. Santorum was amazed because he had been led to believe that Dordt College is a bastion of conservative Republican political views. Where did he get that idea? Again, I can, only speculate. Perhaps his colleague in the House of Representatives, Steve King, told him that. Perhaps the fact that Sioux County is called the most conservative county in the country influenced his viewpoint. Perhaps people at Dordt led him to believe that, though I hope that’s not the case. Whatever the reason, it concerns me that people automatically assume that Dordt has a conservative Republican agenda.

I must say that as a former Dordt professor, I was extremely proud to read the account of Mr. Walters interchange with Mr. Santorum. It is a scary thing for a young person to stand up in public forum and take on someone who has spent his entire adult live engaging in political dialogue; yet Walters held his own with Santorum. Secondly, I was proud because it showed that Dordt College is not a place where everyone is shaped by the same cookie cutter. ( I pray that Dordt College will never becomes a place where students are all expected to have the same opinions on political matters.) Finally, I was proud because even though Santorum is a life-long Catholic and has a sterling record on pro-life issues, Walters had the pro-life position on the issue of health care, a position with strong Biblical support.

Which brings me back to those three answers to Walters question, how can we take care of the poor? Should it be the individual, the church or the government? Well, of course, it should be all three, but the weakest answer is “the individual.” Obviously an individual should pay for her health care if she is able, but Walters’ question was about the poor. Most poor people do not make enough money to begin to pay for the health care needs, especially with the out-of-control healthcare costs that we have these days.

Some people would say to those poor people, “tough,” but that is not a Christian response. Some people would say to the unemployed who can’t afford health insurance, “Get a job.” But most unemployed people are desperately seeking employment. Who should pay the health care costs of the unemployed and the poor? Some people would say “the church.” Apparently some people did say that at Santorum’s Dordt College event.

It is a good answer, but not a realistic one. Unfortunately, many churches do little or nothing for the poor. Check some time what percentage of your church giving goes to the poor. After the staff salaries and the building fund and the Christian education fund and the mission fund, what percentage is left for the poor? Precious little. The plain truth of the matter is that the church can’t even come close to paying for the health care needs of the poor.

If churches took over the government’s share of Medicaid, each congregation in the United States would have to ante up around $323,000 each year. If churches took over the four most basic programs for the poor in the United States, each of the 325,000 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim congregations would have to raise $289,000 more than they now give to the poor. That’s about $93 billion. (These statistics are from Mennonite scholar Ron Sider’s book Just Generosity, pp. 70-73; 82-87;91-93. I realize that they are twelve years old now, but the plain truth is that giving to the poor has gotten worse in those twelve years.)

That leaves, as Walters suggested, the government. What does the Bible say about government and the care of the poor? Well, Paul says in Romans 13: 4 (that’s St. Paul the apostle, not Ron Paul) that those in authority are “God’s servants for your good.” That good is public justice. In I Kings 10: 9 Solomon is told “the Lord has made you king to execute justice and righteousness.” How might the King, that is, the government, execute justice and righteousness? According to the Bible, one primary way is by making sure that the hungry are fed, by paying fair wages, by creating conditions for healthy living. Government intervention is the only way that systemic structural injustice such as discrimination or inadequate wages or dreadfully inadequate healthcare can be corrected.

After all, governments are ordained by God to do justice. They are a gift from God. Where do Christians like Santorum get the idea that government aid to the poor is wrong? And where do Christians like Santorum—or Michelle Bachman or Rick Perry or Ron Paul—get the notion that each individual must solve his own problems? Christianity is the anti-individualism religion, it is the love your neighbor religion, it is the “bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ” religion. The Christians gathered at the Santorum event in Sioux Center ought to have erupted in a chorus of “no’s” when Santorum told young Mr. Walter that each individual is responsible for her own healthcare.

More from Gilead's Pastor Ames

2011-12-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

Pastor Ames in Gilead mentions that he has thought about having a book ready at hand to clutch if he feels a heart attack coming on, “so that it would have an especial recommendation from being found in my hands. That seemed theatrical, on consideration. . . .” I notice that I have written in the margin, “How vain we all are.” It’s a bit like imaging the kind and flattering words that might be said at our funerals? Surely no one has done that!

Still, Ames’ notion of having an impressive book in your hands when you die invites reflection. You would want something of “quality,” but also something that you really loved. He mentions the English metaphysical poets Donne and Herbert, Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and Calvin’s Institutes, Volume II. I’m not in his league. I might choose the poems of Hopkins or Dickinson or something by Wendell Berry or . . . Gilead.

Three Aps, a Flop and a Snap

2011-12-02T12:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote this piece twenty years ago but never dared publish it anywhere because of the offense that some people might take. But most of those people are dead now, so I think I’m safe. Here’s how I came to write about nicknames in my hometown of Edgerton.

I’m eating dinner at this restaurant with a friend from my boyhood. We both left town in 1960 and have gone back only for visits in the last thirty-five years. We’re sitting in this restaurant when somebody walks by, recognizes John, and stop to talk to him for a while.

“Who was that?” I ask when he leaves.
“Ed Bakker.”
“I don’t think I know him,” I say.
“Swivel-neck,” says John. “Swivel-neck Bakker.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “He’s the guy who could look at the clock on the back wall of church and never move any part of his body but his neck.”
“Yep. A hundred-eighty degrees from a straight ahead position.”
“Old Swivel-neck Bakker.”
That’s how it started. Now it becomes almost a competition to see who can remember the funniest nickname. John starts by giving me the name Gunnink.
“Machine-gun,” I say, remembering the deep, bass, woody woodpecker-like laugh. There was something euphonious about the phrase Machine-gun Gunnink.
“Nope, Hamburger,” he says, and I recall the huge man who was reputed to have ordered and eaten a dozen hamburgers at The Leader Café after baling all day.
Now it’s my turn. “De Boer,” I say.
“Easy,” says John, “Flop.” We both remember the man who was mayor of the town for twenty years, Flop De Boer, his gut sagging over his belt, his cheeks flopping over his jaws, his words sort of flopping out of his lips—but he led the town through some of its best years.

The game goes on, but soon John (or as he was once known, Rose, either because of his last name, Rozeboom, or his coloration after exertion,) must go. After he’s gone, I keep remembering. I remember Snap Snyder, who in a beautiful flowing hand always signing his checks with just one word, “Snap.” I remember how in his youth my father, Ap Schelhaas (Albert), was part of a gang made up of himself and Snap and Hap Kooiman and Flap something or other.

My cousin Chick Hannenburg (his real name was Leon but his dad’s name was Chuck so Chick was the logical nickname he acquired—Chuck’s chick) had a cousin whose mom’s nickname was Fat. Whenever they visited there he’d say, “We’re going to Fataneddie’s tonight or we’re going to Aunt Fat’s tonight.” Her husband Eddie died years ago, but the last time I saw Fat—really Florence—she was a relatively spiffy seventy-five-year-old who probably didn’t weigh over 140 pounds. She was still called Fat.

Squeaky Menning might have made it as a contra-tenor, but as a school bus driver he took lots of abuse for his high-pitched voice. Town constables were also abused. The first in my memory was named John something. I remember him only as Johnny Ketchem. He was replaced by Speed Kruen. My Grandpa Pete, whose native language was Dutch, referred to him as that “Swift Kruen fellow.” He never realized he had it wrong. The last cop I remember was Marion “Mutt” Pool who cannot be faulted for preferring his nickname to his baptized name.

My friend Leon Fey was called Butch by his parents and Toddner by some of the kids in the neighborhood. Toddner stuck, but it stuck as Todd, and eventually Leon took Todd as his legal name. Ervy (Ervin) Fey, Todd’s uncle, gave me my nickname. (Ervy’s son, Dennis, was never called anything but Pete by anyone. His dad started that, too.) As I walked by the Ford Garage on my way to the Farmers Store, Ervy always said, “Hey Dagwood” because of the cowlicks on both the north and south ends of my head. Eventually Dagwood changed to Bumpstead which hardened for a time into Bump which was accidentally appropriate since on almost all of my class pictures between grades three and seven I had a scab or a bump on my face. Thankfully, “Bump” died a quiet death. The one nickname I really craved was “Skelly” but my cousin Glenn, two years older than me, had already earned that proud sobriquet.

I suppose that at this point I should be ready to make some profound observation or generalization about nicknames, but I can’t. Sometimes they are funny and sometimes sad, and usually accurate. I believe they are more frequently used by men and boys than by women and girls, but I don’t know why. I suspect they are more often used in small rural communities than in cities. Or perhaps they just hang on longer in small towns. Young people who grow up in small towns will probably leave their nicknames behind them when they move on—and most will not try to hold on to them. I cannot imagine a young man or woman on the rise today putting a nickname on his or her business card, but businesses on Main Street, Edgerton, were owned and successfully operated by three “Ap’s,” a “Flop,” a “Snap” and a “Yerdy.”

I realize that nicknames are cruel, but they can also build self-esteem. I suppose we are better off as their use and longevity diminish. Still, I believe that if the use of nicknames would disappear, we would lose something of value. But it couldn’t happen. No way! As long as there are boys with wit, creativity, nerve, and just the slightest measure of meanness in their hearts, there will be nicknames.

Most of the boys of my youth have moved on to other towns and I’ll never see them again, but I would like for just an hour or so to be back on the baseball diamond with Squirrel and Sluggo and Abba and Pee-wee, with Verk and Ike and Little Hupe, with Wec and Lefty and Rose and even, poor fellow, Bob.

Telephone Conversation with My Congressman's Aide

2011-11-21T09:01:00.000-08:00

Yes, Mason, I’m calling to ask Mr. King
to oppose cuts to programs for the poor
in the United States and in sub-Saharan Africa.
To cut these programs is to say, “Let’em die"
to millions of children and I know that
Mr. King is pro-life and therefore . . . .
What’s that? I don’t understand? When
Mr. King says “pro-life” he means anti-abortion?
Well, I understand that, Mason, but surely
if he opposes the deaths of unborn children
he would also oppose the deaths of born children.
I see, yes, umhmm. So then it’s using tax money
to save the lives of born children that Mr. King opposes?
Un huh, so he thinks that churches and private charities
are more efficient. Well, I suppose they might be, but does
Mr. King think that five hundred dollars efficiently spent
on the poor by the church will do more good than five million spend
somewhat less efficiently by the government? What’s that?
It’s too complicated for me to understand? You mean
I’m just too dumb to grasp Mr. King’s pro-life position?
Mason. . . . Mason? Hello? Are you there?

Dust of the Earth Enlivened by the Breath of God

2011-11-17T17:52:00.000-08:00

I made some disparaging remarks about the word spiritual in my last blog, and I suppose it was because I don't really understand what we mean by the word. What is a spiritual life? I know God is Spirit and I believe that the Holy Spirit in some mysterious way lives in me. But all that seems so inexplicable. Here's a quotation from Rob Mull's review of David Eaglelman's book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain:
Many of the functions we ascribe to our core selves are dependent upon our brain functions. We're realizing how dependent our sense of ourselves is on our biology and its interaction with the environment. . . .
We often talk as if we are separable from our bodies. Futurists want to download their thoughts and live forever online. Some faithful Christians look forward to discarding their shell of a body in favor of a spritual life in heaven. But if we could separate our thoughts and memories, even our sense of self, from our bodies, we would discover that the line between me and you isn't so clear. . . . "The brain is not so much the seat of the mind as the hub of the mind." We're not so much involved souls with joysticks controlling a mass of muscle as we are the dust of the earth enlivened by the breath of God.

What Eagleman seems to be saying in his book, among other things, is that who we are, our very sense of self is completely connected to our physicality, our brains and nerves and even our environment. Take away the physical and you lose the person.

So in the New Earth we will be bodies, incorruptible bodies, as Paul says, but bodies nevertheless.

Sorry, Plato

2011-11-14T15:22:00.000-08:00

“How I have loved my physical life,” says old Pastor Ames in the novel Gilead. It is the kind of observation only an elderly person is likely to make. When one is young, he thinks he will always be as quick and nimble as he is at that moment, and therefore he cannot really reflect on how he loves his physical life. It would be like saying “How I have loved breathing.” Only after one has lost some of his physical abilities, can he come to a conclusion like that of Pastor Ames.

But I’m 69 years old. I can say it using that present-perfect verb: How I have loved my physical life. Virtually all of it. (I have just enough pain to make me relish the fact that I’m usually pain free.) The great love of my youth was basketball. In high school I could never get my basketball shoes and jockstrap on quick enough before practices or games, couldn’t wait to get out there. It was all fun—the wind sprints, the shooting drills, running up and down the court shooting lay-ups at a hundred miles an hour. But especially the scrimmages. And all the driveway ball, in the alley behind Kooiman’s Insurance. Better than the formal games with teams from other towns. Just a bunch of guys in shirts and skins on a slab of cement, leaping and sweating and laughing and shooting. Talking trash in the gentle way that boys in a rural village in the '50's where everybody goes to church might talk it. I have loved my physical life.
I played until I was 58 years old (I had vowed as a youth to play till I died, but two bad knees forced me off the court.) I was never able to dunk, but I remember that well into my forties I had wonderfully exhilarating dreams of dunking the ball (though I guess the dreams were part of my non-physical life).
Of course my physical life involved much more than sports. (One’s mind goes immediately to sex, but I won’t go there in this blog.) What a marvelous thing it is to do physical work when you are young. I remember the first time I stacked hay bales all day on the hayrack, the baler spitting them out almost faster than I could stack them, the sun beating down on me and the temperature in the 90’s. I felt so good about myself that day, I think I would (almost) have done it for no pay. Another day I lugged cowhides that had been stacked in salt in a cellar all winter over to a freight car about 20 yards away. Eight hours straight with a half hour lunch, keeping up with a 35 year-old-man. Later, the owner of the Rendering Plant where I was working said to my dad, “That boy of yours is some worker!” Ah! the physical life.

And singing! Surely singing is part of one’s physical life. Nothing throughout all of my 69 years has given me more joy than singing. The choirs and male choruses and quartets I sang in. And the daily singing as I walk and sit and drive. I can’t begin to explain why I do it (it’s not like I decide to sing) or what it does to me--except to say that it does something good to me, nourishes me, restores my soul. But it is a physical thing, singing. It happens with breath and muscles and nasal passages and vocal cords. (How ignorant I am of this physical act! Where are my vocal chords? How to they work? Is there a scientific word for vocal chords? Are they cords like rope? Or chords like four notes played simultaneously?(: Why don’t mine work as well as they used to?)
I could go on about my physical life, but instead this brief confession: I have never liked the word spiritual very much. I have a book of poems out called The God of Material Things; all the poems in it are about physical stuff. I have written about non-material things, like doubt, but had to use material things to talk about it. One of my favorite poets had as his most sacred writing principle: “No ideas but in things.” Pretty good advice. Kind of what God must have thought when he created the earth.

From Fullest Bliss

2011-11-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

One of the foundational tenets of my existence can be summarized in a line from a great old hymn from the 12th century written by Bernard of Clairvaux, “O Jesus Joy of Loving Hearts”: “From fullest bliss that earth imparts, we turn unfilled to the again.” I suppose I have been learning the truth of it my whole life, but I remember distinctly the moment when I knew in my bones the truth of this line from St. Bernard. I had had a really marvelous experience on a singing tour/mission trip to Puerto Rico, but then, reflecting on the experience, I felt a sort of emptiness, a longing for something else, a need for a new high.
We live in the Shadowlands, C. S. Lewis said, and he meant by that, I believe, that our joys in this life are always muted by the knowledge that beyond the joy lies pain, death, loss. Yet even while muting the happiness, this knowledge contributes to it, for the happiness we feel is due in part to the underlying knowledge we have that it is transitory—the party will end, the new car will rust, the loved one will die; therefore we treasure the moments of joy.
I suspect that it is the desire to hold on to a joy we can experience momentarily that fuels many addictions. The addicted consumer can only ride so long on the high that his new car gives him and then he needs another new car. It’s the same for the alcoholic, the drug addict, the food addict, the gambling addict.
This desire to hold on to joys that are ephemeral, this longing for a sustainable joy that cannot be attained in this life is a fundamental part of the human condition. Some people burn their lives out in frantic pursuit of new experiences that can give them moments of joy. But it is a futile pursuit.

Paying Attention--through the Eyes of Oliver and Robinson

2011-11-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

Mary Oliver says in her poem “The Summer Day”:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With you one wild and precious life?

It strikes me that this “paying attention” is one of the chief parts of praise—and prayer, as Oliver suggests. Marilyn Robinson’s central character in Gilead, Pastor John Ames, also pays attention, and while Oliver pays attention to the natural world, Pastor Ames, again and again, finds the behavior of people a source of delight and praise. He says,
“When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see that aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.”

The person who wrote this, Marilyn Robinson, pays attention. She sees, in the earnest desires and concerns of an individual, something beautiful and remarkable, life as intense and hot as a fire. And I dare say she sees it as a manifestation of the divine in each person, the image of God. At least that’s how I see it.

What will I do with my wild and precious life today? Rake leaves. Visit an invalid friend. And pay attention, look for the loveliness that flows from the creator.

