Our Great Adventure

Fifty-Three-Year-Old Sex

2012-01-30T11:33:00.000-05:00

Parishioners make the most fascinating choices when giving me books for gifts. This Christmas I received Sex and Love in the Bible by William Graham Cole (1959), then Professor of Religion at Williams College.

The erudition, depth, and eloquence of this book are as close to flawless as one could hope. It will inspire thought in anyone who reads it, and I daresay ought to be read by anyone who wants seriously to discover how biblical faith interacts with sexuality. The book is also now fifty-three years old. Though its theological insights are timeless, the issues with which it struggles--or perhaps better, the ways in which it struggles--are now historical.

The occasion for the book was the publication of the Kinsey Reports (1948 and 1953), which seem to be the first sociological research in the United States that asked about all expressions of sexual activity in our culture. It broke taboos by asking about masturbation, homosexuality, and age of first coitus. It set moralism largely aside and sought the facts of folks' behaviors. Starting with a recognition that the Kinsey Reports revealed something important about American society, Cole made it his task to offer a biblical response to the Reports. His conclusions many of us have come to accept as par for the course; his assumptions about the bible reveal his location in time and are still tensions within much of the Church. Here are the major conclusions I found.

Sex is good. Cole calls this a "concession" to the Kinsey Reports, but based on solid scriptural support. He believes the Church of the Victorian Age needed to be corrected from its prudery.
Parents must educate their children about the goodness of sex. Rather than hide behind obscure references to "birds and bees," children will grow up healthier if they understand sex and its role as soon as they can.
For Christians, all things are lawful, but not all things are wholesome. Cole falls solidly on the side of liberty rather than moralism: decisions about what is right and wrong in sexual relationships ought to be made based on the inner motivations rather than strict moral categories. This is still a tension within the Church--regarding sex and so many other things.
Sex cannot be disconnected from relationship. Cole rails against the Kinsey description of sexual encounters as simple "contacts." Every time sexual activity happens, whole persons are involved (whether they want to be or not). He establishes a firm biblical grounding for this view.
The bible is not an inerrant set of rules, but a vehicle by which the Holy Spirit speaks. With clear self-awareness, Cole places himself over against the Fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century and firmly in the camp of historical-critical scholars who, at the time, were considered "liberal" by most of the Church. This divide, now tessellated by several additional factors, still exists in the Church.
Psychology is the profession which best deals with sexual abnormalities like homosexuality. Cole reveals a strong bias to the then-still-established cultural standard of heterosexuality as normalcy. There is no hint in Cole's writing of the possibility that homosexuality can be a natural state for human beings. He also betrays a great optimism--in my view, characteristic of his time--that with enough education and therapy every human being can be on the road to a normal, enjoyable sex life. Learning and psychotherapy are the keys to redemption of the aberrant; the roles of the Spirit, the Church, and the pastor are simply to ensure that folks get the right education and find the right therapist. Though education and psychotherapy are good--along with all "things" which Cole asserts are good in themselves--such optimism sounds hollow a half-century later.

Again, anyone interested in solid exegesis of the bible with respect to love and sex will be enriched by this book. And perhaps readers from the twenty-first century will see their own biases more clearly because of the distance we now experience from those of Kinsey and Cole.

Thanks, Steve, for passing this one along.

~ emrys

A Reason to Yell

2012-01-30T10:22:00.001-05:00

A couple of weeks ago Sara, Gwendolyn, and I were driving along I-88 towards our little village. We had been out running errands in town. Gwendolyn sat in the back and Sara and I in the front seats. About a mile from our exit Gwendolyn asked if we were going home. Sara informed her that we had to stop at the library first, then we'd be going home.

Gwendolyn shouted, "We're going home! We're going home!"

She did this seven or eight times, her head thrown back to get full volume. "We're going home! We're going home!"

At the bottom of the exit ramp I turned left. Sara interrupted Gwendolyn's yell-fest and asked her, "Gwendolyn, if we were going home, which way would we have turned?"

Gwendolyn looked out the windows and took notice of which direction we were going. Then she threw her head back and yelled:

"We're not going home!"

Sometimes form is more important than content.

~ emrys

Worth It

2012-01-19T16:37:00.004-05:00

For MLK Day

On the Line

2012-01-13T21:52:00.002-05:00

Two weeks ago I perused the shelves of a used book store looking for a birthday gift for my brother. In the course of my searching, my eyes lit upon a copy of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952). I flashed back to a dinner out on the occasion of my wedding, at which my dad rehearsed a long piece from a literary work which included--as I remembered it--an old fisherman dying in his boat. Caught up by the memory, I purchased Hemingway's short story then and there.