Another KDCR Plumbline from this Summer

2011-10-31T08:41:00.000-07:00

The Anti-Bootstrap Religion
I recently read a letter in the Sioux City Journal bemoaned the cost of government entitlements. By entitlements I assume the writer means programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Veterans Administration programs, Food Stamps, school lunch programs, and the list goes on and on. The letter writer is rightly concerned about entitlements. Anyone serious about cutting down the national debt has to recognize the need to cut back the funding to some entitlement programs.
But the letter writer seems to have it in for all entitlement programs. He expresses the belief that everyone ought to swim on his or her own feathers without help from the government or anybody else. “We start with nothing, and no one owes us anything. Parents graciously give,” he says. And he concludes by saying, “America was built on self-reliance. It’s time we return to that value.” He’s wrong about parents and wrong about America.
Parents owe their children food, clothing, shelter, love, encouragement and training in righteousness among a host of other things. These are obligations that come with parenthood. Parental neglect of children will lead to legal consequences. Why even a farmer who neglects his cows can be imprisoned for his neglect. And while self-reliance played a role in America’s development, so did social responsibility. From the early society of Puritan America, a theocracy, the people of this country survived because they relied on God and on one another. In times of sickness, in times of danger, at harvest time and even when they simply needed festive joy and celebration, they joined together and gave of themselves to the community.
And that attitude has continued right into the 21st century. We provide health care for those who can’t afford it, food and other basic necessities for mothers with children but without the means to care for them. We provide books for use free of charge at our public libraries, and if our house is on fire, we can depend on our society in the form of the Fire Department to come to our aid. (Although I read recently that firefighters in Tennessee allowed a home to burn to the ground because a homeowner had not paid a $75 fee. Perhaps this is the America envisioned by the letter writer who extols self-reliance.)
Which leads me to my main concern in this Plumbline. The idea of a government that is socially responsible and takes social action has been under attack recently not just by the letter writer, but by that political force that came to be called the Tea Party. And of course conservative talk radio has been railing against the supposed socialism of President Obama. Conservatives who say they oppose big government usually have programs aimed at bringing about social justice at the top of their hit list.
So what should it be, self-reliance or social responsibility. I would guess that when it comes to health coverage, most conservatives would say self-reliance. Just the mention of the possibility of a public option in Obama’s health care proposal met with such vitriol from the right that eventually the public option was no longer an option. And still President Obama’s plan is hated for its perceived socialistic components.
John Boehner, the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, said recently that the United States has “the best health care system in the world.” That explains his hostility to what he calls Obamacare. If it ain’t broke, why fix it. Why would you mess with the best system in the world?
However, it is not clear what world he lives in. According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s (that’s the CIA) World Factbook, the U. S. ranks 49th in life expectancy. That means the citizens of 48 countries have a longer life expectancy than those of the United States. In infant mortality we are ranked beneath 30 countries among them Cuba and Slovenia. And yet the U. S. spends 17 % of its GDP on health care while European countries with significantly better health care ratings spend about 8 percent. In other words we spend more than twice as much as the European countries for health care that by most measures is significantly inferior. And virtually all of the countries that offer superior health care are social democracies that have “entitlement” based health care.
The problems of healthcare as well as the other multi-faceted problems of poverty are extremely complex and I suppose that any plan that tries to fix them is going to be flawed. But I am certain of two Biblical principles that speak to this issue: First, governments are called to promote justice in society. Paul says in Romans 13: 4 that those in authority are “God’s servants for your good.” That good is public justice. In I Kings 10: 9 Solomon is told “the Lord has made you king to execute justice and righteousness.”

Jim Skillen of the Center for Public Justice says, “God does justice in the world by commissioning human beings to exercise justice in the world.” And one way humans do this is through their governments. “Nondiscriminatory governments,” says Skillen, “should not be identified as something secular, as if political governance can be built apart from God on human reason and good intentions.” A state that offers the same civil rights to all its citizens is a state grounded in Christ’s own governance. It is government established by God for our own good. Clearly such a state should not allow some people desirous of working to starve for lack of income to buy food, rent and heat, while others are well fed and housed. Nor would such a state force millions of its poorest citizens to go begging for health care, often experiencing denial when they seek care. That would be injustice. Governments are designed by God to restrain evil and promote justice. This probably means, among other things, that governments should see to it that both beggars and bankers have access to adequate healthcare.
A second Biblical principle that speaks to this issue of poverty and health care is this: Christians are called to love their neighbors. They must bear one another’s burden and thus fulfill the law of Christ. But how should we do that as citizens of the United States? Many Christians I talk to say that the church alone and not government should take care of the needs of the poor. Clearly Dr. Skillen does not agree—and neither does the great Mennonite scholar Ron Sider. Sider says that there is not a shred of Biblical support for those Christians who argue that the church alone is responsible for the poor and government has no role to play. Furthermore, the historic church over the centuries has supported the role of government in helping the poor.
I began this Plumbline by quoting someone who opposes government social programs and believes every individual must rely on himself. One of the most fundamental characteristics of Christianity is that it is a religion that does not focus on individuals as much as it does on a group, the body of believers. The focus of the gospels is always the kingdom and in the epistles it is the church, but in both cases, it is something much larger than an individual. Christianity is always about relationship, community, communion, the body of believers.
Rank individualism, the belief that people must lift themselves up by their bootstraps is simply not compatible with Christianity—nor is it compatible with a Christian concept of government. Christianity is the anti-bootstrap religion.

The Uses of Water

2011-10-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

A while back I said that I thought the novel Gilead by Marilyn Robinson would make a fine devotional book. Take this paragraph, for example, from page 27-28:

"There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after rain, and the tree were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberence, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of it now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. . . . This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."
Paying attention. And seeing the beauty of the world and the hand of God behind it. That's worthy of reflection and also the theme of my daughter Jennifer's blog today [Honestly Jen]. Jen posts a photo of a gorgeous sunrise. Pastor Ames in this excerpt from Gilead, often looks at the behavior of people, seeing behind their beautiful moments, the hand of God.

A Poached Egg Jesus

2011-10-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

I did not see Jesus Christ Superstar—the movie or the musical—when it first appeared in the sixties, and I have never felt any desire to see it in the almost fifty years since. But a friend who saw it at Stratford’s Shakespeare Festival this summer raved about it, and since my wife and I were planning to stop in Stratford for a couple of plays in early October, we thought we would book some tickets. Easier said than done. The play has been sold out for almost its entire five and a half-month run, and the only tickets my wife and I were able to book in August for an early October date were two single seats with obstructed visibility. We grabbed them.

What accounts for this old (1969) rock drama’s immense popularity now, we wondered. Is the audience comprised of a bunch of old coots hungry for a nostalgia buzz? Or is there, perhaps, a legitimate Jesus hunger in the culture?

We got to the theatre early and sat on a bench near the door in the lobby as people entered (people-watching is itself very good theatre). And we got an answer to our first question—if we base our judgment on the audience that came that day. The audience was made up of people of all ages: tour busses full of senior citizens and school busses full of high schoolers; family groups, sometimes three generations; church groups, and singles and couples of all ages. As to the second question, well, we’re still not sure.

As for the play itself, I would have to agree with those who rave about the spectacle of it. The dancing is marvelously energetic. The scene in which Jesus is whipped is powerfully evocative and realistic. And the crucifixion is spectacular: the cross, illuminated by a thousand small light bulbs (like a theatre marquee) swings down as Jesus shoots up into the air on a small mechanical pedestal until he appears to be set against it. It’s gaudy-brilliant, so clever and stunning that it evokes wild cheers from the audience.

But we do not—usually—go to a play just for spectacle and technical brilliance. We want to be captured by a story. In literature we use the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief.” For that to happen, the story one is watching must have an inner coherence that allows the audience—in this case, me—to surrender to the story. Jesus Christ Superstar does not have that, at least not for me.

Unfortunately, the Jesus of this rock musical does not have a clue about who he is. But the musical makes pretty clear who he is not. He is not the son of God. He is not the savior of the world. He is not the raiser of the dead. He is not even the healer of the sick. (The lepers that he encounters are still lepers after he touches them—but happier lepers.) The actor who portrays Jesus walks around with a blank face most of the time and seems puzzled about what he is supposed to be doing.

Judas Iscariot is the one who almost has it all together. He knows who he is and he thinks he knows who Jesus is or who he should be. Even after he hangs himself, he comes back to stage life in a jazzy electric blue suit singing “Superstar”: “I don’t understand/How you let the things you did/Get so out of hand.”

According to lyricist Tim Rice, Jesus Christ Superstar is essentially a love triangle with Judas and Mary Magdalene vying for Jesus’ attention. And the directors of the Stratford production have attempted to highlight that tension in their production. Much of the action and many of the song lyrics try to develop this non-biblical motif, and the result as they try to blend it with the biblical elements of the Christ story is an incoherent story line.

But the great dissonance in the Superstar story (this will surprise no one who remembers it from the 60’s) derives from the fact that Jesus is “just a man.” He has no supernatural powers; he hasn’t a clue why he has to die; he seems weak and needy most of the time. What makes him a superstar? What attracts all those followers, especially his disciples?

One theme that struck us as downright funny—though it is not intended to be—is the apostles concern for fame. It’s as if Rice takes the hunger for stardom that motivated so many 60’s rock stars and transfers it to the apostles and even to Jesus. This lyric, for example, makes one giggle even as it is sung ever so seriously by the apostles:

“Always hoped that I'd be an apostleKnew that I would make it if I triedThen when we retire we can write the gospelsSo they'll still talk about us when we've died”

Even Jesus seems motivated by the desire for fame and a place in history:

“I must be mad thinking I'll be remembered - yesI must be out of my head!Look at your blank faces! My name will mean nothingTen minutes after I'm dead!”

I went to the play with just the slight hope that it might be faith-affirming, and in a small, strange way it was. In Jesus Christ Superstar, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice give us such a mish-mash of the Biblical story, such a bland Jesus wandering about in confusion, that one wonders why anyone would have followed him. Because the story does not hold together, I am not caught by it; instead, I am irritated. Still, because I instinctively contrast it to the great Biblical narrative, I am reminded of what I have always known and believed: the grand narrative of scripture, culminating in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the redemption of the cosmos, does have an inner coherence. And throughout history, millions have found it absolutely believable.

C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said [“your sins are forgiven”] would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell.” Rice and Webber and the directors and producers of the Stratford Theatre production of Jesus Christ Superstar have given us a poached egg Jesus. And, though I did not gag on it, I was not nourished by it.

A Recent Plumbline on KDCR

2011-10-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Cal Thomas

Dear Cal Thomas,
In my early years as a college English instructor at a Christian college, I would receive in the fall a mailing from a Christian organization (I have forgotten the name of it) urging me to have my students enter a contest to write an op-ed piece that presented a Christian perspective on a current issue, included a Bible text, and was published in the mainstream press. The winner would receive a significant monetary prize.

So I had my students attempt to write such an op-ed piece—and I even submitted a piece myself one year. But neither I nor my students ever won. Most years, as I remember, you were the winner. You were, apparently, the gold standard for Christian op-eds.

I have read your columns in my newspaper over the years, but a funny thing happened on the way to the present: your columns became less and less recognizably Christian and more and more bitter, fearful and negative. Often it seemed that you were concerned much more with promoting a conservative Republican agenda than with a critique of current events from a biblically Christian perspective.

Let me illustrate with a brief look at your column that appeared in The Sioux City Journal on July 13, 2011, titled “Obama Promotes Class Division by Seeking to Punish the Successful.”
washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/07/obama-democrats-make-war-successful
You write that President Obama and his fellow liberals frequently “disparage millionaires and billionaires,” are “preoccupied with pulling down the strong,” and “trash the rich.” Mr. Thomas, you know that’s not true. When President Obama and other Democrats talk about taxing the wealthiest among us, they are not disparaging the wealthy. They are simply saying they should pay more taxes.

In fact, every time Obama mentions rescinding the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, he includes himself in that wealthy group. So by your logic, Mr. Thomas, Obama must be “preoccupied with pulling down . . . himself,” and also countless other Democrats who are among the wealthiest Americans.

I do not believe, Mr. Thomas, that you are really this illogical. Rather, it seems to me that you are so concerned with painting President Obama in an unflattering light that you entangle yourself in this absurd illogic.
If you argued that the wealthy should not pay more taxes, you might make a legitimate economic argument. But that’s not your concern. You attack Obama as a despiser of the wealthy, going so far as to say that Obama’s “war on achievers” is “repulsive” and “un-American.” Here you take your contrived “war on achievers” and use it as an excuse to call Mr. Obama some nasty names. I don’t understand how a Christian columnist can engage in this kind of vituperative journalism. It is unfair and unbecoming behavior for any columnist.

(Incidentally, when you continually say Obama promotes “class warfare” or creates “class division,” you are simply echoing what virtually every conservative pundit and politician has been saying for the past several months, a talking point based not in truth but in the desire to demonize President Obama. The fact that the 400 wealthiest families in this country hold as much wealth as the bottom 50 % of the population combined tells us that we, indeed, have class division. And if we want to blame a president for that, we should acknowledge the fact that in 20 of the 28 years prior to Obama we have had Republican presidents.)

But my concern here is with how avowedly Christian columnists conduct themselves as Christian writers. And what bothers me most about this piece is the way you ignore what Christ has said about wealth and poverty and instead fashion from conservative, capitalistic values a religion of wealth that holds up the accumulation of wealth as just about the noblest ambition of humankind. You write: “In their hearts most people who are poor would like to be rich, or least self-sustaining, but this president never talks about how they might achieve this goal. Instead, he criticizes those who made the right choices and now enjoy the fruits of their labor. . . . Wealth is a sign of achievement, a reward for risks taken.”

Anyone who reads your entire piece would conclude that you want poor people to make wealthy people their role models. This reader would assume that you believe that almost nothing is more noble or virtuous than making lots of money and then enjoying it.

You seem enamored with the principles of classical economics, but I wonder if you know what Adam Smith, the father of classical economics, would say about your blatant admiration of the wealthy? Here’s Mr. Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition . . . [is] . . .the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments” (58).

What would Jesus say about your earnest attempt to make the accumulation of wealth seem so desirable and poverty so undesirable? He might begin with “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break through and steal.”

And he would tell a little story about a man who had such abundant crops that he built more and bigger barns. But God said to him “You Fool! This very night your life will be demanded of you. This is how it will be for those who store up things but are not rich toward God.”

Or he might invite the wealthiest of our land to leave their gated communities and gather in one of our poorest neighborhoods and then he would quote the prophet Isaiah: “Loose the chains of injustice . . . set the oppressed free.” “Share your food with the hungry, provide the poor wanderer with shelter. When you see the naked, clothe them and turn not away from your own flesh and blood.”

I do not believe Jesus condemns all wealthy people, but he clearly shows that those who accumulate great wealth or make the accumulation of wealth the goal of their lives tread a treacherous path. So he says to the rich young ruler, “Sell all you have and give it to the poor and follow me.” And he says to all of us, “If you want to be my follower, deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me.”

Recently a friend of mine walked into a local business and was greeted with “Well, what do you think our moron of a president will do next?” My friend said, “Hey, that’s no way to talk about a brother in Christ.”

I tell the story because I want to ask you, Mr. Thomas, in reference to the op-ed piece I have been critiquing, “Is that any way to talk about a brother in Christ?” And because I want to challenge you with a broader question: What should characterize biblically-informed political speech in this time of frightfully polarized political atmosphere which finds Christians in political camps that seem to be in hostile opposition to one another? If you know that President Obama is, as Jesus called the Pharisees, “an offspring of vipers,” then, I suppose you should continue to write as you do. But if you don’t know that, if you think it is possible that President Obama’s confession of faith in Jesus Christ is genuine, then you are obliged to speak of him in quite a different tone of voice.
Sincerely,
David Schelhaas

Work Cited
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Mineloa, NY: Dover Publication Classics, 2006,original publication 1759), 58.

Poem for the Day

2011-10-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

October 16
Single-Heartedness
Not content with having spent all summer
pumping out giant crookneck squash (some weighing
more than seventeen pounds), this old (in vegetable time)
squash plant continues her work as blithely and confidently as if
it were early June instead of late October. Wide green leaves
flutter on the fence, small squash
curl fetus-like under warm green leaves, and
three bright yellow blossoms, full of purpose and ignorance,
grin into the late afternoon sun.
They do not know that the television soothsayers
have looked into their bird entrails and seen hoar frost
on tomorrow’s lawns and death’s wilt and shrivel on
every growing thing.

Five Months Later

2011-08-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

I see my last blog entry was March 21, five months ago. Well, Rip Van Winkle slept for 25 years, so my five month snooze was a mere power nap.

I remember a couple of years ago, a student asking me to recommend a book for devotional reading and I didn’t know what to say, for I am not a reader of devotional books. After a few moments of thought I recommended Lewis’ Mere Christianity, a book I have been going back to my whole life, a book that continues to surprise, inform, challenge and delight me. I also recommended Philip Yancey’s What’s So Amazing about Grace. And I might have said the Psalms, a book that has been a steady presence in my life for most of my 69 years.

Lately, I have been re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the best novel of the decade in my opinion, and it has occurred to me that the book makes for wonderful devotional reading. (Yes! A novel for devotional reading.) If the purpose of a devotional reading is to bring about reflection on matters of faith, to challenge your way of living and looking at the world, to deepen and enrich your relationship with God, then this little novel written by a woman in the voice of eighty-year-old John Ames, a Calvinist preacher, can aptly be called a devotional book. (It is much more than that, but perhaps I’ll discuss that another time.)

Gilead is an epistolary novel, one long letter written by Ames for his very young son—to be read after Ames dies and his son is old enough to understand the letter. Along the meandering path of the letter one finds, scattered like bread crumbs from beginning to end, marvelous observations about life as a child of God. Like this:

This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success. I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eighty decades walking around in it. . . . Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes—old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable. What of me will I still have? Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion. Like Balaam’s ass, it’s seen the angel I haven’t seen yet, and it’s lying down in the path (67).

Well, there are days when it feels like my old body (forgive the dualism) feels like it's bending down toward the path. But not today—a perfect 78 degrees and I am off to the garden.

2011-03-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

In a recent news item in my church magazine, The Banner, I read about a newly elected member o f the House of Representatives who said when asked why he had run for office, “I’m not satisfied with the world my children are inheriting and am adamant about cleaning up the mess that has been created.”

Ah, I mused, a Christian politician who recognizes that we are called to care for the creation, to clean up the environmental mess that our wasteful, consumptive lifestyle has created. But I wanted to be sure so I did a little background check and to my dismay read that this Michigan Republican endorsed the party position on environmental issues. I know what this “party position” is because the news lately has been about the Republican budget cuts, especially the gutting of all issues connected to the care of the creation.

One of the first things the Republican controlled House of Representatives has done in 2011, ostensibly to cut back on President Obama’s budget, is to propose a budget of their own that, among other things, slashed nearly every bit of environmental funding they could find—funding to remove coal ash from the air and mercury from the water, funding to clean up the Chesapeake bay, funding to restore environments destroyed by mountaintop coal mining, funding for clean energy, and on and on. They even cut funding to supervise and regulate offshore drilling (imagine this after the BP debacle of this summer) but they never considered cutting the billions of dollars that go to subsidize our scandalously profitable oil companies.

One cannot help but ask “When did the Republicans become indifferent to the beauty and health of the nation’s land, water and waterways, or the respiratory health of children?” How can a party that speaks so frequently of patriotism and that calls itself pro-life be opposed to doing basic maintenance on America the Beautiful? Have the Tea Partiers spread such fear in the hearts of these legislators that virtually none of them dare to vote their conscience?

After all, as recently as the last presidential election the Republican candidate John McCain during the presidential campaign repeatedly said the following: “Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great.” (Quoted by Schultz, Sacramento Bee, Sept 12, 2010)

Even President Bush, after trying to subvert or manipulate the NASA findings on global warming during his time in office, eventually issued statements expressing concern over global warming.

During the recent mid-term election, George Schultz, former Secretary of State under Republican President Ronald Reagan led the fight against California’s Proposition 23 which sought to repeal the state’s clean energy laws. Here’s what Schultz had to say about it: “Proposition 23 seeks to derail our future through a process of indefinite postponement of our state’s clean energy and clean air standards.” These standards, says Schultz are “about preserving clean air for our kids and fostering good jobs for our workers. [They are] about a California that leads the world in the next great global industry and facing the next great global challenge. The effort to derail it would be a tragic mistake” (Sacramento Bee, Sept 12, 2010). The Schultz-led campaign defeated the oil company-led campaign to postpone the standards.

But today’s House Republicans, it seems, would repudiate McCain and Schultz and open the doors for even more abuse to our most basic natural systems and resources, the systems and resources upon which all of our lives depend: soil, air, water and forests.

I hope that the fresh young congressman from Michigan who talks about “the mess that has been created” takes the time to read the CRC’s Contemporary Testimony, Our World Belongs To God, along with whatever Tea Party manifestoes are being passed around the House.

What Are Clothes For?

2011-02-28T12:32:00.000-08:00

It is astounding how much time and money our modern culture spends on clothes and astounding how much clothing most people possess. Go to yard sales and flea markets (or your own closet) if you have any doubts on this matter. In my reading of Walden this morning, I noticed that Thoreau devotes about 6 pages to clothing--the reason we have it and the superficiality of our deep concerns about it.
• “The object of clothing is first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness.”
• “We are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility.”
• “Who would wear a patch . . . over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do so.” (Comment: I cannot even imagine what Thoreau would say about the modern tendency to buy worn out jeans, a behavior where “utility” has entirely disappeared and the only thing that matters is that influential people in the narrow world of the purchaser have bought them . These folk believe “their prospects for life would be ruined” if they do NOT wear them.)
• “It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class?” (Comment: Think of any assembly of older well dressed men of power sitting in the board room in the nude. Or better yet, a group of males from a variety of jobs and income levels, nude. How much power and authority would the “Suits” of the world have if they were divested of their suits?)
• “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”

What If the Sky IsFalling Down

2011-02-24T07:48:00.000-08:00

Nobody likes Chicken Little. Nobody likes a prophet of doom. I doubt that even the doom-sayer enjoys his gloomy message. So here’s my dilemma: What if I believe the sky is falling down and what if I believe that we can do something to slow it down? Should I just shut up about it?
I’ve decided to walk the tightrope between annoying people to death with doomsday talk and shutting up entirely. Here’s the deal. Bill McKibben in his book Eaarth—as I have noted before in this blog—gives ample scientifically documented evidence of the fact that our old earth has been so compromised by the glut of Co2 emissions spewed out by our post Industrial Revolution lifestyle that it is no longer the same planet it was 40 years ago. But he also suggests ways that the inhabitants of the high polluten’ countries could live to slow down their consumption of fossil fuels and thereby slow down the warming.
But it will require a dramatically different way of living for all of us.
Do I want to change? Do I want to live a far simpler, much more restricted life? Little travel, small home, very little stuff? I have a son and daughter-in-law in California whom I want to visit at least once a year. I want to drive up to Sioux Falls at least once a month to see my kids and grandkids. I want to visit Greece and The Holy Land. . . . You get the picture.
So if I just said I didn’t believe McKibben and the scientists, who would know? Who would care? And anyway, will my personal consumption-frugality make a difference? Won’t it take massive change at the national and international levels for any real change to occur?
Still, not to change when I know that the continuing in the same old destructive lifestyle will mean tragically diminished lives for my grandchildren and their children would be monstrous, wouldn’t it?
So get ready! I’m already letting my hair grow long. I am combing the yard sales in search of sackcloth. But I will only wear it a couple of times a year.

Egypt, Tucson, and the Right to Bear Arms

2011-02-09T07:10:00.000-08:00

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

One of the most surprising non-occurrences in the wake of the shooting injuries and deaths in Tucson at Gabby Gifford’s “meet your congresswoman” event has been a serious discussion of gun rights. It seems that the entire “public nation,” from President Obama to the press in all its forms, has simply accepted as fact the NRA’s position that the Second Amendment guarantees to individuals the right to bear arms. Even liberal MSNBC TV commentator Chris Matthews began a discussion of the gun issue recently by saying, “Now I know that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to carry guns. . . .”

But this interpretation of the Second Amendment is not the traditional interpretation. Most legal scholars throughout much of the twentieth century—believed that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of states to form militias—but did not understand it to be about individual gun ownership (Lapore). Even Robert Bork argued that the second amendment works to “guarantee the rights of states to form militias, not for individuals to bear arms” (Lapore).

Then, in the last three decades of the twentieth century, lawyers for the NRA began to argue that the second amendment gave individuals the right to bear arms. This came about because of a push for gun legislation after the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life. Ironically, Reagan was the first presidential candidate to get an endorsement from the NRA because of his position on guns.

Former Chief Justice Warren Burger said the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime” (Lapore). Burger also argued—in his retirement—for a rejection of the NRA’s reading of the Second Amendment.

Burger notes that the meaning of the clause cannot be understood without looking at “the purpose, the setting, and the objectives” (Burger) of those who drew up the amendment. People of that time were worried about that “monster,” national government, and especially a national or standing army. (The First Congress limited the size of the national army to 840 men.) Most people thought of themselves as citizens of New Jersey or Virginia, etc., rather than as citizens of the United States. “To the American of the 18th Century, his state was his country and his freedom was defended by his militia,” Burger explains (Burger).. To ally the fear of the national government, the first amendment granted states the right to maintain a militia. The state militias would comprise the army that would defend the United States—as had been the case in the Revolutionary War.

Burger argues—and the construction of the sentence supports him—that the right to keep and bear arms is predicated upon the necessity of a well regulated militia that can protect the state. You can keep and bear arms to guarantee the state’s freedom, it says. The opening clause of the amendment, an absolute clause, can be rewritten accurately only by making it an adverb clause beginning with the word because—“Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State. . . .” So, we have a causal relationship in the statement—because the state needs protection, you can keep and bear arms.

Gun advocates argue that the amendment grants the right to bear arms for national and personal security, but it is clear that the amendment mentions only the security of the state.

More that two hundred years after the Second Amendment was approved by congress, we can see why its historical context is so important. After numerous wars, an army that has increased from its original 840 men to hundreds of thousands of men and women, and a Department of Defense that has an arsenal large enough to blow up the world, a state militia is no longer necessary or able to defend a state against our national government nor is it needed for defense against outside forces.
Of course this does not mean that all guns now need to be outlawed, but it does allow for the regulation of some guns and the outright banning of certain guns for the well-being of the populace.

In fact, to those who argue that we need guns to protect ourselves against a tyrannical government, it might be argued that if we ever needed to overthrow our national government because it has ceased to govern justly, guns would be just about the least effective tool for such an attempt. As I watched the relatively peaceful revolt taking place in Egypt against a government that had become intolerable, I couldn’t help but think, “Thank God they don’t have guns.” What would have happened if that mass of people had all arrived in Tahrir Square wielding guns? Ancient scimitars or the occasional screwdriver do not invite a violent response. But if those protestors had arrived with automatic weapons, they would have been met with the full might of Mubarak’s military, and blood would have filled the square.

None of us knows how the Egyptian protest will play out, but recent history shows us that in the modern age, because of the power of the mass media, peaceful protests usually yield positive results, but violent revolutions usually lead to more violence and continued tyranny. Look at the great revolution in India brought by that peaceful little man, Ghandi. Look at Mandela and South Africa. Look at Poland’s break with the Soviet Union led by Lech Walesa and others.

The tragedy of the Gabby Gifford shootings and the great hope of the protests in Egypt both suggest that easily obtainable guns will not provide for the security of individuals or defense of the country. Rather, they will be counter productive.

Works Cited

Burger, Warren. “The Right to Bear Arms.” Parade Magazine, January 14, 1990.
Lapore, Jill. “The Commnadments: The Constitutions and its Worshipers.” The New Yorker, January 17, 2011.

My Brush with Communism and Its Brief but Fearful Consequences

2011-02-04T12:39:00.000-08:00

When I was nine or ten years old, I went to a father-son banquet (with my dad, of course) in my home church. It was a fad of the time designed, I’m sure, to teach boys manners and create some forced quality time between fathers and sons. This, in a culture where most fathers spent “quality time” working with their sons on their farms every day! What has happened to this quaint bit of Christian culture—the father-son, mother-daughter banquet—I’m not sure. I haven’t heard of any for years in the Christian communities I have lived in. In fact, I never attended one with my son who is now 37 years old.

In any case, what I want to remember here is the “entertainment” at the banquet, a lecture by a Christian Reformed pastor from Rock Valley who had been a POW in the Korean War. Well, if anyone at that time worried whether this preacher would be able to hold the attention of a bunch of little boys—not necessarily something folks worried about in those days—he need not have worried. The man held us transfixed as he described the conditions he suffered as a prisoner—rats, near starvation, beatings—mesmerizing us with the dreadful pictures he drew in our minds.

But the most potent part of his message concerned the evils of Communism. He painted pictures of Russian soldiers carrying bayonets and marching down Main Street of Edgerton, Minnesota, breaking down the doors of homes and marching up the stairs to the bedrooms of small boys, with bayonets at the ready.
For several weeks after the banquet I had dreadful nightmares that awakened me in tears and sent me to my parents’ bedroom. They would assure me that the Russians were not coming, tell me to go to the bathroom, take a drink of water and go back to bed. It was a cure that worked pretty well, but not so well that I gave up practicing lying perfectly still under the covers, thinking it might some how prevent my being transfixed by a bayonet.

The nightmares went away after a time, and I never was much afraid of Communism again. The railings of the John Birch Society, the screaming billboards about Martin Luther King being a Communist, seemed to me to be mostly silliness. Even though the preacher who spoke of his experiences with Korean communism was undoubtedly earnest and meant well, somehow, somewhat unconsciously, what trickled down to me as I matured was the recognition that fear-mongering and conspiracy accusations were often a lot of hot air, sometimes accompanied by personal agendas.

Which brings me to Glenn Beck, who in the light of his lowest ratings ever on Fox, has conjured a conspiracy theory that has almost everyone who knows anything about world politics scratching their head or laughing in outright scorn. Here’s his theory about the current revolt in Egypt: It has come about through the organized and combined scheming of Communism, Socialism, Obama’s government, The Muslim Brotherhood, and Muslims in general. This unlikely union of conspirators plans to make Babylon—which was intentionally not bombed in either of the Bush’s wars (and they are also in on the conspiracy)—the center of the Muslim takeover of the world.

Apparently, some of his faithful believe him, but I am not going to lose any sleep over it.

On the other hand, we do have things to worry about—more serious than communism or the coming Muslim takeover. It involves no conspiracy (but some hot air) and is a subject about which I lie awake and ponder. My previous blog entry tells you what it is.

Living in the Moment--As a Child

2011-01-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

“Let us spent one day as deliberately as nature and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing,” Thoreau says somewhere in Walden. I don’t know if I could spend a whole day as deliberately as nature—I imagine myself as a tree, for example, doing little more than rustling in the wind and engaging in photosynthesis—but Saturday morning I set out to live as deliberately as my two-year-old granddaughter, Corrie.
I took her to the College Rec Center and turned her loose. She spent a lot of time running about on the large gymnastics area in one corner of a room—a raised semi-soft surface for exercises and tumbles of all sorts. I sat on the surface and watched her, chased her, caught her and watched her some more. She was blissfully happy and, most of the time, in her own world. After about an hour (I know, if I were living as deliberately as a child, I would not have noticed how long we were there), we wandered into a racquet ball court where about 15 balls of various dimensions and bouncibility lay. Corrie played—again in her own world most of the time—and I wondered how old she would have to get before she would need to make some sort of structured game up with a ball or balls. At two-and-a-half she is content to throw and kick and run and talk to herself. She is not at all interested in my attempt to structure some kind of play.
Eventually it was time to go home for lunch so I put her boots on her feet, and then, after she had walked half way around the track in them, I lured her back to the coat hooks where we donned the rest of our winter clothes. On the ten minute walk between the Rec Center and the car (about 100 yards), she stopped to examine and stomp in several piles of snow and found a lovely piece of sand on the parking lot that she wanted to save.
The trick to enjoying this pace of life, I discovered, is to have nothing ahead of you that has to get done, no clock ticking, no agenda, no mental picture of a computer that you want to spend time with or a store that needs your custom. That’s not a state of mind achieved easily, especially after a life of more than fifty years of goal directed labor.
I can remember—quite clearly—what it was like to be a child with virtually no purpose on a summer day except my own delight however I might find that, to get up in the morning and head out for a ball diamond or a friend’s house, to ramble from one place to another, from one game or adventure or wild scheme or plotted mischief to another and the only interference to that lazy summer existence the three siren whistles—at noon, 6 PM and 9 PM.
But a lifetime of school attendance as a student and a teacher, over 60 years of responding like a Pavlovian dog to the next bell and the next class with its new set of students and learning goals to be accomplished, have shaped me into a person who is constantly measuring what he has to accomplish against the time he has to do it in, so that it has become harder and harder for me to live in the moment—as the theatre people say. To live deliberately. It is extremely difficult for me to give myself over totally to a conversation or a dinner or a beautiful scenic spot, “for at my back I always hear time’s wing`ed chariot hurrying near.” And there is the next thing to accomplish.
St. Paul said we must “redeem the time.” That sounds like an argument for the kind of life I’ve lived--always doing the next thing and the next thing and the next. Jesus said “take no thought for the morrow,” “consider the lilies,” “become like a child.”
Sometimes I wish I would have paid more attention to Jesus.
But maybe that’s what retirement’s for.

An Open Letter to the CRC Office of Social Justice

2011-01-20T09:22:00.000-08:00

For Peter Vander Muelen and whoever cares about Climate Change:

I wonder if any of you at the OSJ have read Bill McKibben's new book Eaarth. McKibben, you may remember, wrote one of the most significant books on global warming, The End of Nature, about 20 years ago--and of course many other fine books on creation/science issues, but Eaarth absolutely knocked me off my feet. In it McKibben paints a picture not of what might happen if we don't act, but of what already has happened: "The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. . . . We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won't be the same planet, and hence it can't be the same civilization. The earth that we knew--the only earth that we ever knew--is gone."

Now I suppose any of us who has been paying attention, had some sense of this, but his description of what has happened, a summary loaded with documented scientific evidence, almost makes me despair. And the sad thing is that most Christians I know, people who acknowledge that they are called to be stewards of the creation, don't really care that we have failed utterly to do our job. I remember a presentation on Climate Change you (at least I think it was the OSJ) sponsored at Dordt College a year or so ago in which the tenor of the audiences response to the presentation was challenge and argument. Most people in my neck of the woods don't care that the woods are burning--no, they don't believe the woods are burning because they can't smell the smoke.

So, I got the OSJ email this morning and without forethought starting typing this email. What does the CRC do in the face of overwhelming evidence and overwhelming indifference about climate change? How does the church prepare for the radical transformation of civilization that McKibben describes--if he's right (and there are lots of scientists, NASA's James Hansen among them, who support what he says)? Is the church ever so bold and prophetic as to take a stand on an issue like climate change? What would Jesus do in the face of the scientific evidence we have on Climate Change? Do any normal people really care enough about the earth to radically change their life style? (As I write it is minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit and my furnace is busy heating my 3 storey, 10 room house, and I am planning to drive to Florida in a week.)

Climate Change seems to me to be the single most important issue facing the world today. Does that sound sacrilegious? Last night while sitting at a basketball game (bread and circuses will keep us all sedated), I mentioned my concern about global warming to a friend and he said, "Well, I'm much more concerned about moral issues." Only as I was going home did it occur to me that I should have said, "Well this is a moral issue."

Enough. I really wrote to recommend a book, not rant. And I should note that the tone of Eaarth is cautiously hopeful. But it does not flinch from looking squarely at the dreadful state our world is in.

Blessings on the work of the OSJ--and wisdom as you seek to lead the CRC in these difficult times.