The "About the Author" paragraph at the end of the book declares Hemingway to be "one of the most important influences on the development of the short story and the novel in American fiction" (Scribner Paperback Fiction edition). Having failed to read any Hemingway before this book, I cannot tell you why his work is described this way. I can tell you that after the first three pages I had to read it to the end.

The Old Man and the Sea breaks all the rules of writing. It has commas galore in the wrong places. Many sentences run on while others are only fragments. It does not honor the traditions of marking by punctuation what text is narration and what is the personal thought of a character. And the whole book reads like a staccato viola piece, temptuously and tortuously choppy. Like the waves of a windy sea. Perhaps this union of form and function help to make it the masterpiece that it is.

Two characters, an old man and a boy, have active roles in the story, and in ninety-four out of the book's one hundred twenty-seven pages we only read about the old man. Yet the old man's determination, his depth of experience, and his sympathy for the sea held my attention better than the kaleidoscope of characters in, say, The Brothers Karamozov. Perhaps the most masterful work within the narrative is the blurring of the line between human and oceanic, sea and sky, heaven and world, which comes to be embodied in the old man as he enters the deadly struggle with the biggest fish ever caught. Hemingway narration keeps us on the line, wondering equally whether fisher or fished will win and whether we will find ourselves in the man or the sea.

Like the artist who suggests meaning by depicting voids, The Old Man and the Sea never offers concrete statements of theme, purpose, or moral. And in this case the story is more powerful for the darkened void, like the attractive mystery of a sea unfathomed. One could find almost any enduring theme within the narrative, if one but reads the story another time. (And I have done so, twice now.)

The "About the Author" text mentions that Hemingway, recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, killed himself in 1961. Knowing nothing about his life outside this book's one-page synopsis, I find there a great mystery. Though I agree with the rear cover which lauds The Old Man and the Sea as heralding "the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss," I hear in the story a sad twist at the end which betrays both courage and triumph. Like so much of the book, the twist is not clear and sharp but deep and murky. Yet it ends the great minuet of The Old Man and the Sea on a chord that does not resolve, which, I suspect, also characterizes the lives of those who end their own.

I am left to wonder, both of the old man and of Hemingway himself: can one conquer the sea, or only weather its storms?

After my first read of the short story, I realized that the piece my dad recited was not Hemingway at all, but Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. When I bought this book, I was trolling in the wrong waters. But to my joy, I have caught a big fish after all.

Thanks to Annie's Book Stop in Manchester, New Hampshire for putting some classics right up front.

~ emrys

Savoring the Spirit

2012-01-04T17:58:00.002-05:00

I love black preaching. White preaching (classical preaching, Presbyterian preaching), of which tradition I am a part, relies upon uniform control of concepts and words as the primary vehicle of the Spirit. Most of the time, calmness and crisp diction are the hallmarks of good sermon delivery. The goal is to blossom a flower for the contemplation of the congregation's mind.

Not so black preaching. My observation of black preaching is that it seeks to drive truth into the congregational bones. And the primary vehicle of the Spirit is the response of those bones. Do those bones stand up in response to the preaching? Do those mouths open to praise the Lord? Does the congregation respond to the call of the Word? Does real, embodied life show up when the Word is unleashed?

These three days I am steeping in the blessing of twenty-six sermons delivered by young preachers. I'm staying at a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky and attending the Festival of Young Preachers. One hundred twenty-five young preachers (between the ages of 15 and 29) preach in five different rooms over the course of eleven sessions. Though all preachers are starting with Jesus' "sermon on the mount" (Matthew 5-7), every sermon is unique because every preacher is unique. I have been laughing with young Orthodox preachers. I have thrilled at teenage young women announcing the gospel in the context of Advanced Placement exams. I have wept as I responded "Amen!" to young black preachers. I've been basking in the glory of the Spirit moving in strange, loud, soft, and wonderful ways among the next generation of preachers.

I have the joy and responsibility of bringing the Word to a congregation most Sundays of every year. I rarely get to sit back and soak in someone else's delivery. And even when I do, it's most often within the cool intellectual climate of Presbyterian worship. Hearing such a variety of interpretations of scripture both from folks who craft elegant turns of phrase, and also from folks who repeat a three-word litany to make a drum-beating summons, is a treat for my soul.

What a cool opportunity, too, to bring a young man from our congregation to be part of this homiletic extravaganza. I have high hopes that he will go home remembering how rich, varied, and eccentric are the ways in which the Spirit words in the work of the Word.

If you're involved in the work of preaching to the world; if you're interested in the elevation of young preachers for the next generation of the Church; if you're young and want to preach; or if you would just jump at the chance to bask in the joy of hearing young energy in the pulpit, you must check out the opportunities at the Academy of Preachers. The Lord is doing some cool stuff here.

~ emrys

Carbon Sasquatch

2012-01-01T09:40:00.002-05:00

After a conference in Louisville, Kentucky next week, I'll be flying from there to Manchester, New Hampshire. Via Orlando, Florida.

Thank you, Southwest Airlines, for filling my annual carbon footprint for 2012 before Epiphany.

~ emrys

Going Digital

2011-12-28T22:26:00.001-05:00

It's official. As in a Mirror, my (first) fantasy fiction novel, is now available in Kindle (.mobi) and other e-reader (.epub) formats. See the link on the right side of this blog page to get your copy.

Thanks to Sara for setting up the PayPal link.

Happy e-reading!

~ emrys

Tin Years

2011-12-22T23:59:00.000-05:00

As soon as last year's anniversary was over, I looked to see what the material was for the ten-year anniversary. Tin. Tin? Other than being a poetic pun on "ten," I couldn't see why tin made an attractive material for gifts. I certainly didn't understand why it came after bronze. But in the spirit of this discipline, I obeyed the list and racked my brain to think of something I could make out of tin that would be useful for Sara.

And I came up with nothing. Less than what I dreamed up for bronze.

I discovered that I possessed something made out of tin (a large popcorn tin, in fact), but had no idea what to make.

After discarding all sorts of completely useless ideas, I settled on the prospect of wrapping something otherwise useful in tin. Since ten years has a benchmark quality about it, in our decimal society, I decided to make a photo collage and set it in a shadowbox frame wrapped in tin.

One cheapo shadowbox frame and an hour later, I had a system down for cutting, bending, and wrapping the tin around the wood.

The edges of tin pieces are sharp. I think I spilled more blood making this gift than the last nine put together. I hope Sara appreciates this--if she doesn't appreciate the quality of the craftsmanship.

Every one of these annual projects has a kindergarten feel to it. I sometimes feel as if I'm putting myself back in kindergarten, doing art projects that the parents will coo over because they're obliged to do so. Then three years later, when the next clay paperweight comes home from school, the old one will become a garden ornament or fodder for the trash truck. But it's the thought that counts, right?

I beat the surface of the tin, both to hide my unintentional scratches and to reflect a momentary thought that after ten years any relationship, though it may shine, will also have its fair share of dents and divots.

Last but not least, the collage of ten representative photos, one from each year together.

This, I think, is the strangest one of my anniversary gift series. Fitting perhaps, though, as it seems strange to reflect on ten years of married life. As I imagined what photos I would want to include, I struggled to remember what major events happened in 2003, 2004, and 2007--to name a few. Funny how time collapses certain spans flat while preserving some signature moments.

I wonder what it will be like at twenty years.

~ emrys

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-22T06:42:00.000-05:00

Dear Friends and Family:

Merry Christmas! We hope that you are able to fully appreciate the joy and wonder of this season. If you need a little help, take a 2-(almost 3)-year-old out to look at Christmas lights!

Gwendolyn is everything you would expect from an active two year old. She will very proudly tell you that she’s “Two and a haff be tree” (translation: “I’m 2 1/2 and will be 3”) since she’s recently figured out she has a birthday coming up! Christmas trees and lights are a thing of wonder and so much fun to enjoy with her!

2011 was fast and full. Highlights this year include Emrys’ 5 year anniversary at Nineveh Presbyterian Church, Sara’s 6 years of remission and our 10th wedding anniversary. We are also celebrating the new little one that will be joining our family in June 2012. Our area was hit with record-breaking flooding in September, and amidst the devastation it was amazing to watch a local community, and a larger faith community, come together to help out.

Our lives are full, we are blessed, and the guest bed’s made up—we’d love to have you visit!

Love, Emrys, Sara & Gwendolyn

P.S. Our home phone number will be changing on January 1st so if you need the new number, please email us.