David Schelhaas

2011-01-18T09:14:00.000-08:00

I have been walking and jogging in the Dordt Recreation Center about four times a week hoping, I suppose, to add a few “cubits unto my stature” even though scripture tells us clearly that none of us can, by taking thought, add one cubit to his stature or one day to his life. (Actually, when I finish jogging I feel as though I may have subtracted some days from my life.) Since I am usually in pain when I jog, I try to find things to think about that take my mind off the pain, and this morning, as I rounded the curve at the north end of the track, I heard a young woman say to an older couple, “She wants you to pray for her, she’s potty-training her child.”
“What?” they shouted.
“Pray for her potty-training,” she shouted back.
Well, there’s food for thought. Are some things too trivial to pray for? Should we bother God with our pettiest concerns? As I try to think of prayers about trivial subjects that are recorded in scripture, I draw a blank. Hannah prayed for a child, not a dry diaper in the morning. Many people pray for healing. Some of the Psalms are prayers for the destruction of the unrighteous or for victories over their enemies. But does the Bible give us a record of someone praying to win a race or catch a fish? Jesus, it is true, told the disciples to cast their nets on the other side of the boat and they caught a huge mess of fish. But we have no indication that the fishermen/disciples prayed for a good catch.
This raises a long time family argument: When we go fishing, my daughters and wife pray that we catch fish. I don’t—though I’m sure my desire to catch fish is far greater than theirs. If our lives depended on the catching of fish, I would pray to catch fish. But all I’m really asking for as a sport fisherman, is a few moments of pleasure and a trophy that will give me bragging rights for a season. But because there are so many significant things to pray for, it seems sort of self-indulgent to pray that I catch fish.
But back to the evidence of scripture. Perhaps one could argue that history is mainly about Kings and Generals, scripture only records big events, and therefore we can’t really say that just because scripture contains no examples of prayers about relatively unimportant things, people of that time did not go to God with such things. On the other hand, the Hebrew concept of Jahweh was of someone so awesome, so fearful, that they could not even say his name. That might just indicate that they would not feel right about asking him for a puppy or naturally curly hair.
The young woman I heard on the track might argue, I suppose, that her prayers for help in potty-training indicate she has a grander concept of God than someone who refuses to bother God with such pettiness. She might say, “My God is so great that he can handle the smallest request with ease and because he so loves his creatures, his majesty is not offended by my ‘trivial’ request. Why he marks the fall of the sparrow!”
Perhaps that’s what it comes down to—one’s concept of God. You might be cautious about your petitions if your image of God is the great Creator who roars through the book of Job—“Who is this who darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?” “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” But if your dominant perception of God is the tender Shepherd or the father who runs to embrace his prodigal son, well, then you might go to him for help in potty-training your child.
But God is both—tender shepherd and roaring creator, so while our concept of God may influence the kind of petitions we come to him with, it doesn’t answer my question: Are some petitions too trivial or self-indulgent to bring to God? The best answer I can give is this: If we approach the throne of God with humility, reverence and awe, then the significance of our petition is probably irrelevant.
Oh, and one more thing. While the Bible does not say the Lord helps those who help themselves, the Lord does give most of us the wit and strength and patience that enable us to successfully potty-train a child.
And also, perhaps, the discipline and wisdom to get out of bed and exercise to maintain our health, for though we cannot add cubits to our stature, we may prevent shrinkage.

Treehugger!

2011-01-17T08:42:00.000-08:00

Here’s a statement I hear rather frequently where I live and work: “Well, of course, I’m no ‘tree hugger,’ but . . .” and then follows a mild expression of concern about some part of the creation. For many people in my part of the country, being known as a “tree hugger” is a shameful thing.
I’m not sure why they feel this way, but I suspect it grows out of a fear of being identified with people—“radicals”—who have chained themselves to old growth trees in an effort to prevent them from being cut down. Apparently this kind of behavior seems extravagant, all out of proportion, especially since the trees are owned by a company which seems to have the right to do with them whatever it wishes. Or maybe they believe, as one of my students told me, tree-hugging can lead to pantheism.
Whatever the reason, “tree hugger” seems to have negative connotations. Wikopedia tells me it is “slang, a sometimes derogatory term for environmentalist.” But most environmentalists are proud to be known as tree-huggers. So they have turned the derogatory epithet into a badge of honor. (I have heard that Christians in Antioch did the same thing when they were scornfully called “Christians.”)
As a Christian deeply concerned about the care of creation, I am proud to be called “tree hugger.” I recognize that “tree hugger” is a synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is used to represent the whole. So, someone who shows extravagant concern for trees represents all people who exhibit a strong and active concern for any part of the creation. I would call myself a tree hugger in that broad, general sense. But I would call myself a tree hugger in a very literal sense as well. I care, quite specifically, about trees, especially large old trees.
When my wife and I traveled to California to see the sequoias in California’s Sequoia National Park a couple of years ago, our first response when we saw them was silence. They took our breath away. Some of them, we realized had been there before Christ was born. But after standing beneath them for a while, we started to feel a kind of joy bubbling up in our hearts and began to chatter and exclaim to one another in what we later called High Sierra Sequoia Glossolalia. Even though we felt something like love for the trees, we didn’t try to hug them. They were simply too huge to hug. But we left the park with a profound sense of the majesty of the Creator.
From the sequoias, we continued north to several of the well-known redwood forests. Ronald Reagan said famously that “if you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” We disagree. We couldn’t get enough of them. We drove (with numerous pull-offs) the Avenue of the Giants. We went to Redwood National Park, and we got lost briefly in a county park full of redwoods. We lay on the ground at the base of a redwood to try to get pictures of the top. We noticed how the sunlight streaming through the branches of another changed it, and again we became giddy in the presence of these graceful giants.
Another of our favorite trees is the Angel Tree, a live oak near Charleston, South Carolina. Over 1500 years old, the tree has a diameter of spread reaching 160 feet and covers over 1700 square feet of ground. And we have favorites right here in Northwest Iowa even though few of them are native to our prairie landscape. For years I was able to observe from my office window at Dordt College a splendid maple tree, over a hundred years old and with a trunk that has a circumference of twenty-three feet. And then there’s our community’s grandest tree, the cottonwood in Central Park, and a particular willow that is veiled in sheer gold all winter long while the rest of the trees languish in dull gray, and the maple on our block that is the first to remind us every year that it’s almost time to go back to school. As our eyes move up the trunks of these giants, our hearts lift in praise to the one who said after each day of creation, “That’s good!”
God loves the world. He loves his creation. In Genesis 9 we read of the covenant God made never to send another flood. It was not a covenant made exclusively with humans, but with “all living creatures.”
How should we love the world? Is it enough to throw off a “thank you, Lord, for your wonderful creation,” if we never notice the particulars--like a first-grade teacher who says, “I just love my class” but never bothers to get to know any of her students?
Surely trees are some of the most remarkable non-human creatures in all creation. They are unique, each one different from every other—a great blessing in our world of mass produced similitude. In their beauty, variety and grandeur, they elicit our praise of the Maker. And they serve the earth and humans in hundreds of different ways, perhaps most importantly, by removing CO2 from the atmosphere and returning oxygen into the air. If trees were not performing this vital function, the earth could not sustain human life.
Why would anyone—especially any Christian—be ashamed to love them? Of course we must love God above all. Of course we may not worship trees—though it’s true that the grandeur of trees has evoked worship in many pagan cultures. But to care deeply about trees and other aspects of the natural world, to act (radically, if necessary) in ways that protect and preserve the natural world, is part of our obedience to the Creator.
When our two-year-old granddaughter walks home from church with her parents, she stops sometimes to hug three trees along the way. Her parents don’t know how this started, but they think it’s cute, as do her grandparents. We hope she remains a tree hugger. We can imagine her as a young woman talking about some significant aspect of creation care, saying, “Well, of course, I’m a “tree hugger” and then follows a passionate expression of concern about some aspect of creation.

Clueless in Sioux County

2010-11-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

One of the issues in the just past election that concerned me most was the Iowa Water and Land Legacy Amendment, an amendment that would allocate three-eights of one percent of sales tax to the conservation and maintaining of Iowa's grasslands, wetlands, waterways and forests as well as the conserving of its agricultural soils. To me it seemed like a no-brainer(and apparently to the Iowa Senate also which approved it by a 49-1 vote) since Iowa ranks 47th out of 50 states in conservation spending, has extremely polluted water ways, and is likely to lose more than 230,000 acres of habitat by 2012.

Thankfully, the amendment passed, but the majority in my county opposed the amendment. And I can only think of two possible reasons, neither of them very persuasive. Perhaps some voters were opposed to any possible increase in taxes, even 3/8ths of one per cent of sales tax, and even if the money is used for the common good--things like hiking, fishing, hunting, health, and flood protection.

Or, they listened to what the Farm Bureau said in opposition to the amendment. The Farm Bureau was the only organization opposed to it, and it launched a massive telephone campaign to fight it (including a caricatured Iowa farm wife talking in fake homespun Iowa twang). This fits the profile of the Farm Bureau, at least in my experience. Anytime there is a campaign for environmental legislation or protection for small farmers, the Farm Bureau opposes it. It will claim to be for these things in general statements, but when it comes to specfics, it always comes down in favor of large agribusiness and exploitation of the environment.

My father-in-law, a lifelong "small" farmer, called the Farm Bureau an organization to keep farmers unorganized and fought their policies his whole life. I am beginning to see why.

Finding Gold in Lewis's Letters

2010-09-30T18:02:00.000-07:00

I'm still reading the third volume of C. S. Lewis's Collected Letters (on page 300 with about 1100 pages to go.) Many of the letters are thoughtful responses to his readers--but not necessarily interesting to me. But occasionally one comes upon a letter that is sheer poetry, as this one to a Nell Berners-Price:

Dear Nell,
I am sorry to hear about your Mother. In a way you were most fortunate to have had her so long (mine died when I was a little boy), yet in another way it probably makes it worse, for you have lived into the period when the relationship is really really reversed and you were mothering her: and of course, the more we have had to do for people the more we miss them--loving goes deeper than being loved. But it must be nice for her. Getting our of an old body into a new life--like stripping off tiresome clothers and getting into a bath--must be a most wonderful experience.

And here's another Lewis quote I ran into reading a book on imigration by Soerens and Hwang. Lewis says that each human being you encounter is "the holiest object presented to your senses." Well, of course, once he says it, one knows immediately that it is true. We are, after all, created in his image--and no other creature is that. Further, we are created to live forever with a "destiny much greater than this life alone." That means that the immigrant, the starving child, the condemned rapist, the unwanted pre-born baby, each one, when it is presented to my senses has a quality of holiness. Which is one reason, I suppose, Jesus says whatever you have done to one of the least of these, you have done to me.

Two Morality Tales from Major League Baseball

2010-09-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

Major league baseball has given us two morality tales this season, one heart-warming, one unsettling, both profound. The first was the almost “perfect” game thrown by Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga. With two outs in the ninth inning of that game, a hard hit ground ball resulted in a close play at first base and umpire Jim Joyce called the runner safe. So Galarraga lost his perfect game. However most observers saw that the runner was clearly out—and TV replays gave concrete visible evidence to the fact.

Here was a situation ripe for harsh language, bitterness, and recrimination on one side and stonewalling defensiveness on the other. But it did not come—at least not from the two key players in this little drama, Galarraga and Joyce. Galarraga’s immediate response was a shy, incredulous smile, followed a short time later by the comment that nobody’s perfect and everybody makes a mistake from time to time. Joyce admitted he had blown the call, apologized personally to Galarraga, even shed tears over it.

It was a great teaching moment brought to us by major league baseball: Galarraga’s grace in the face of unintentional injustice and Joyce’s heartfelt sorrow and apology teaching all of us, and especially young people, a profound lesson in forgiveness and repentance, exhibiting,as Hemingway put it, “grace under pressure.”

That happened quite early in the season. Now just three weeks before the end of the regular season, Derek Jeter has put on his own little morality play. Here’s the drama: The Yankees and Devil Rays are locked in a tight game in the most intense pennant race in the majors. With the Yankees trailing by a run and Jeter at bat, he appears to be hit in the hand by a pitch. Instantly he grasps his hand, winces, and dances around in pain. The umpire awards him first base. Moments later, with Jeter on first, teammate Curtis Granderson hits a home run. But what much of the crowd saw and what TV cameras caught on tape is that the ball did not hit Jeter but the end of the bat. His entire little dance of pain had been a charade.
Jeter readily admitted he had faked getting hit. “My job is to get on base,” he said. Joe Maddon, manager of the Tamp Bay Devil Rays, protested the call so vigorously that he was thrown out of the game, but after the game he said, “I thought Derek did a great job, and I applaud it, because I wish our guys would do the same thing.”

And that seems to be the prevailing opinion. ESPN announcers chuckled as they endorsed Jeter’s little drama. Phil Rogers of the Chicago Tribune says approvingly, “He (Jeter) knows the right thing to do at the right time every time and this was an example.” Ben Walker of the Associated press writes, “Coming off the Steroids Era, where cheating often meant illegal performance enhancing drugs, some actually found a charm in Jeter’s old-fashioned chicanery.”

I find it neither right, nor charming nor harmless. And speaking of the Steroids Era, if you can lie about getting hit, why not lie about taking steroids?

Our games often mirror life, and our lives often mirror our games. Tell a lad to lie if it will help his team to win, and he will likely become a man who will lie to help grow his company’s bottom line. If we play our games to win no matter what the moral cost, then we will run our businesses on the same principle. One might even speculate that the financial collapse of September 2008 was made possible by the gradual cultivation of this non-ethical code.

Large number of people in our country have either rejected the Biblical code of right behavior known as the Ten Commandments or have divorced their religious beliefs from their workplace practices so as to enable them to ignore its teachings when they are at the job. We have become so secularized that large numbers of fans and commentators are calling Jeter’s lie the “right” thing.

Derek Jeter (and all his encouragers) said with the lie he acted out that the end justifies the means. Armando Galarraga said of the umpire who cost him his perfect game, “I understand that nobody’s perfect” and in doing so he bore witness to the fact that life consists of more than winning, that things like decency, kindness, humility, generosity, and honesty enrich life far more than fame or fortune.

Lewis on Reader Response

2010-08-31T08:11:00.000-07:00

C. S. Lewis writes the following in a letter to someone who had responded to his space trilogy, and especially That Hideous Strength: "When I've said that there is no allegory in it, and that there's nothing at all about the Second Coming in T.H.S., you may reply 'Well, that is what the books mean to an intelligent reader and what does it matter what you meant them to mean?--a point of view I wholly agree with."

What startling words from an author, and especially one as opinionated and traditional as Lewis. Most authors, it seems to me, are far more critical of readers who don't see what they intended them to see or see what they did not intend to put into the novel. Yet here's Lewis saying he wholly agrees that it is the intelligent reader who creates the meaning from the text, and implying that the author surrenders any right to criticize the reader the moment he publishes the novel.

I was just as surprised to hear my former colleague Jim Schaap says a similar thing in a recent Pro Rege article. Talking of reading Peter DeVries' Blood of the Lamb forty years after he had read it as a young man, he says, "Last summer when I had finished Blood of the Lamb again, I had read an entirely different novel. The story hadn't changed, but I had." Here is a writer, speaking as a reader, who is acknowledging that the same words read at different points in one's life will evoke entirely different responses. Did he mis-read it earlier? Not necessarily. Different readers or the same readers at different times can make from the printed symbols on the page quite different stories. AND IT IS COMPLETELY LEGIT.

I beat the drums for a Reader Response approach to teaching literature over the last 35 years, but have found that most English teachers are frightened by it. What do I test on? What's the right interpretation? Of course, we should note that Lewis says an "intelligent" reader (or reading). The story can't mean whatever I want it to, and it can be mis-read. But it certainly can mean more and different things than the author intended.

The Good Life

2010-08-26T14:35:00.000-07:00

What is it? I don’t mean what do American corporations tells us it is, or politicians, for that matter. Nor do I mean what I in my most exalted or pious moments think it should be. But what is it when I take a deep hard look at what I most value in life.

Well, here goes. It’s a spouse who loves you and shares her/himself with you, family—three and four generations, meaningful work, freedom from want, freedom to speak one’s opinions even when they conflict with these of fellow citizens, a church family and meaningful worship--especially preaching, a culture where justice and law make life more or less safe, a community where friendliness and courtesy happen as a matter of course, good books to read and movies to watch and music to hear and perform, good talks over good food and wine with good friends and family.

That's it, off the top of my heart--and head.

What would you say?

Ambition

2010-08-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

"Boys are now taught to regard Ambition as a virtue. I think we shall find that up to the XVIIth Century, and back into pagan times, all moralists regarded it as a vice and dealt with it accordingly." C. S. Lewis

I have been reading The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 3, a book that goes to 1800 pages and provides, in addition to brilliant and startling statements, the opportunity for arobic exercise while lying on one's back in bed reading, holding the four pound volume in the air with both hands for about twenty minutes each night. The statement above made me sit up and take notice.

Ambition a vice? It sounds positively unamerican. Have we turned morality upside down over the last two centuries?

I checked what the Oxford English Dictionary says about ambition and found that every definition carried the notion of an ardent desire to rise to high position or attain rank, influence or preferment. W. R. Alger writes that "Aspiration is pure upward desire for excellence without side-references; ambition is an inflamed desire to surpass others."

Okay, that helps somewhat, but even so, don't we like that kind of drive to attain position and influence, to surpass others? Isn't that what we like to see in our students and graduates? People who make a name for themselves. I notice that at the Heartland Christian School Convention they are bringing in recent Christian school grads who have done just that. I know it is possible that these grads never sought to make a name for themselves but were motivated by a "pure upward desire for excellence." But what do we do when we single them out for rising above others as if to say, "See, this is what you can do with a Christian education! You can be a leader of men--and women. You will receive recognition." Isn't this what colleges love to do as they promote their "brand." "Come to our institution," they seem to say, "and you can be educated to become a person of influence and prestige." And then they hold up a successful grad.

It is a very delicate thing we are dancing with here, and I think we might do well to step back frequently and ask ourselves what motivates us to hold up as models so often people who have achieved wealth or fame, people who are winners, rather than the saintly losers, the humble servants. Or why should we hold up anyone at all. Let the achievement, whatever it is, be its own reward.

"The first will be last," Christ tells us, "the greatest among you will be your servant." "Christ made himself nothing," Pauls says in Phillipians, and then he tells us to be like Christ. Do we say to our children and students, to ourselves, "Make yourselves nothing"?

Sorry about the heavy moralizing. I will try to be more upbeat next time.

More on Climate Change

2010-06-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

In my last Plumbline I told some stories about people I had encountered who were adamantly opposed to the very notion of global warming and human involvement in it. In each case the reasons were pretty superficial or even ridiculous. Today I want to try to express as fairly as I can the serious reasons people give for being indifferent to global warming. I want to be fair to them, but I also will try to refute those reasons. As I listen to and read the arguments of those opposed to the idea of human involvement in global warming, I encounter two main arguments, one has to do with science and the other with business and lifestyle.

First, the area of business and lifestyle. For those who have a strong commitment to capitalism, the “free” market system, and the lifestyle that we associate with this system, a war against CO2 emissions will be perceived negatively. Why? Because, they say, it will have a negative effect on American business. That’s why organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Acton Society so actively oppose the notion of human involvement in global warming. That’s why wealthy oil companies engage in disinformation campaigns, intentionally spreading half truths about carbon emissions. (And there is documented evidence of this kind of behavior.)