Unlikely Bedfellows

2011-12-11T23:08:00.001-05:00

Growing up I used to watch a lot of Tom & Jerry cartoons. The implicit violence was both extreme and cartoonish: both characters fared poorly, then always came back in full health for the next episode.

Angels and demons made a frequent appearance in the show. Tom or Jerry, when faced with a decision about whether to maim, cripple, or torture his nemesis, would have a haloed figure dressed in white appear on one shoulder, bending toward mercy. On the other shoulder would appear a horned red figure, whispering cruelty into the other ear.

What a genius way to depict the struggle of conscience! Where did these guys come up with this stuff?

I just discovered that the twin angels (lofty and fallen) of Tom & Jerry have existed for at least six hundred years. As I read through Book I, Chapter XIV, section 7 of John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. McNeill, trans. Battles), I found this nugget, during Calvin's discussion of guardian angels:

" . . . the common folk imagine two angels, good and bad--as it were different geniuses--attached to each person."

Calvin remains noncommittal on whether persons have their own guardian angels. But I'm sure he'd be happy to know that the commoners' speculation about them brought entertainment to so many children of my generation.

~ emrys

Much Ado About . . .

2011-12-05T21:11:00.001-05:00

concrete.

The addition to our first floor, completed in August, brought about eighty new square feet to our kitchen, making it a real potential "eat-in" kitchen (which it was billed when we bought it, but never actually could serve that way). As a result, however, most of our kitchen is sea-foam green tile, with eighty square feet of unfinished concrete pad.

And the concrete pad is not level.

We have dreams of installing hardwood laminate (bamboo, to be specific), and are nearing our savings goal to pay for the stuff. Before it can be installed, however, the "new" section of floor needs to be level. To ascertain just what might be needed, I conscripted my HandyGirl to do some assessment (note sunglasses to protect eyes from concrete chips I was chiseling):

With a one-and-one-quarter-inch drop over forty-eight inches, the length of the new kitchen area would require a significant volume of concrete. I have worked with just enough concrete to know that screeting and troweling are not my thing--especially in confined spaces. So I spent a lot of time comparing "self-levelling" concrete. Several suppliers make it, but it turns out that no weekend warrior homeowner buys the stuff, because the DYI retailers don't carry it. (This should have tipped me off early; but it didn't.) So I had quite a runaround with the commercial sales departments of Lowe's, Home Depot, and our brilliant local guys to find out how much this part of the job would cost me.

The short ending: $700 to be able to pour a level floor without troweling. Yikes.

About a week before I was to suck it up and take the plunge, I spoke with my brother on the phone. Chris has done a whole lot of random construction and remodeling work on homes. I floated some questions to him about concrete applications. After kindly indulging my plan for a while, he asked, "Why don't you just use wood?"

Huh?

From that conversation, a new plan was hatched which would involve no troweling, no mixing, no warning labels about caustic lime. From leftover wood already in my possession, I am now laying down strips and screwing them to the concrete. Each strip is one-sixteenth of an inch thicker than the one before, gradually raising the finished floor surface to accommodate the concrete's bias.

In case I wondered whether my work would hold up under the soon-to-be-installed new flooring, HandyGirl Quality Control was on the job, testing every run.

It seems that trying to run twenty-two feet along the same two slats is great fun when you're two and a half years old.

Total cost of leveling: $50 for concrete anchors, a big Thank You to Russ for allowing me to borrow his hammer drill, and one home-printed sign for the front door that says "Uneven Pavement"--at least until the new floor is in.

~ emrys

Sex and Death Warmed Over

2011-12-05T15:10:00.001-05:00

Dracula: The Un-Dead, published in 2009, is the self-proclaimed sequel to Bram Stoker's original Victorian horror story. Bram Stoker's great-grand-nephew Dacre Stoker and "Dracula documentarian" Ian Holt teamed up to co-author the definitive continuation of Bram's classic tale.

Readers seeking to gorge themselves on the Victorian twin taboos of carnal relations and blood-soaked death will not be disappointed. Four of the original characters from Bram's novel reappear, twenty-five years after the Transylvanian Count is defeated--or so we thought--in the Carpathian mountains. The English heroes of the first novel are still alive and kicking; but between alcoholism, depression, and drug addictions, they have been reduced to pale shadows of their former selves. They find themselves--with Quincey Harker, the Hamlet-like non-hero--sucked into more battles with the vampiric realm. This time they fight not only the Count but also a greater demon: the sadistic and sexually weird Countess Bathory.