It’s probably true that an all out war against CO2 emissions will hurt business. To cut down on CO2 emissions, people will have to consume less, that is, buy fewer and smaller cars, fewer carpets, fewer toys, fewer TVs, fewer clothes—fewer manufactured goods of all kinds because most manufacturing processes produce CO2 emissions. We all know the slogan with the three R’s, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” And the R that is virtually impossible for us to do is “Reduce.” We are a culture that loves the new, loves to buy. And many see this love of buying stuff as a good thing since the success of our economic system depends on the ever increasing consumption of consumer goods. That’s why the Dow shoots up when the consumer spending goes up or housing starts go up. But fossil fuel consumption is at the core of the manufacturing process, and fossil fuel consumption, according to a majority of climate scientists causes global warming.
So, one way to avoid facing the hardship of sacrifice is to deny that climate change is a problem or that our use of fossil fuels contributes to it. Then life as we know it can go on as we want it to; you can buy all the toys you want and I can travel to any exotic spot on the globe. One young man who listened to my first Plumbline on this issue said to me, “I think I deny the possibility of humans’ contributing to climate change by their lifestyle because I don’t really want to change how I live. If I deny there’s a problem, I don’t have to do anything about it.”

This takes me to my second focus point of debate, science. Now most of us are not scientists and we find the science of climate change too complex for our own analysis. A large majority of climate scientists around the world argue that the earth is getting warmer and the warming is caused by Co2s and Methane produced by human activity. Let’s call this the majority opinion. But there are also minority opinions. A small number of scientists in this group argue that the earth is not getting warmer. Most minority scientists agree it is getting warmer but that we do not know what causes it. Some argue that the warming will not have negative consequences and ask why we should worry. One of the most distinguished from this minority group, Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, says this: “We are quite confident that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees warmer than it was a century ago; that atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen over the past two centuries; and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth. But we are not in a position to attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future.” In other words, he argues we don’t have enough information to make pronouncements about the current situation or the future.
So the question becomes which scientists shall we listen to, those of majority opinion who argue that global warming is occurring and that it is caused by Co2s produced largely by human activity or those of the minority opinion as I have described above.

I suspect that in many cases we will trust the scientists who have a worldview that closely fits with our own. So, if you are one who holds the free market as very dear, and you don’t want your free market rights or lifestyle abridged by new taxes and weighted down with regulations, you will probably embrace those scientists who assert that global warming is not caused by human activity. I don’t think this always happens consciously; often it happens subconsciously and we are not even aware of our motives.

And if you are one who believes that stewardship and care of the creation is one of the primary tasks God has given to humans or if you are a thoroughly secular environmentalist, you will likely support the majority opinion.

This raises another key element in one’s worldview, the religious.

If you are a Christian, you might say, (whether you support the majority or the minority opinion) I want to hear what the Christian scientists say on the matter. I think we can ask this question as long as we recognize that sometimes the very best scientists are not Christians. Common Grace operates here as in all other areas of life. But having acknowledged this, I must also acknowledge that there are probably Christian scientists on both sides of the issue. Which ones shall we believe? It seems to me the best answer to that is that we should trust those who are the best, most highly regarded climate scientists.

We can ask, as a minimum, that they publish in journals that are juried and that they are recognized and respected by the larger scientific community for their scientific work. In my reading I have not encountered Christian climate scientists who support the minority opinion that meet these criteria, though I suppose there might be some. But I know a number of Christians who support the majority opinion. I will mention two.

Sir John Houghten, knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1991, was co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes Assessment Committee. He also served as Director General of Britain’s Meteorological Office, and Chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. He has received the prestigious Japan prize for his lifetime work on Climatology, the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal, and the International Meteorological Organization Prize. He is, without a doubt, one of the most respected climate scientists in the world.

But Houghton is as well-known for his Christian faith as he is for his science. In checking a number of biographical references to Houghton, I was pleased to discover that almost the first thing mentioned about Houghton is his strong Christian faith. Here is the second sentence of the Wikopedia bio: He was brought up as a Calvinistic Methodist in the Presbyterian Church of Wales and “has remained a strong Christian throughout his life and sees science and Christianity as strengthening each other and believes strongly in the connection between Christianity and environmentalism.”

Like most Reformed scholars, Houghton believes that science and religion, rather than being in conflict, actually complement each other. “There’s a widespread suspicion of science, fostered by the feeling that science goes against the Bible,” says Houghton. “This is very unfortunate; it takes a small view of God and a very inadequate view of science.”

Well, I will have more on Houghton in my final Climate Change Plumbline. But I want also to mention a scientist of the majority view who was, at least until recently, a local citizen. Dr. Douglas Allen is a scientist whose training is in atmospheric physics. He has worked in research at NASA’s Goddard Space flight center in Chicago and has published extensively on climate related issues. While he taught at Dordt, he also went out into the community and spoke on the issue of climate change. In fact, his presentations two years ago at my church were for me highlights of the adult Sunday school program. I knew him as a colleague and found him to be a humble, pious, upright man of God. But, of course, he is also a man of science. And thank God that is no contradiction.

Three Stories about Climate Change

2010-06-01T12:34:00.000-07:00

I spent February of this year in Florida, hanging around with old folks most of the time—after all, I am 67 and an official member of AARP. One of the things I was told by an elderly acquaintance in Florida was that the whole idea of global warming had come from an 8th grader’s term paper. And he believed it. I asked him if he ever watched NASA launch spacecraft to go to the space station—since we could see those launches from our trailer park. Yes, he said, he had and they were pretty amazing: the huge ball of fire hurling the spacecraft into the heavens and then in no time at all disappearing, only to return from outer space precisely on time two weeks later after having traveled hundreds of thousands of miles and then landing as neatly as you might pull your car into the garage. Amazing! The precision of it, the marvelous science.
Well, I said to him, do you realize that NASA, the same organization that put men on the moon and now sends them to the space station, is the organization that has been doing the cutting edge research on global warming for more than three decades. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been in the forefront of climate change research. And furthermore, the scientists at NASA believe that global warming has brought us to the brink of disaster. Yet you want to belittle the whole idea of global warming by reducing it to the significance of an 8th grader’s term paper. I just don’t get it.
I tell this story because it illustrates the illogical resistance to the idea of climate change and human involvement in it that exists—especially with my contemporaries, the old folks.
But it is not just the older generation that resists the idea of global warming; most people in my small corner of the world seem to think the idea of climate change is silly or irrelevant. I was told a few years ago that at an area Christian school it’s just better not to bring up the subject of climate change because it’s too controversial. Imagine that. One of the most significant issues of our time, an issue that cries out for a Christian response, and it couldn’t be talked about in a Christian school. I hope that’s not still the case.
At Dordt College there’s been a good deal of talk about climate change—at least in the Science Department. About a month ago I attended a lecture on climate change at Dordt given by a man who was both a preacher and a scientist. His central argument for caring for the creation, and specifically for being concerned about climate change, was this: We must care about the creation because we care about people. We must do what we can to slow down climate change because people are dying from the effects of climate change. In other words, the issue of global warming is a pro life issue.
For the next hour or so he gave us facts and statistics about the reality of climate change and the devastating effects it is already having on people all around the world. And these effects usually are in one of these areas: loss of food, inaccessibility of clean drinking water, health problems and war.
It was a stunning and disturbing litany of present and coming disaster. And challenged us to live in such a way that we diminish our personal consumption of CO2 producing energy. At the same time the entire presentation was permeated with the assurance that we need not worry or despair because God is in control.
When the speaker had completed his presentation, the floor was opened for questions and comments. (As is often the case, there were more comments than questions, and the comments were usually critical.) One of the questioners gently chided the speaker for arguing that we should care for creation because we care for humanity when the real reason we care for creation is because God commands us to. Someone else criticized the speaker for being too negative.
But then a young man who identified himself as a farmer made what was to me the most startling comment. It went something like this: You scientists are just trying to play God. You think that God needs you to take care of the world. Suppose you’re right and the world’s climate is getting warmer; God can take care of that if he wants to. It says in the Heidelberg Catechism that ‘not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my heavenly father.’ That shows that God’s in control and if he wants the temperature of the world to be cooler, he will simply change it.
The speaker seemed so surprised by this argument that he did not really offer a rebuttal. He respectfully told the commenter that he disagreed with him and moved on to another question. This left me frustrated and I raised my hand to respond but the meeting was adjourned before my response could be heard. So I’m taking this opportunity to say what I wish I could have said then:
One of the most inexplicable and mysterious things to me is why on earth God so often chooses to have his work done by humans. As Paul puts it, almost humorously, “It was God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (I Corinthians 1:21). Eugene Peterson in The Message puts it even more emphatically: “God took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things.”
The point is that God in his wisdom uses humans to do much of his work in the world. And that’s not only true in the case of bringing the gospel to those who have not heard it; and it is also the case with caring for the earth. Already in the second chapter of Genesis God commissions humans to tend and care for the creation. And the theme continues throughout the scriptures, right into Revelations 11 where John hears the twenty-four elders invoke punishment for those who have violated that creation care mandate when they say: “the time has come to destroy those who destroy the earth.”
Would the questioner have made the same argument to a missionary who was challenging us to go into the world and make disciples of all nations? Would he assert that missionaries think God needs them when the doctrine of election should suffice to bring all those God had chosen to be saved into the kingdom? Would he chastise someone from his church who used the science of medicine to find a cure for her cancer? Would he say the doctors were playing God? Would he argue that since God in his providence could save the woman from cancer if it were his will—quite apart from medical science—she was being unfaithful by going to the doctors? I don’t think so. And I just don’t get it.
And, quickly, a third story. The Dordt faculty had been treated by the Board of Trustees to a banquet and afterward we heard a presentation on global warming from the science department. The presentation featured lots of graphs and charts, evidence of all kinds that validated the notion of human cause for global warming. One of the science profs tried valiantly to argue that humans were not responsible for the climate change that was occurring, but he could not produce much evidence and eventually admitted that. When it was over and we were standing outside in the fragrant spring air, one of the board members, a bright and articulate middle-aged pastor, turned to me and said, “There’s nothing to it. It’s all a lot of nonsense.”
No rebuttal, no evidence, just a categorical statement—as if it were biblical truth. I just don’t get it.
Three stories: an old guy in Florida, a much younger man in Iowa, and a middle-aged preacher, all three adamantly opposed to the idea that we ought to be the least bit concerned about global climate change.
Perhaps you are saying, well, Schelhaas, you have set up some convenient straw men to make the opposition look silly.
But I must ask, what are the arguments of merit against the acknowledgement that climate change is occurring around the globe and human activity is largely responsible for it? The climate experts at Dordt College (Dr. Douglas Allen and Dr. Robb De Haan in particular) would say there are none. Ninety-five percent of climate scientists around the world say the same thing. In the last election both major parties made strong statements about the dangers of global warming and the need to do something about it.
Yet so many Christians in the places I live scorn the very words global warming. I don’t get it, but I will try to understand by making a couple more Plumbline forays into the world of climate change in the weeks to come.

From Andy Crouch's "Culture Making"

2010-04-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

It is no surprise to discover that two-thirds of American phlanthropy actually goes to institutions (whether museums, orchstras or churches) that primarily serve the rich--essentially, the wealthy underwriting their own cultural esperienes with the benefit of a tax deduction--or that the futililty of American urban life has given rise to misogynist, nihilistic forms of music that simply underwrites broken horizons of masculinity and femininity with the alleged credibility of "the street." It is also no surprise that most money is made on Wall Street providing financial services to people who already have extraordinary amounts of money, that most advertisements target a thin (literally and figuratively) slice of prosperous young people, and that much of the rich world's research into new medicines target the disorders that disproportionately affect the rich world. Nor is it a surprise that in the name of economic and political empowerment, dictators like Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe have expropriated allegedly ill-gotten wealth from cultural elites--yet in the end only further impoverished and imprisoned their own people. (p. 209-10)

Apricot Buds and Pussy Willow

2010-04-10T14:54:00.000-07:00

Just about every year that we've lived here, I have been able to cut a bunch of pussy willow branches to bring as a bouquet to my wife--and every year she's thrilled with them. Those pictured here are past their prime for cutting, but beautiful in their golden fuzziness. For the rest of the year they will be absolutely ordinary, eliciting no wolf-whistles or ooh-lah-lahs, but right now they are lovely. Every year I cut them back so they do not block the sun from my vegetable garden, but they don't seem to mind. They come right back the next year.

And these apricot blossoms, are so pregnant with blossoms I expect they will burst into blossom tomorrow if it stays warm. This apricot tree is about 10 years old and in ten years we have had about 4 apricots. Apricots need to cross pollinate, and our other apricot tree either dies every other year, necessitating our purchase of a new one, or blossoms later than this one. But we live in the hope of a lush crop some day. Maybe this will be the spring!

Another Sarah

2010-04-07T07:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem I wish I had written but in fact it is by Anne Porter:

Another Sarah
When winter was half over
God sent three angels to the apple tree
Who said to her
"Be glad, you little rack of sticks,
Because you have been chosen.

In May you will becme
A wave of living sweetness
A nation of white petals
A dynasty of apples."

Thinking He Was the Gardener

2010-04-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

In a sort of "aside" in his sermon yesterday (Easter Sunday) our pastor said, "What an appropriate mis-idendification Mary made, thinking Jesus was the gardener." For in the most comprehensive sense, he is the gardener--the gardener of the lives of all believers, of course, but also, as Kuyper suggests, the gardener of every square inch of creation, of the stars and the animals and the radish seeds just planted in my garden, gardener of rulers and politicians and voters, gardener of artists and poets and bloggers, gardener of architecture and technology and obscure academic journals--and he desires (I think) to nurture and nourish it all. Of course, all of creation is groaning under the weight of sin and that includes its caretakers; so much of what we see in the creation is bent or blighted or worm-eaten. But because Christ is risen, we have the promise and the witness of a new creation that gives us hope as we move out on this Monday morning into the gardens of the world. We will get dirt under our fingernails, and grass stains on our knees, but we will persevere because of the resurrection of the gardener-rabbi who had to say just one word, "Mary," and dejection instantly became jubilation.

I call my blog gardener-dave, and some readers have suggested that because of that, I ought to write more about gardening, about growing flowers and vegetables. And I should. But when I took the name gardener-dave for my blog, I was really thinking about the more comprehensive gardening I have just been talking about and that most of us do as culture-makers. Writing a poem is gardening as is building a coffeehouse. Getting involved in politics is gardening. Nurturing children and grandchildren is gardening.

That said, the big news at 432 1st Ave. is that the daffodils are blooming in the back yard and the forsythia bush is pushing out gold. (However, nature's first green is not--on our yard, anyway--gold but the delicate purple of crocuses.) Last Friday, which was Good Friday, I planted potatoes. My grandfather believed firmly that that was the only time to plant them and while I don't believe in that bit of folk wisdom, the snow was gone, the earth was fairly warm and dry and the sun was shining, so I got out my garden spade and planted spuds. I also have some lettuce, spinach and radish seeds in the soil.

I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and nothing confirms that for me better than taking a tiny, dry lettuce seed and putting in the soil.

A "Plumbline" I wrote that will run on KDCR Friday, 3/19

2010-03-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

What Glenn Beck Does Not Know
Should one even bother to reply to Glenn Beck? Clearly, he does not use reason when he tries to convince folks to think like he does. Often, he attempts to frighten people by using words that carry all sorts of emotional baggage. Sometimes he talks as if he knows a lot about something, but in reality he’s not very well informed. I would hope that people would see through this sort of manipulation, but I hear that Beck has a huge following—even in a town like Sioux Center. So I am going to respond to something he recently said.

Beck said that Christians should check their church’s web pages for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” and if they find them, they should resign from the church. Why? Because those words are really code words for communism and Nazism. Now for those Christian Reformed folk listening, if you bother checking the website of The Christian Reformed Church in North America, you will discover—if you did not already know it—that it has an entire Office of Social Justice. And what are some of the concerns of that office? Things like world hunger, AIDs in Africa, creation care, immigration, and disaster relief (actually the office of Social Justice is an arm of CRWRC--Christian Reformed World Relief), All of these, in one way or another, are issues of social justice.

Now why would the CRC as well as the Reformed Church, Pentacostals, most mainline churches, the Roman Catholic churches, Lutheran churches and many more be concerned about issues of social justice? The answer is simple: The Bible calls us, commands us, to be involved in social justice. You know this if you read the Bible. The Old Testament is full of these commands. The Psalms again and again call the people do care for the widow and the fatherless. And the prophets—Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, Micah, to mention just a few—all call the people of Israel to social and economic justice.

Let me quote just a few of the literally hundreds and hundreds of texts that carry this message. Isaiah 58:6&7:
Is not his the kind of fasting I have chosen:
To loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke,
To set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
And to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
When you see the naked, to clothe them,
And not to turn away from your own flesh and blood.

As I said, the Old Testament is full of texts like this. And the New Testament also. In fact, when Jesus says “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, a stranger and you invited me in, naked and you clothed me, sick and in prison and you visited me,” he explains it by saying when we do these things to the needy of the world, we are doing it to him. This is social justice, that is, justice in society, Jesus is talking about here. And notice that those who do not do this—feed the hungry and welcome the immigrant and visit the prisoner—are condemned to everlasting darkness. Social justice is not an option; it is a command! It is central to the gospel.

Yet Glenn Beck apparently thinks it is evil because it smacks of socialism and communism. What seems apparent to me is that Glenn Beck does not know much about what the Bible actually says. He speaks as one having knowledge and authority, but he is really ignorant, at least as far as biblical knowledge is concerned. And if he is so wrong on this issue, one wonders about his accuracy on other issues.

Of course Beck’s real target is President Obama and his supposed socialistic agenda. This has been a talking point of Beck and other conservatives for the last year. Obama is a socialist and socialists are evil, they say.

Well, let’s examine both of those premises. Are socialists evil? Or is socialism evil? The socialist credo is often summed up this way: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. In other words, those that have more are expected to help those who have needs. That sounds like a Christian doctrine to me, sounds like those words of Jesus I quoted earlier. It reminds me of those words about the early church found in Acts 2: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone in need.” That sounds like socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

C. S. Lewis, writing in Mere Christianity, talks about what a “fully Christian society would be like,” based upon biblical precepts. He notes a number of characteristics: everyone would work, obedience and respect and cheerfulness would be hallmarks, and, he says, its economic life would be “very socialistic.”

I find it interesting and significant that one of the most highly regarded and influential apologists for the Christian faith in the 20th century, would make that judgment about a Christian society and socialism.

So, it seems clear to me that socialism is not evil but it also seems clear to me that Obama is not a socialist. He believes in some social programs as most of us do. How many of you who are listening object to social security or Medicare? Very few, I would guess. And those of you in Sioux Center, how many of you object to the library and Four Seasons Center? Both are supported by tax dollars and the wealthy of our community pay more taxes than the poor. From each according to his ability.

Obama is a pragmatist. He will do whatever he thinks will work best for the good of the American people. I wish his health care plan was more socialistic than it is. As it is, it gives lots of leeway and power to the large insurance companies.

A final observation about Glenn Beck: C.S. Lewis, in the same passage I quoted earlier says that a Christian society would regard worry or anxiety as wrong. He bases this on passages like Philippians 4:6 which give us this command: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, present your request to God.” Glenn Beck’s main objective seems to be to create fear and anxiety in the hearts of his audience. But then, as I said before, he does not seem to know very much about what the Bible actually says. Perhaps Christian should resign from watching Glenn Beck.

Blindside and Precious

2010-03-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

Blindside and Precious

Two movies having to do with African Americans caught in situations of extreme poverty were up for best picture at the Academy Awards this year: Precious and Blindside. Neither won, though in my opinion Precious should have. (But I saw only 5 of the 10 nominated films.)

Both Precious and Blindside are fine movies but completely different in style. Blindside is a typical Hollywood movie, by which I mean, a movie that takes a true story and cleans it up into a slick, clean comfortable feel-good tale that allows rich, white, Christians and Southerners to feel good about themselves. Precious, in contrast, is a journey into the life of a young African-American girl who has been sexually abused by her father and experiences daily the most putrid kind of verbal abuse from her mother. The language, of the mother especially, is so violent and profane that it scalds your heart.

Blindside seems to say that if once in a while wealthy whites would pick an African American kid out of the gutter and take him home to live with them, what a wonderful world this would be. Precious seems to say that situations of chronic welfare dependency and poverty can lead to terribly destructive abuse of a child, but that the child can be rescued and empowered by teachers and social workers and church people from within the African American community. One movie is slick and smooth and shows us wealthy white folk rescuing a down and out African American male. The other is jagged and fraught with wretchedness but shows us the title character finding hope within the struggling community. One, Blindside, is a true story that has been slightly fictionalized . The other is a fiction that speaks truth with immense power. Blindside reminds us that individual acts of kindness can have powerful and long-lasting effects; Precious reminds us that we have deep, unsolved problems with racial, sociological and economic causes that get lost and forgotten in a culture dominated by middle class concerns.

Blindside ran in Sioux Center (by my unofficial observation) for about six weeks. Precious, as far as I know, never made it to the Sioux Center theatre though it was released in November of 2009.Both movies end on positive notes, but the hope in Precious is far more tenuous than in Blindside. I suspect Blindside was so popular in my home town because most people want the movies they watch to make them feel good. Precious does not quite let you feel good as you walk out into the light. You leave knowing that all is not well in the land of the poor and disenfranchised.

Oh, Canada

2010-02-25T20:43:00.000-08:00

And then there was one!

At one point during my 20 year career at Dordt, I had 11 colleagues on the faculty who were Canadians. Now, with Hubert Krygsman moving to the presidency of Redeemer College, there is one.

All of the departed Canadians were my friends and that includes not only those at Redeemer—John Van Rys, Jim Vander Woord, and Syd Hielema—but the others: John Vander Stelt, John Van Dyke, Fred Van Geest, Case Boot, John Struyk, and Simon DuToit.

But my loss is nothing compared to Dordt’s loss. I know, of course, that generalizations about ethnicity or nationality are dangerous, but I will hazard some generalizations nevertheless:
· The Canadians lived and breathed a Kuyperian worldview. It was in their blood and bones. When they were in the classroom, it was in the classroom.
· The Canadians spoke with refreshing, Old World Dutch directness. They had no tolerance for bullshit. In an academic world characterized by evasion and euphemism and half truth, these men said what they thought in plain language.
· The Canadians, almost all of them first and second generation North Americans, had the immigrant work ethic. This can be seen not only in the institutional work they did—writing documents, etc.—but in the publication output from people like Van Dyke, Van Geest, Hielema, and Van Rys.
· The Canadians were questioners, stirrers of the pot. I suppose most institutions prefer people who just shut up and do their jobs, but I think the really good ones embrace the questioners that challenge them and make them continually assess what they are doing.
· The Canadians brought down from the north some of our most lively students, students who questioned, got excited, drove you crazy, were naughty, but only rarely were bored and boring. Will they keep coming down to Dordt?

Why are we down to one? Well, four, have retired and four, for whatever reason, have gone to Redeemer. But where are the new Canadian hires? Do Canadians still apply for jobs at Dordt? Does Dordt seek out professors from Canada?

I know this, it is in Dordt’s best interest to have a contingent of Canadian professors on its faculty.

Long-legged Waders

2010-02-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

Letter from Florida (7): Long-legged Waders

Florida is a paradise for bird lovers. And of all the birds we see around here, the most startling—even though many of them are common as robins up north—are the long-legged waders. What pleasure we take in identifying by name these creatures that we had no knowledge of a few weeks ago.

Some, of course, we knew. An old favorite is the Great Blue Heron. We see lots of them here, though they look different than they do in the North: They have beards and white streaks in their plumage and they sit for hours on end with their long necks stuck down in their shoulder blades, like petulant old men. In the north—as I recall them—they are a solid blue gray and when you spot them they are either fishing or flying. We also enjoy the sleek, grey-blue Little Blue Heron.

Another favorite down here is the roseate spoonbill, a gorgeous pink bird about 30 inches tall with a bill that looks like a couple of nearly flat spoons clasped together. I have some great pics of them; unfortunately I can’t load them on this laptop.

We see all kinds of egrets down here, Snowy, Great, and the Cattle Egret. Our favorite is the Snowy with his black beak, black legs, and yellow feet. (Again, I egret that I can’t show you a picture.)

And then there’s the White Ibis (they’re everywhere, probing the swampy soup with their long curved bills), the Glossy Ibis, the Limpkin, the Wood Stork, the American Bittern, the Green Heron, and more.

I take quite a bit of pride in my ability to identify these birds out in pond and field, though I am not very good at it yet. But this struck me as I was thinking about the fact that I know a lot of these creatures by name: They don’t even know their names. A Snowy Egret would never announce—even if he could talk—“I am a Snowy Egret, and over there is my cousin the Great Egret.”

I know that’s obvious, but In our human pride we think that our having given them a name, makes them what we’ve named them. It’s a little like the preacher I heard recently who seemed to believe that God (and Adam and Eve) spoke English becauseI asssume, his (the preacher’s) Bible was in English.

Ah, well, we human beings are as odd as some of the Long-legged Waders, standing pompously with our necks in our shoulder blades or are beaks in the soup.

Letter from Florida (6): Musical Guilt

2010-02-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

Some time ago a friend told me that he was singing more, listening to more music and was, because of this, much happier. I believed him.

Music is one of the most powerful and mysterious forces on earth.
And just as mysterious is the question, Why do we listen to what we listen to? Why do we like some music and hate another kind? Is this a learned thing or instinctive?

Example: I grew up in a home where classical music was on the radio most of the time. My mother had no use for the gospel music of her time and wouldn’t have walked across the street for a gospel concert. I remember a time when The King’s Choraliers, a Grand Rapids based male chorus that sang gospel music, came to Edgerton, my home town. It was a big deal in town because the director was a man who had grown up in Edgerton. But my mother was not the least bit interested in attending.

As I grew up, I absorbed some of her attitudes and these were augmented by participation in Choral programs when I attended college. Some time later, however, I was singing in a male chorus like The King’s Choraliers. I did not like all the music, but I did enjoy much of it.
Now, I listen most often to classical music and certain kinds of pop. And I find most contemporary Christian music irritating, either grating or monotonous or both.

But here’s one of my guilty pleasures: Sometimes on a late Saturday afternoon, as I am surfing my TV, I will come across the Gaither Singers doing old time gospel. And I stop and listen. A whole stage full of old and young gospel singers with big hair and outlandish clothes and lots of make-up singing and smiling and raising their arms, having the time of their lives. A lot of the music is corny and the theology, by my standards, pretty bad. But every so often they’ll do a number so good that it brings tears to my eyes or gets me singing along with them.
A while back while watching the Gaither Hour, I heard/watched Sandi Patie and Larnell Harris singing “I’ve Just Seen Jesus” and it was one of the most moving musical experiences of my life. And here’s the strange thing. I am almost ashamed to say that. Why? Am I supposed to deny what I experienced, deny that the music lifted me out of my chair and made tears run down my cheeks? Deny the pulsing excitement about the resurrection that the song aroused in me?

Are my instincts or whatever it is that made me respond so deeply to the singing of that song by those performers bad, so bad that I should not trust them or is my head—educated in another direction bad?

I know this: I’m trusting my instincts.

Letter from Florida (5); More on Worship

2010-02-16T05:15:00.000-08:00

Jennifer quotes Barbara Brown Taylor saying worship is not something that “people cook up by themselves.” And Luke suggests among other things that worship is a dialogue. Both suggest that God, the Spirit, makes worship happen. Of course as Ron notes, when one actually takes on Christ with the Eucharist, that’s everything. That seems to be the Catholic position, but does that mean fellowship with other believers is not a part of worship? Or exegesis of the word?

My little screed of several days ago came out of a frustrating worship service that had way too much of the preacher’s personal opinion and not nearly enough of the word of God. That happened again this Sunday. It disturbs me. But suppose it was the word of God that was upsetting me? What if I heard strong Biblical preaching that was so radical it upset my comfortable life. That would be a good thing, right?

I have been reading a collection of essays by Smith (The Devil Reads Derrida) and in a short piece on worship he says this:

“What is worship for? What does worship do? While God’s glory is the central aspect of worship, its principle effect is the formation of the body of Christ into the image of Christ. It is in full-orbed worship (Word and sacrament) that we are formed as subjects of the King. It is in worship that our allegiance is molded and directed to Christ. So Christian worship is the school of the Spirit. But given what we’ve learned in Paul’s engagements in Philippi, we could also say that Christian worship is a kind of civics class: it is where we are shaped into “Messiah people,” who pledge allegiance to the ascended King-in-waiting, and learn the counter-imperial measures of love, justice and mercy. The goal of worship is not a private refueling but a public disturbance—to create subversive ambassadors of the coming King.”

This is the concluding paragraph of an essay about Paul’s preaching in Phillipi, especially the incident of casting demons out of young girl—an act which angered the authorities because it took a source of revenue from them. Smith suggests that perhaps the best kind of political action we can take is to worship in a way that calls the corruption of government and business and media to account—in other words, create a public disturbance.

I like this kind of talk because I believe we have compromised far too much with the powers of the world, but I know that this language—subversive, counter-imperial—frightens some people. And I suppose –to go back to my original remarks about the preacher who shut off my worship by political remarks—subversive worship services might also turn people off. But if it is solidly Biblical, let it.

Letter from Florida (4): New Friends

2010-02-12T12:45:00.000-08:00

We noticed Mr. and Mrs. Crane walking by our house a couple of times a day and so one day we just went out and introduced ourselves. That’s the way you do it in a retirement village.

They’re a rather odd couple, really, but gentle and sweet. They both walk in this slow, loping walk, sort of dipping down as they go and planting each foot so delicately on the grass or street that you’d think the ground was hot. Both of them walk this way—I guess it’s true that couples who live together long enough start to imitate each other unconsciously. Also, they both have red hair though that must be a genetic thing, not something that happened by imitation.

In the morning when we take our walk around Lake Fox Village, they are usually out as well, standing by the lake--they have an unusual double-wide down by the lake, sort of round in shape, unlike most of the homes which are rectangular.

They don’t talk much, but when they do, we sit up and listen. It comes out sort of like a honk. And if they’re really agitated, they may start to run in an ungainly fashion and then, suddenly, they’re flying. It’s an amazing thing, this flying. In they air they are marvelously graceful and their legs, folded back behind them, created a beautiful pattern—like something designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

It’s a curious the way these Cranes who fly so effortlessly choose to walk most of the time. Perhaps it is because they are constantly foraging on the lawns of the houses—looking for grubs and insects, I suppose.

About three feet tall, these Sand Hill Cranes are wonderful neighbors and we are happy to call them our friends.

Letter from Florida (3): Flannery and Worship

2010-02-09T10:16:00.000-08:00

Speaking of worship—as I did yesterday—I am always struck by the worship practices of Flannery O’Connor. I was reminded of them as I read the new biography of O’Connor by Brad Gooch. While she was at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, she attended a small Catholic church around the corner from her apartment. Almost every morning! “I went there three years and never knew a soul in that congregation or any of the priests, but it was not necessary. As soon as I went in the door I was at home.”

She is famous for a remark some years later at a literary gathering at the apartment of Mary McCarthy in New York City. Painfully shy, she has said virtually nothing the whole evening but when a woman remarked that she considered the host (in Holy Communion) to be just a symbol, O’Connor remarked: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” For O’Connor the host was absolutely life-giving and was at the very center of her worship.

My concern here is worship and it is clear to me that what O’Connor experienced in that church in Iowa City and for most of the rest of her life in Milledgeville was worship. And while I am not ready to have my protestant church make the Holy Communion central to worship, I do question making the sermon the center of our worship—especially when the sermon is overly argumentative or informative. The worship service must draw us into the presence of God so that we sense something of his love, his holiness and his majesty. Music can to that; the sacraments can to that; and the sermon can do it, but not if the preacher turns it into a stridently rhetorical exercise.

Letter from Florida (2) Politics and Preaching

2010-02-08T07:05:00.000-08:00

While we are in Florida, we gather at a chapel with a number of Reformed brothers and sisters for Sunday worship and are led by a variety of retired CRC and RCA pastors--so one never knows what to expect. Yesterday morning, the sermon was from Genesis 1 and the central thesis was that the creation was the marvelous act of our all powerful God. Now this is a fundamental truth of Christianity and a worthly subject for a sermon; however, most of the time and energy of the sermon was devoted to a debunking of evolution--and in a rather sarcastic tone. This raised a couple of problems for me.

First of all, the word evolution, like communism or socialism, is a word that makes a certain number of religious people automatically see red. To use it indiscriminantly as a synonym for atheism, that is, to suggest it represents a belief that denies the existence of a creator God, is to do a huge injustice to those who believe in some form of theistic evolution. And further, it denies the fact of evolution within species, for which there is all kinds of factual evidence. But that is what this preacher did.

And at the conclusion of it all, he said it didn't really matter whether we believed in a young earth or an old earth: the important thing was to recognize the creator God. Well, if that's the case, why spend all that time ridiculing evolution which is linked inextricably to an old earth.

There was no nuance: God was the creator and evolution was evil.

Then he got to the second main point: humans are called to be stewards of the earth. Ah, I thought, this is what we need to hear in this assembly of elders.(Have you ever noticed that most "over sixties" are not particularly environmentally aware?) He even said Christians ought to be the leaders of the environmental movement! Amen, brother!

But he followed this up immediately by saying, "Of course most of may not agree with Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth;" in fact, many of us may think it is based on convenient lies."

And that was that.

I don't suppose I need to say that my worship was severely compromised. More and more I wonder what it means to worship. Is a lecture on the evils of evolution or the evils of Al Gore conducive to worship in anyone?

Flannery O'Connor's Hometown

2010-02-06T10:08:00.000-08:00

On our way to Florida, we made a side jaunt to Milledgeville, Georgia. It was a pilgrimage of sorts to the shrine of St Flannery. That’s Flannery O’Connor, author of two collections of short stories, two novels and a couple of other books, one a collection of essays on the craft of fiction and one a collection of her letters, both assembled posthumously. O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39.

Both Jeri and I have taught the short fiction of O’Connor for years and have come to admire it more and more the longer we taught it. Her stories are often violent and shocking, yet funny and unflinching in their portrayal of evil and breathtaking in their depiction of grace. Although most evangelical Christians would probably find her fiction disturbing—and even disgusting in some cases—it has been a force to be reckoned with in the largely secular world of modern American literature. “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures” is O’Connor’s epigrammatic answer to critics who protest the violence and craziness of some of her characters. Which is to say, in a world unable to recognize the basic realities of life and death, sin and grace, readers have to be shocked into recognition by the outrageous and violent actions of some of her characters. And so The Misfit in her story shoots and elderly grandmother and says, “She’d have been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every day of her life.” And Hazel Motes so Christ-haunted that he puts out his eyes in a desperate attempt to show his commitment to his Church without Christ.

Flannery O’Connor is as good a writer as America has produced in the last seventy-five years.

And so we drove into Milledgeville on a cloudy evening in January coming into town on Highway 441, as typical and ugly as every other American city’s outskirt business drive, with fast food places, motels, car dealers, and big box stores. After getting a motel, we went to the college, Georgia College and State University, which was Georgia Women’s College when O’Connor attended it in the forties. It’s a beautiful old campus with high columned buildings everywhere. In fact, Milledgeville bills itself as the city of columns and it’s not just because of the college buildings. All around the college and fanning out in every direction are grand old mansions—many of them fronted by two and three story columns. And a couple of blocks from the college campus is a lovely old business district with shops and pubs and restaurants, as modest and ordinary as the Highway 441 buildings are garish.

The ugliness of Highway 441 stretches right up to Andalusia Farm, where O’Connor lived for many years. It used to be four miles out of town but now there’s a Wal-Mart right across the street. I suspect O’Connor would have been amused and saddened and cynical about all the changes.