The deep darkness of the first Dracula, told through the intriguing lens of correspondence written between characters was enough to draw this reader well into this new book. One comes expecting the same horrific battle between terrified good and mysterious evil; the greatest fear in Bram's telling grows from one's not knowing how vast and formless is the shadow of the vampire. The Un-Dead, however, surrenders the sharpest weapon of the horror story by revealing too much. The narration attempts to inform the reader about too much of the inner lives of the characters, rather than allowing the mind of the reader--which is often darker than any author's pen--to infer from the action. In writer's club parlance, The Un-Dead "tells when it should just show." The revelations are so numerous, varied, and at times long, that the reader gets distracted from the movement of the plot, which would otherwise keep readers turning the pages late into the night.

(Full disclosure: this reviewer admits that these faults often arise in the work of freshmen novelists, of which he is one.)

Perhaps the overindulgence of words stems from the intent of the authors, as described in an extended authors' note at the end of the book. The young Stoker and Holt composed this piece in order to "reclaim Dracula" from its use by so many other authors and screenwriters in the last hundred years. At the same time, Stoker and Holt sought not to alienate the Dracula fans who have come to the realm through the other (admittedly bastardized) versions of the Count's story. As a result, the thick blood of Vlad the Impaler gets diluted in The Un-Dead until the dreaded nemesis of Bram's novel seems a hobbling hodge-podge of motivations, desires, and choices. The authors' goal of exhaustive historical accuracy does not rescue the book, as descriptions of people and places often come across as professorial name-dropping that should have been left on the cutting room floor.

The real bite of a horror story like Dracula, un-dead or otherwise, is the power of a simple narrative simply told. The insight of the great Aristotle is as instructive here as it was thousands of years ago: a story has a beginning, middle, and end. In a horror story, those parts ought to be just long enough to inflict the wound of fear. Then the story vanishes in the night, leaving the reader with an insatiable desire for more. In its attempt to reclaim the name of Dracula for the Stoker family, The Un-Dead may well have put the nail in the coffin of other would-be heirs. And Dracula-geeks will likely find saliva dripping from the fangs at all the insider information buried in the text. As frightening tale destined to become a classic, however, The Un-Dead is too anemic to bring Bram's popular legacy back from the grave again.

~ emrys

Dark and Deep

2011-12-01T21:04:00.001-05:00

Any book with a series head "Studies in Dogmatics" ought to fill the reader with trepidation. Not so this reader, who dove into Holy Scripture by G. C. Berkouwer like a freshie into the Loch Ness. Much like the waters of that ancient lake, the text of Berkouwer's work (translated from Dutch by Jack B. Rogers, 1975) proves to be deep, dark, and cold.

But even the dream of tackling a textbook plumbing the mysterious--even murky--depths of such a subject as "holy scripture" must fill the reader with awe. After all, the relationship of holy scripture to faith, ethics, the Church, and the Holy Spirit presents such a tangled web of ovular logic and philosophical crenelations; I would accept the challenge to write a textbook on the Trinity instead. Yet Berkouwer took up the pen to follow each thread in the Gordian knot of holy scripture, the essential and overflowing witness upon which so much of the life of the Church depends. For such courage, at very least, Berkouwer's work ought to be praised.

Holy Scripture possesses a density of thought and logic which forces the reader's mind either to slide over large pieces of thought or to creep slowly through each piece of terrain. A fifteen-hundred page work might have brought his readers to the same heights of erudition and wisdom; instead Berkouwer (edited slightly by Rogers) makes us scale the sheer wall of nearly four hundred pages to reach the crown. Reading this work is work. With almost non-existent use of metaphor or illustrative narrative, Holy Scripture calls for a constant upward climb toward complete analysis of the subject at hand. When logical purity requires the use of numerous negatives rather than the blanket assertion of a positive, Berkouwer does not shy away, but demands that the reader's mind follow the circuitous route to the precise goal of understanding.

For all the challenge in its reading, however, Holy Scripture delivers the package promised by its table of contents: a comprehensive study of scripture and its relationship to certainty, canon, authority, interpretation, the "God-breathed character," reliability, clarity, sufficiency, and ("But wait! There's more!") preaching and criticism. Like an inchworm plodding its way along every nook and cranny of an oak leaf, Berkouwer leaves no boundary, no contour, no edge unexplored. Holy Scripture is a master work for those in the Protestant and Reformed traditions of Christianity.

Before taking the header "Studies in Dogmatics" to heart, this reader anticipated some new insight into the nature of scripture and its relationship to the Spirit or the Church. I craved some spice which would take the pottage of dogmatical analysis and produce something flavorful and new. About one-third of the way through the book I realized I would not find it here. This conclusion reflects no ill of the text, however, only of the errant assumptions of the reader. Taken for what it is--a grand survey of the intersection of the bible with all these different topics--Holy Scripture offers a breathtaking view of the landscape. Berkouwer serves as a guide who, from the top of Pike's Peak, can point your telescope to central Iowa and tell you what variety of corn is grown in that farmer's fields. The book reveals several lifetimes' worth of education and reflection on the most important texts the world has ever known. A more solid work on orthodox, Reformed dogmatics no one could desire.

After the climb has brought us to the summit, however, we are still unable to gaze through the rock on which we stand. At the center of scripture is a mystery rather than a logical syllogism. In Berkouwer's words, "the unique authority [of holy scripture] can only be acknowledged and experienced on the way; it is not acknowledged on the grounds of a preceding consideration, and the way then followed as a conclusion" (p348). More to the point--and more in keeping with the Reformed tradition of which I find myself a part--scripture is nothing without the Person to whom it points and who speaks through it: the person of Jesus Christ. The faithful struggles of those wrestling with scripture occur within the context of faith in the Spirit of Christ calling us from behind the text. Far from being either a scientific or a magic book in possession of which we might find ourselves, scripture is one vehicle by which we find ourselves in the possession of another--then swimming in a grandiose mystery as dark and deep as life itself. This is the life, the challenge, and the joy of all who follow the Lord Jesus Christ: to live in and through, and to struggle with, holy scripture. Kudos to Holy Scripture for braving the depths of this struggle.

Thanks to my colleague Mark who passed his copy to me.

~ emrys

Laugh or Cry?

2011-11-27T21:26:00.001-05:00

While we waited for our lunch to arrive at our table today, I looked over and saw this sight:

My daughter is not yet three. I fear that by the age of six she will be texting with one hand and, without looking up, reaching out and asking "Mommy, would you please hand me that latte?"

~ emrys

Girls Will Be . . .

2011-11-13T21:14:00.001-05:00

A recent posting on a blog I follow, during a rant against overprotective parents, schools, and communities, lifted up the ubiquitous aphorism "Boys will be boys." In my present context I hear this refrain used to excuse boys kicking balls in the house, hitting other kids when they're angry, and consistently choosing loud and dangerous activities over quieter, more intellectual pursuits. When I hear it used in narratives about adult males, it often excuses misogyny, driving fast and dangerously, and the willingness to eat food from someone else's plate at a restaurant.

I do not wish to take issue with "Boys will be boys" here.

But I have a daughter. My question is, What will girls be? To couch it in parallel terms: what would it mean to say, "Girls will be girls"? (My use of the phrase is speculative; I have never heard it said.)

May I say "Girls will be girls" in order to excuse time-sucking attention to wardrobe choices? Does it play as a reason to accept adopting a victim stance in situations of conflict? How about talking trash about other girls when they're not around? In the adult world, is it fair to say "Girls will be girls," and then accept a woman's use of her sexual charms to bait men? Or accept gossiping as an alternative to conflict resolution? Or explain away emotional outbursts?

If (we) boys get a bye on so many things because we're boys, I'd like to know in advance on what things my daughter gets a bye. I don't want to waste parenting energy on helping my daughter out of difficult behavior if I have the option of saying, "Oh, well. Girls will be girls!"

Curiously,
emrys

Technicality

2011-11-07T19:36:00.000-05:00

On Saturday we had friends over for lunch, adventures in the woods, and marshmallows roasted over the fire. For the first time this year I had the time and excuse to make a bonfire across the creek. I have oodles of leftover wood from various home projects (construction and demolition) whose finest end is to bring warmth and light to a chilly autumn evening. Long after our friends had left, I kept the fire going. Gwendolyn came to help.

Fire seems to draw all humanity into its ring of illumination, and my daughter is no exception. She quickly noted my use of a fire stick to move logs around. I set down the stick to get more fodder for the flames, and she went for it.

"I help," she said.

Having gone just out of reach and seeing her stepping boldly toward the roaring flames, I jumped back toward her. "No," I said. "I don't want you that close to the fire. When you're older, you'll be able to help stir the fire."