We visited the farm which served as a sort of setting for many of her stories set on farms run by strong women like her mother Regina. Most of the buildings are in bad repair, but there were a couple of peafowl penned up near the house reminiscent not only of the fowl that O’Connor herself so cherished but also of the pathetic little roadside zoos that pop up in several of her stories. and the house itself looked good on the outside but needed a lot of work on the inside.
As we strolled around the farm on a beautiful, sunny day, I was struck by the transience of most physical things. The garage (called the nail house) was falling down as was the house where the couple that helped with the farm work lived. The quaint town of Milledgeville itself had been changed for the worse by the modern convenience businesses pasted across its face. O’Connor’s brief life examined from one perspective, seems terribly sad. From the time she became ill with lupus until she died15 years later, she set her face steadfastly toward her art—sacrificing most other personal pleasures to that one goal. She was editing in her bed until the day she died.
So brief a life—and narrow by some standards. Yet what she left—her small body of literary works—will be here, I believe, until Christ returns.

Before we left, we stopped for gas at one of those stations on 441. As I was pumping gas, a young man in a beat up pickup (he could have been O. E. Parker) pulled around in front of me and shouted something to me. I couldn’t understand him so I walked up to his pickup and said, “What?” He said, ”This ’ere station is owned by Muslims so folks from the community don’t buy their gasoline here.”

We were in O’Connor country.

Pictures of The Fruited Plain

2010-01-24T15:24:00.001-08:00

The Fruited Plain

2010-01-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

My blog has been comatose over the past four months and the reason is "The Fruited Plain." Let me explain. In late August, my daughter and her husband purchased a building on Main Street in Sioux Center and began the long process of gutting it and creating from the space a coffee shop/wine bar to be called "The Fruited Plain."
And just like that, I had a job--volunteer laborer. Whatever needed to be done, I did or attempted to do along with a large number of volunteers. We tore out the old ceiling and the loose insulation--by the dumpster-full; we pulled nails out of old 2x4's reclaimed from the old stud-walls. We put up new studwalls and covered them with sheetrock--in some cases 4 layers of 3/4 inch drywall, 2 layers on either side (for a firewall). We mudded the joints and primed and painted and applied a clay like substance to the walls. We cut trenches for plumbing and elctricity in the cement floor. We removed old paint from the interior brick walls to create the industrial look. We planed a thousand feet of rough-cut ash to be used for trim wood and the building of booths. We sanded and stained and varnished and installed trim wood and floorboards. We took rough cut wooden beams that we found above the ceiling and hung themfrom the ceiling of the party room called the Backroom Bistro. And A hundred other tasks.

But now it is finished (sort of), and open, and I am proud to post some pictures of the finished product.

CO2 Orgy

2009-10-15T17:41:00.000-07:00

My daughter tells me that is the day to blog about Global warming and so I thought I would go back about 15 years to the first piece I ever wrote about global warming. Here are some excerpts.

Imagine a man living his entire live in a modest and sober manner but then upon reaching the age of fifty suddenly going on a wild and extravagant week-long orgy. And further, in the course of that binge, he contracts a terrible, incurable disease and lives out the remainder of life suffering the consequences of that disease.

This is the analogy Tim McKibben uses in his book The End of Nature to describe humankind's use of energy. For thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution our energy consumption was modest and the resulting production of carbon dioxide was also modest. But during the last two centuries we have engaged in an orgy of fossil fuel consumption, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at ever increasing rates. Now, says McKibben, we have changed nature to such an extent that it cannot be brought back to the way it was. The earth is suffering from an incurable overdose of CO2. Yet instead of modifying our production of CO2, we continue our orgy, though we are chronically ill because of it. We are like the man dying of lung cancer who still needs his hourly fix of nicotine. Even if we significantly cut back in our production of CO2, we could not return nature to the state it was prior to the Industrial Revolution. We might, however, be able to stop or slow down the dramatic alterations in nature that are presently occurring.

So why don't we do something about it? Why do we continue to increase the amount of CO2 that we spew into the atmosphere? I'd like to try to answer those questions, but first let me give a bit of background to the concept of global warming, or the greenhouse effect, as it is sometimes called.

You have probably noticed that if you park your car in the sun, windows closed, on a hot day, it is much hotter in the car then outside the car. This is because the sun rays that enter the car return as infra-red radiation. But since glass does not allow infra-red rays to escape, the car gets very hot. The same principle operates in a greenhouse: sunlight gets into the greenhouse but the infra-red rays cannot escape. Carbon dioxide functions in the atmosphere of earth much the same as glass functions in a greenhouse or your car: it prevents infra-red rays from escaping earth's atmosphere. This is not all bad, since if we did not have that blockage occurring to some extent we might be as cold as Mars and unable to support life. But if there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere then more and more infra-red rays are contained in earth's atmosphere, and gradually the overall temperature of earth increases. (Venus, whose atmosphere is 97 percent CO2, has a temperature that is 700 degrees warmer than earth's.) Right now the mean temperature of the earth is increasing because we have increased the amount of CO2 by about 25% in the last century. Unfortunately, it does not take huge temperature changes for living conditions on earth to be radically altered.

Dr. James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has testified before a congressional hearing that only a 1 per cent chance exists that temperature increases in the last few years were accidental. In other words, a 99% chance exists that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are responsible for the warming trends in temperatures.

Dr. Hansen's conclusions are based on computer analyses of a hundred years worth of thermometer readings world wide. Therefore, even if this summer were unusually cool in the midwest but the world wide statistical data showed an increase in the mean temperature, Dr. Hansen's conclusions would stand. But still so many people deny the evidence. Why?

We call our time a scientific age and in some ways, of course, we are. But in many ways we are not. We are common sense empiricists and if we can't feel the temperature changes ourselves, we're no more likely to take science's word for it than were the medical doctors of a century ago when they were told by scientists with microscopes that there were millions of little things called germs that were causing their patients to die. It took a long time and a lot of unnecessary deaths before medical doctors finally took the word of the microbiologists for what they could not see with their naked eyes.

A second reason why we do not do anything--and this is probably the most significant reason--is that to do anything about cutting back on our production of CO2s will be percieved as harmful to the economy and our spendthrift lifestyles. Our economy depends upon an ever increasing rate of consumption of manufactured products, and since we cannot produce the products without spewing excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, we are caught. To stop excessive consumption would be to cripple the economy. Our governments, our very lives, are controlled by the economic machine, so when that machine says we must produce and consume, we do it.

Even the economist Lester Thurow, himself an advocate of global capitalism, admits this is true. In a book review in the March, 1997, The Atlantic he says:
Where both the market and the political process fail is in dealing with global environmental issues such as global warming . . . in which the effects occur over long periods of time and their severity is highly uncertain. Crises aren't clear; solutions can be postponed, and the problems allowed to fester. The decline of the quality of life is so slow that we can't notice it and therefore don't do anything about it.(100)

But Christians cannot be content with doing nothing. We are called to care for the earth. That means we work to decrease our emission of greenhouse gases. And even if we seem to make little or no headway, we keep at it.

A Short Rant from a Crotchety Old Goat

2009-06-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

My wife and I went to a movie the other night. Up. It was okay—a couple of really heartwarming scenes that show the pain in the loss of a mate were great. The accompanying music—a simple piano—was really moving, especially to people who realize they are getting older.

What was not okay was the volume—especially the volume at which the 12 or so inane previews were presented. As an older person, I recognize that my hearing is not what it used to be, but even to me, the volume was so loud it nearly drove me from the theatre. I felt assaulted. I sat through the 15 minutes of previews with my fingers in my ears the entire time. When the movie finally began, the volume was turned down a bit, but it was still much too loud.

I will admit that when I watch TV at my kids’ home, I miss half of what is said because the volume is too low, and when they watch TV at our house they complain that we have the volume turned too high. Having said that, let me assert that the theatre’s use of such high-decibel volume is not done out of concern for the hearing impaired elderly.

It seems to be a fairly standard practice for theatres to ramp up the volume during the previews, and the reason seems obvious. They need to hold our attention. It’s the same reason commercials on TV often seem louder than the programming—though this was much worse.
I expect that the next generation is going to experience hearing impairment at a much greater rate than my generation, and I hope that someone in that future time sues the pants off of the theatre chains for ruining their hearing. Sort of like the lung cancer victims who smoked suing the cigarette companies.

There. If I don’t sound like a crotchety old goat, I’m sorry. I tried.

Power Touching

2009-06-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

Last week I was power-touched twice—or at least I think I was. When it happened, I did not know whether such a thing as a Power Touch existed. I thought the phrase “power-touching” was my invention, but I googled the phrase just to make sure and discovered it is not my invention at all. But more on that later.

What is Power Touching? In my experience, it usually occurs between two males—one who occupies a position of authority in relation to the other. The person in the authority position will at some point in the conversation put his hand on the shoulder or back or arm of the other. He may even rub the back or arm in a caressing manner. The intent of the touch, I believe, is to put the other person at ease—create a sort of comfort zone. As I experienced my touchings last week, one was done by an expert, so naturally that it seemed just a part of the conversation. But the other was done so awkwardly that I had the feeling that the person doing it was doing it as some sort of assignment: “By next week I want each of you to power touch seven different people.” The man with whom I had been talking suddenly came toward me with his arms out and rubbed both of my arms as he made a bit of small talk. It was clumsily done and made me feel uncomfortable.

Now before you begin to speculate that I have an unnatural aversion to being touched by males, let me assure you that I frequently hug certain males—sons, brothers, good friends that I have not seen for a long time. I am quite comfortable with those hugs. What bothers me about power touching is not that a male is touching me, but that he is attempting to manipulate me, to use touch as a strategy to create a bond with me or make me think positively about him. I feel like I have been reduced to a project, and I don’t like that at all.

Am I just being hyper-sensitive? No. My goggling of the phase “Power Touch” revealed to me that it is indeed an intentional strategy practiced by lots of people who stand to profit from the touch. According to Dr. Carol Kinsey Goman (my Google source), “We are programmed to feel closer to someone who’s touched us.” One study by Cornell University revealed that a waitress who touched the hand of her patron ever so briefly, twice, received a 17% tip whereas if she did not touch the patron she received a 12% tip.

Dr. Goman is an “Executive Coach” who has published a book, The Non-Verbal Advantage: The Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work. Aha! I was right. The executives who touched me were quite likely engaged in a kind of conscious manipulation. And I feel vindicated in the discomfort I felt at the power touching. I suppose if I were a single mom with two kids to support with my job as a waitress, I would discreetly touch my patrons—even though it’s manipulation. But when bosses and supervisors use this good thing, the human delight in touch, for selfish personal goals, I object.

April is Genocide Prevention Month

2009-05-02T06:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem I have been tinkering with ever since April 1 when my MSN Home page spit out the information that April was genocide awareness month. It seemed so bizzare, almost obscene, to try to stuff something as immense and horrific as genocide into a month. As so often happens, the poem went in a somewhat different direction than I expected.

Upon Learning that April Is Genocide Prevention Month

As if you didn’t have enough to do, April,
here you come babbling about genocide prevention.

Sweet, hippie-girl April, with your daffodils everywhere
shouting their happy yellow song and waving at me as I pass,
your grass so green it hurts my eyes,
and the pale green leaves of trees,
like tiny cupped hands that catch and drink the misty air.
Oh, April, bright, fragile, hopeful April,
all the tender trees are dressed in their thin green-gold ingénue frocks,
ready to dance the night away.
Will you cancel the prom?

And what would you have us do?
Shall we send a flower to a warlord? A bouquet of daisies
to a mother as she spreads thin sand
over slaughtered sons and daughters?
Sweet, foolish, flower-garlanded April,
do you think that a few choruses of “All that we ask is
give peace a chance” will do the trick?

What is Darfur to you, dear April? Death in The Congo?
Have you seen those boys holding big guns in their small hands?

Oh, sweet, foolish, hopeful April,
do you really think a month
is long enough?

Rise up my love, fair April, and
spend the year with me in beautiful, downtown Gaza,
luxuriate on the Sudan sands, experience the lush, Congo green.
We shall weave garlands of bones to wear round our necks
and dance the genocide prevention dance,
our hands stretched upward, eyes wide,
mouths shouting soundlessly,
“No! No! No! No! No! No! No!”

(It won’t make a difference to anyone, April,
but at least next year, when you’re
asked to be Genocide Prevention month, you can say,
“No. I did that last year.”)

An Easter Poem I Wrote Thirty Years Ago

2009-04-10T06:47:00.000-07:00

Illuminated Manuscript

OUR LORD REIGNS
BANANAS--2LBS FOR 39 CENTS
FLOWERS

During a spring snowstorm
I saw the brightly lit sign in front of a fruit market,
but laughed it off. April snowstorms
being conducive to cynicism.

But a brief flurry of crocuses two weeks later
chipped away at my doubt and then one day on the road to work
I was nearly blinded by daffodil and forsythia shine.

After that, doubt didn't stand a change.
Petunias, tulips impatiens pattered down,
catching in window boxes, along sidewalks.
Rhododendrons thundered in lavender clouds,
dandelions crackled in jagged lines across green lawns.

Oh, yes!
Our Lord reigns,
rains flowers.

Fruit showers, forecast for later in the summer,
came as expected.

Strawberries and raspberries gushed
through gutters, a Red Sea miracle.
Plums the size of golfballs pelted unprotected cars.
Bananas whirling like boomerangs filled the air.
Apples, peaches, pears came down like cats and dogs,
all together,
all singing a rainbow promise:
Our Lord Reigns!
Our Lord Reigns!
Our Lord Reigns!

Doing Something Useful

2009-04-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

As I write this, two men are in my kitchen, sanding and sawing and hammering. I know them slightly, they are good men, a father and son team that restores old floors. We discovered a fir floor underneath the linoleum of our kitchen, and we hired these men to take off the layer of gunk—linoleum adhesive, I suppose—and make the floor smooth. Some of the boards were damaged and there were other places where non-flooring boards had been inserted in a remodeling project of the past , so our workers had to replace some of these boards with fir, carefully fitting in the tongue and grooved old fir pieces they had found at a store in Paulina.
The father of the team must be 75 years old but he crawls around the floor on his knees with no knee pads (his son uses them) and seems happy in his work. He saw my boat in the garage and commented on it, saying, he found no pleasure in fishing: “A half hour on the lake and I’m ready to come in.” His joy seems to be his work. His son, who knows I recently retired, says to me, “What do you do with all your time, now that you’re retired.”

I hesitate to answer him. Shall I tell him that yesterday as they worked in the kitchen, I was upstairs, writing a poem. I have no doubt that crafting a poem is every bit as honorable as crafting a wood floor, but I’m quite sure that the local culture would not agree. We are a people who value useful things like floors more than poems whose value and use is questionable.

I could show him the poem, but I’m not sure it would convince him. It’s a pantun, a form that uses the second and fourth lines of the previous stanza as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The trick is to make the lines fit together—sort of like tongue and groove flooring. Sometimes the lines of a pantun can seem disconnected but usually a link of some kind can be found that gives a sort of coherence.

Above is the picture of the floor (which, incidentally, my wife and I stained and varnished). Below is the pantun.

My Father Counting Money at the Till

Happy-go-lucky is what the townsfolk called him,
I saw his darker, pensive side sometimes.
The Minnesota sun shines on the coldest days;
My father covered trouble with a whistle or a song.

I saw his darker, pensive side sometimes,
I saw him counting money at the till.
My father covered trouble with a whistle or a song,
The old song and dance that got him through the war.

I saw him counting money at the till
In the evening as we put the store to bed.
The old song and dance that got him through the war--
Was the music he made lament or lullaby?

In the evening as we put the store to bed,
The coins clinking in the tray could cast a spell.
Was the music he made lament or lullaby?
In those days men wore hats and whistled at their work.

The coins clinking in the tray could cast a spell,
A metronome that measured out the years.
In those days men wore hats and whistled at their work.
I used to break into song at the drop of a hat.

A metronome that measured out the years--
My father counting coins and singing in the store.
I used to break into song at the drop of a hat;
I have known the sadness of a twilight closing time.

My father counting coins and singing in the store,
Happy-go-lucky is what the townsfolk called him.
I have known the sadness of a twilight closing time.
The Minnesota sun shines on the coldest days.

Liebestot

2009-03-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

I found them lying side by side, dead, heads firmly clamped to the base of the trap. Liebestot, Wagner calls it, love in death. I hope their deaths were instantaneous, that these “wee, cowrin’, timorous beasties” had no chance for a “panic in [their] breasties.” Notice how tenderly the little hand caresses the partner's head--love in death.
The trap had been set the day before, after my wife, coming in from the garage, surprised one of them in the entryway. We assumed they had gained entrance through the garage door which had been left open frequently during the past week by the carpenter doing some remodeling in our kitchen.
I imagine them as mates, drawn to the warmth of an open door and, later, to a midnight snack of peanut butter. And then, death! The romantic in me wants to find a silver lining in the fact that they died together, lovers. Neither of them will have to grieve. But if I can believe Bobby Burns, and I do on this point, mice—and most animals—live in a kind of constant present so that they are never bothered by worries about the past or the future:
“Still thou art blest compared wi’ me,
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear.
An forward, though I guess and fear,
I canna see.”

Quite apart from any little momentary surge of sympathy, my overwhelming emotion was triumph. I had slain my enemy the mouse—and in my first attempt. A few years back when mice got into our house, they kept licking the peanut butter off my trap without engaging it. I felt terrible. But here I had slain not one but two—and in one fell swoop.

How little it takes to make one’s day.

God Said Softly, "Music"

2009-03-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

It must have been early in the morning, of the fourth day
that God in the pre-dawn deep blue-blackness whispered to himself, “Music,”
though it wasn’t the English word,"music," English not yet existing nor, for that matter, any other earth language. So God said softly in God language, “Music”
as he imagined all those birds at dawn—though why it had to be birds that sang and not, say, rodents or cats or large non-human mammals, I don’t know. (Blue whales,of course, sing and have actually made a best selling album; still it’s birds that are the earth’s primary singers—they do it for a living so to speak.)
He must have heard in his mind’s ear all those birds waking up,
breaking the silence with their first hesitant chirps and cheeps, trills and gurgles,
then gradually gaining confidence and soaring into songs of dawn.
But what a good idea, music—maybe his best creation though it’s hard to pick one best thing, Eve being a pretty terrific idea and all the tasty foods and, of course, language, all languages,but especially English and here I know my bias is showing, English being my only language and by the looks of things the language of the world today.
But back to music. I suspect it was birds who planted in humans the notion that they could sing, and then pretty soon Jubal was tinkering with wires and whistles and it wasn’t long after that, in God time, that Leonard Bernstein was directing the New York Philharmonic, and I stood in the Chorus of The Siouxland Oratorio and sang with others the great choruses of Handel’s “Messiah.”
He knew what he was doing--and here I mean God and not Handel,
though Handel certainly did all right and so did the Chorus and Orchestra,
but we’re all just birds, really, all of us, warbling as best we can
in praise of the Creator, who back in the darkness of infinity
thought how nice it would be to hear his creation make music.
(And perhaps he also thought then how much his creatures might be
comforted by the songs they sang to him. I’ll bet he did.)

2009-03-02T15:01:00.000-08:00

Giving Grace

2009-03-02T14:20:00.000-08:00

Our lives are like lawns full of dandelions. I know it’s a clichéd metaphor, but it’s a pretty good visual image and besides it fits the picture. Wouldn’t it be lovely if our lives were as flawless as this lawn? But they’re not, and I was reminded of that the other night after church.

Here’s the scene: People are milling around in the narthex after a church service when a former student from long ago, someone who looks nearly as old as I do, sidles up and after a bit of small talk says, “I just gotta tell you this—I plagiarized in your class. You handed back a paper and said to me, ‘Did you write this? It doesn’t sound like you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I wrote it,’ so you smiled, handed back the paper and walked on.”

How should one respond to such a confession—forty years after the deed? I’ve had this experience three or four times, and this last time I said something like, “Oh, well, I suspect most of us have done something like that at one time or another. I remember when I handed in something I hadn’t written.”

But he said, “No, I have to confess. It really, really bothers me.”

“Well, then,” I said, “I forgive you, and I’m sure God does also.” It’s an uncomfortable business, this giving of priestly absolution. I’m not used to it. Even being apologized to makes me uncomfortable—most of us feel that way, I think. We don’t want to sound pompous or appear to have been waiting for penitence, but we don’t want to seem indifferent either. After all few things are harder to do then confess or apologize.

Confession is good for the soul according to the old saw. I suppose that’s true, but I wonder if feeling guilt for something forty years after the fact, something that one could confess to God and be done with, indicates a hyper-sensitivity to guilt and an inadequate appreciation of grace or a sturdy conscience that refuses to gloss over sin. As I reflect on these confessions I have been privileged to hear, I wonder if in my classroom, I dealt out more guilt than I did grace, and I begin to wish that I had exercised less judgment and more forgiveness.

It seems to me that in the Christian school culture I grew up in and taught in, most teachers, I among them, were much more ready to punish than forgive—especially if forgiveness was not merited. It was just common sense: “A kid does something wrong, she’s got to be punished. How else is she going to learn to behave?” I can think of numerous times that I or one of my colleagues caught someone doing something wrong and punished them, but I remember fewer instances of intentionally choosing to show grace—of saying, “I’m just going to forget this ever happened.” (Well, this is apart from accepting late papers, something which I did with more and more readiness, the longer I taught.) I wish now that I had looked for opportunities to give grace—not randomly, but when circumstances indicated that the experience of grace from my hand might be an effective tool for training in righteousness.

As I grow older, I find I am moved to tears much more easily than I used to be, and few things move me more powerfully in a novel or movie or TV show than the depiction of someone dealing out grace—undeserved favor. I think good writers recognize the power of grace in a story because it can be spotted rather frequently—even in the generally depressing world of television drama.

Some time back my wife and I received a gift of the boxed set of the first season of West Wing, and recently we watched an episode in which the following transpires: Someone from the Whitehouse staff has leaked evidence from Chief of Staff Leo Mc Garrity’s personal file that Leo had been to a treatment center for alcohol and drug addiction. Leo knows the leak is going to cause huge problems and might even result in his having to resign. Eventually, the culprit is discovered and Leo orders one of his subordinates to fire the young woman. But before the guilty young woman leaves he asks that she be sent to his office. When she shows up with her little box of personal effects, terrified, Leo asks her why she did it and she tells him that her dad was an alcoholic, she knew how they behaved, and she just felt that it was her patriotic duty to leak the information. Leo talks to her for a bit about addiction, then says to her, “I believe you thought you were doing the right thing. Go back to you office and unpack your belongings. You can keep your job.” She returns to her office, stunned by grace. And we in the audience are stunned by the generosity of this crusty little man.

What better thing does Christ do than give us grace? And what better thing can we do as Christians—little Christs—then to show grace to the lovely children, the little Christs, that enter our lives? The Old Testament “eye for an eye” justice code simply does not fit the grace-code implemented by the Father through Jesus Christ? At least that’s the way it seems to me now. I wish I heard and saw grace given out by the people of my community. Perhaps it’s happening and I don’t see it. Whatever the case, when I spot it in a work of fiction and am always moved by it. What might it be like to see it in real life?

The Smartest Guys in the Room

2009-02-03T14:13:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, preachers and teachers and professors and, perhaps, medical doctors were the most influential voices in our CRC sub-culture. Businesspeople are the dominating influence in our culture these days. If someone is successful in business—which usually means “makes lots of money”—we have a tendency to genuflect as he passes by. The conventional wisdom of our time is that business people, bankers and lawyers are the smartest guys in the room.

Of course, this tendency to venerate successful business people has been a major characteristic of the larger culture for a much longer time--which leads me into my topic for today, the film documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I had seen the film a couple of years ago, but seeing it now, in the context of the international economic meltdown, it spoke to me even more powerfully, and it prompted some observations about whose influence should dominate in our culture.

The Smartest Guys in the Room traces step by step the rise and fall of the Enron Corporation, showing with absolute clarity the intention of Ken Lay, president of Enron, and Jeffery Skillings, CEO, to do almost anything, no matter the morality of it, to make money for themselves. And for quite a few years, they succeeded.

They succeeded by the skillful use of political influence, by bribing their accounting firm, by reporting profits they did not make but only hoped to make, and by taking advantage of loopholes in energy deregulation legislation.
But for me, the most astounding trick they played involved the stock analysts of the major banks and investment corporations in this country. By playing upon their susceptibility and greed, Enron leaders persuaded these analysts to buy stock from Enron and the bogus companies it had created even though there was no evidence of real profits. One critic, citing Lenin, calls these analysts Enron’s “useful idiots.”

This aspect of the Enron story, one small part of a vast and complex web of shenanigans, is what I want to look at a bit more closely. Stock analysts from virtually every major bank and investment firm fell under the spell of Enron’s courtship. Here’s a list of just a few: Soloman Smith Barney, JP Morgan/ Chase, Citibank, Deutchebank, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, CSFB, and Merrill Lynch. The analysts dealing with Enron must have been senior members of their firms, and they had to have gotten permission from their superiors to buy the Enron stock under highly suspicious circumstances. In other words, a whole bunch of really smart businessmen bought into the Enron charade. Unfortunately, they weren’t as smart as the smartest guys in the room, the leaders of Enron who conned them.

These leaders, Kenneth Lay, Jeffery Skillings, and the others, were smart guys. They pulled off their smoke and mirrors game for 16 years. They had their employees and most of Wall Street eating out of their hands. In the end, of course, they weren’t smart enough. Skillings sits in jail; Lay died before he got to prison; another committed suicide. And none of them was smart enough, apparently, to realize that a vast complicated house of cards like the Enron house, could not withstand the winds of time and circumstance for very long before it would collapse.
What does the Enron story have to say to us today? Perhaps this: The smart business people from Merrill Lynch and Citibank and Morgan Stanley and all the rest of those banks learned from their mistakes. And so, after 2001 they behaved more sanely, invested more wisely, were less greedy and insisted on more regulation to avoid the losses like those sustained with Enron.

Wrong!! They learned nothing and nothing really changed. The smart business guys, the brokers and analysts went right on making the same stupid kinds of investments they had made with Enron. But on a much grander scale. The housing bubble makes Enron look like a fleabite. Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme makes Jeffery Skillings look like a piker.

Much more recently, when President Obama and the press criticized Wall Street executives for giving themselves $50 billion in bonuses in 2008, several of these executives justified the bonuses, saying they have to pay them to keep their smartest people from taking other jobs. Jon Stewart gave the only sensible response one could give to this line of reasoning: “You don’t have any smart people.”

Where did we ever get the idea that the guys running our businesses and corporations are the smartest guys in town? And why, in the last twenty years, has a business model taken over many of our churches and schools and charitable institutions? Because of the belief that business people know how to do things right.

Let some philosophy or education professor question the transformation of professors into workers, of students into consumers, of education into a commodity, in short, of a college into a business, and he is likely to be ridiculed as hopelessly nostalgic or idealistic—not smart enough for the modern age.

Let a non-business person challenge some economic “principle,” and she will likely be told by the economists and business folk, “Your problem is you just don’t understand economics.” In other words, you’re not smart enough.

Well, who does understand economics? All those high-paid analysts duped by Enron and flummoxed by the housing bubble? Allen Greenspan? He didn’t see this recession/depression coming, and when it came, he expressed shock at the cupidity of the bankers and corporate leaders. Mr. Greenspan, last year’s unanimous choice for smartest guy in town, apparently was surprised by human greed. Not so smart.

I’m not the smartest guy in town by a long shot, but I know some basic truths. I know that the market is not magic, but a flawed mechanism, like everything else, and to put one’s trust in it is a form of idol worship as silly as bowing before the image of a golden calf. I know that humans, who are also fallen and prone to all sorts of sinful behavior—greed and pride and sloth and idol worship, need laws and regulations to control their tendency toward evil.

To conclude simply: We can’t rely on the smart business guys; we need to respect and hear the wisdom of the broadly educated others, the teachers and preachers and social workers and homemakers and laborers and artists.

January Thaw

2009-01-29T08:40:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem I wrote yesterday. It's not polished yet but that will take a few weeks of playing around with it. I am not even sure it works, but perhaps there's an old Kuyperian hanging around somewhere who will tell me.

January Thaw

Finally today, temperatures above freezing,
blue sky and a bright sun teasing me into
thoughts of spring. The edges of eaves
drip a steady chatter of happy gossip and the snow,
so white and sparkly, almost blinds me. I could dance
were it not for the dark blue shadows of the ash trees that slash
across the frozen lawns to remind me that nothing is ever one thing.
The blue sky darkens, snow turns black, hoar frost grows on the gray walks,
and the dark windows of houses suddenly flower, bright as marigolds.
This is what it is to live in a world which is straining to become
the Kingdom of God--a blue-white, January-thawed, happy-sad, half-baked kingdom.
A world of “already” and “not yet.”
--Dave Schelhaas

Seed Catalogs and Crookneck Squash

2009-01-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

One of the good things that happens each cold, snowy January is the arrival of seed catalogs. Well, good and bad. They are jam-packed with summer—fruits and flowers and vegetables and leafy trees; pumpkins the size of volkswagons and watermelons so red and juicy your mouth waters just looking at them. A seed catalog is a wonderful escape from the plain white world of winter. But it can also manufacture discontent. Three months of mostly cold, dead weather lie ahead of us before we will see growing things.

In addition to the seed catalogs that come in the mail, one can find all kinds of online seed catalogs. I spent some time yesterday browsing the Seed Saver catalog online. It contains primarily heirloom varieties and the wonderful pictures make your mouth water. In the squash section I found the Pennsylvania Dutch Crookshank squash that we grew last summer—squash so big that each one provides us with at least four meals. They are supposed to have a curved neck, but most of ours have straight necks. That’s because they matured in the evergreen tree that stands next to our garden. The vines climbed up the tree, blossomed, set fruit, and there they were, four or five large squash hanging in the tree. Of course hanging has a tendency to stretch and straighten out a neck so you will notice that only one of the squash in the picture actually has a crookneck.

But the straight necks taste just fine—especially when sliced into a casserole with apples, brown sugar, cinnamon and few other mysterious ingredients that Jeri adds.

Obama, McGovern and War

2009-01-22T11:32:00.000-08:00

Of all the commentaries I read and heard after President Obama’s inauguration, the one that spoke to me most powerfully was an open letter to the president by George McGovern in today's Washington Post. In his letter, McGovern calls for a five year moratorium on war unless our nation is in grave danger. McGovern, the old history teacher, argues most persuasively against going to war in Afghanistan noting that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union experienced excruciating losses in Afghanistan and eventually limped home defeated.

“I have believed for some time that military power is no solution to terrorism” he says, and as I look at Iraq and Israel and Afghanistan, I must agree.

McGovern acknowledges that he will be called too idealistic, but suggests that sometimes idealism is the best realism. He concludes, this old politician who has been warring against world hunger for more than a quarter of a century, by suggesting that programs that help feed and educate the children of the world will do twice as much good for nation and the world and at a fraction of the cost.

I was privileged to hear McGovern speak at a Northwestern College chapel service last fall, and it was one of the most memorable events of my year. So I wrote the following poem about it:

When George McGovern Spoke in Chapel at Northwestern College

He stood behind the lectern without a note,
eighty-six years old, tanned, that famous grin
lighting up his face as he made his opening comments.
Then he got down to the serious business of telling us
about world hunger,
about the starving kids he saw when he served in WW II
and the starving kids he still sees today. He talked about ways
to save kids from starvation, about Food Stamps (his creation)
and school lunch programs in America and around the world.
He has always had a heart for young people, this old warrior
against war who once said he was “fed up with old men
dreaming up wars for young men to go die in.”

It was the chapel service at Northwestern College
but he read no scripture, said little about God, except this,
except these five lines, which he sang in a clear tenor voice
with just the hint of an old man’s quaver:
“Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world,
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in his sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

So often, less is more.

A Brace of Birds

2009-01-20T12:57:00.000-08:00

I do a little radio show called "What's the Good Word" for Dordt College Radio (KDCR). Here's The one I wrote for today, January 20, the inauguration day of Barack Obama. The menu for the inaugural dinner, held shortly after the inauguration of President Obama, had as its main course a “brace of birds.” The word brace immediately caught my eye. I thought I knew what it meant, “a pair of birds,” but I wanted to explore it a bit, since to my mind immediately came a number of other, quite different meanings of brace, both verbs and nouns. Other noun meanings include a pair of suspenders (braces), a kind of drill (a brace and bit), devices attached to the teeth to shape and strengthen them; and a related word, bracelet, the decorative jewelry worn on the wrist. Some verb meanings are as follows: “to strengthen or support; to make ready for impact; to stimulate or invigorate; to tighten by stretching”; and the variation, embrace, “to hug.” There are more, but these are some that I know are still used.All of these different meanings of brace, come from the same basic root, Middle English , bracen and the Latin brachia, plural of brachium, which means “arm.” To put it simply brace means arms. Well, that helps a good deal, doesn’t it? A bracelet goes on the arm, and when we embrace, we put our two arms around someone. We have two arms, so somehow brace came to mean a pair: A brace of pistols or a brace of birds. When a brace of birds appeared on the inaugural banquet menu, I imagine it indicated two kinds of fowl—Cornish hens and squab, perhaps, or pheasant and duck. A pair of birds. We speak of suspenders, the kind we use to hold up our trousers, as braces because it is as if two arms encircle our shoulders to hold up our pants. Even that drill I referred to, the brace and bit, has several horizontal and vertical arms that are necessary for it to work properly.Perhaps our most frequent use of brace is its usage meaning to support or strengthen. Again the connection to arms seems apparent. We brace something, perhaps, by putting a support arm across it or under it to strengthen it. When we nail up a brace, we nail up an artificial arm. And when we feel ourselves falling, we put out our arms, that is, we brace ourselves, to make ready for impact. And, of course, many of our young people have experienced with some discomfort the application of shaping and supporting braces on their teeth.The one meaning of brace that I find most difficult to connect to the root meaning of “arms” is the verb meaning “to stimulate or invigorate.” We have all taken a bracing hike at some time or another, an invigorating hike. Where did that meaning come from? I don’t know. Perhaps you have an idea.The King James Version of the Bible makes no reference to the word brace. Esau, apparently never brought home a brace of birds for his father to eat. But it contains many references to both bracelet and embrace. One of the more familiar is this from Ecclesiastes: “There is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.” I learned the truth of this best when as a high school teacher I had hall duty, and one of my tasks was to break up young couples with arms wrapped around each other--locked in embrace.This is David Schelhaas, saying, “What’s the Good Word.”

Two Plays, Sort Of

2008-12-12T07:44:00.000-08:00

(Continued from Thursday) A TV show is not exactly a play, but it has most of the elements of a play. Our son Luke writes TV shows, specifically, this year, scripts for the long running show Law and Order. His first script aired Wednesday, December 12,2008. Luke has written for a number of different shows over the years, but this was his first Law and Order. We taped it so we could attend Wit, and when we got home we watched his episode. As his parents, we are proud of Luke's writing accomplishments, but we also view some of what he has written with a bit of trepidation. We knew the subject of this show was going to be the exploitation of young boys for sexual purposes, not exactly a comfortable subject. We also know that he is only one person among several who will determine what appears on the screen. The show was gritty, revealing the squalidness, pettiness, and rapaciousness of the world of prostitution. We weren't quite comfortable with everything we saw. But we thought that for the most part it was a true depiction of a part of our culture that cries out for redress. And there was at least one moment in the show that was so powerful it "redeemed" the show. A homely young girl (she "happens" to be from Boyden, Iowa, though she is now in New York City) believes she is in love with one of the gay boys to such an extend that she is willing to take the rap for a murder he seems guilty of. He, of course, is just using her. Well, in the process of her interrogation, she is forced to recognize her terrible neediness, to acknowledge that she has been pushed away by people her entire life. It is a dreadfully pathetic moment when we see her forced to admit that no one loves her. She sits there, emotionally naked before our eyes. And if we are human, we feel a deep, deep pity for her, the pity that's hid in the heart of love.And this is where Wit and Law and Order come together for me. Both show with great power the need for love, acceptance, compassion, human connection--call it what you will--that all of us desperately want and need because it is at the very heart of being human.