Gwendolyn stood still, watching the flames while I took the stir stick out of her grasp. I turned over a log, set the stick down, and went to retrieve more wood. When I came back to the fire, she had picked up the stir stick again and looked at me with the conviction that comes so naturally to a two-and-a-half-year old.

"I older," she said. Then she reached into the fire with the stick.

I laughed. "You're right, my lovely. And it looks like you've matured quite a bit in the last three minutes."

~ emrys

Resurrecting a Kilt

2011-10-26T14:28:00.002-04:00

Immanent Halloween Party

8 Yards of 17oz Worsted Wool

19 Pleats

5 Years Stuffed in a Cardboard Box

The Ironing Job from Hell

~ emrys

Extra Hands

2011-10-26T14:20:00.002-04:00

I try to involve my daughter in as many home projects as I can. I try to discipline myself to sacrifice efficiency and aesthetic (both of which I value) in order to offer her more experiences with tools, textures, and technical skills. I can't take her up on ladders, and many of the tasks that require power tools still have to wait until I'm on my own. But there are so many in which she can participate.

I take her out to work in the garden. She loves to dig in the dirt, pile it up and stamp it down, and say, "Wookit, Djadjie!" when she discovers a slug or unpicked acorn squash. Two days ago she helped me to carry branches from an overgrown bush to the brush pile; it's "work," but she loves it. I imagine her willingness comes in part from the new experience and in part because I'm doing it and she wants to imitate. She'll stand next to me and patiently hand me deck screws while I put together a frame. When the pile of weeds needs to go to the compost bin, she'll load up her arms and waddle across the yard with me. She'll take her socks and run them from the hamper to the sock drawer.

(Herein, by the way, is the best interpretation of the bugbear passage from Jesus' teaching in Matthew 5:48, usually translated "Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect." Exegetes have struggled since Jesus spoke them to understand his word "perfect." I believe it refers to a child's innate tendency to imitate parents. Life has an imitative quality about her--she knows her purpose is to have the same purpose as the one who bore her. The Christian knows what she is about, because she is imitating Yahweh, and Yahweh knows what Yahweh is about. What have you seen your parent do? Do likewise, especially if your parent is God.)

A few days ago I had to make pies. I brought Gwendolyn over to the counter, gave her a cutting board and a mini rolling pin, and helped her measure flour, salt, and shortening. We filled up the Kitchen-Aid bowl with a triple recipe and took it to the stand mixer. I told Gwendolyn that I would let her pull the switch to start the mixer. I put the paddle in, raised the bowl, and told Gwendolyn (who by now knows just where the switch is) to turn it on. Just as the words came out of my mouth, I realized my mistake.

A triple recipe is seven and a half cups of flour--nearly two-thirds of the bowl's volume. And the mixer switch has no child lock on it to limit how fast she turns on the mixing blade. Thus in the blink of an eye Gwendolyn had slammed the power up to speed 4. Before I could reach the switch myself, the paddle had thrown flour all across the counter:

Sacrificing aesthetic and efficiency--that's what we're about. And giving Daddy more things to do before Mommy gets home.

I turned off the mixer and looked at my daughter. In spite of the artificial pallor now dusted across her body, she had on her impish grin. "Lookit, Gwendolyn! We got flour all over the kitchen!" And we laughed.

~ emrys

Buccaneer

2011-10-26T13:57:00.000-04:00

Last year, during an aggressive game of Hand and Foot, I accused my mother-in-law of being a pirate. She informed me with her usual grace that she most certainly wasn't a pirate . . . but that she could be.

A few days ago I discovered, after leaving Gwendolyn unattended with table ware for too long, that the potential for buccaneering is genetic:

Look out, Blackbeard!

~ emrys

Nearing Completion

2011-10-26T13:52:00.000-04:00

Even though the autumn chill sets in with increasing speed, work has yet to be done on the front of the house. Each time I go out I don more layers of clothing to complete the next task. Here's the inside header in place:

And here are the spacers I inserted between the batten so that I could have a continuous surface on which to place a trim board:

During a visit from GrannyAndGrandad a few weeks ago, my father-in-law offered to help with the staining of the T-111 siding that went on with the first floor expansion. The gentleman at 88-BC (our local construction supply store) did a good job at finding a color to match our existing board and batten siding. Here I am beginning the edging around the electric service:

Grandad made the confession that he just can't keep his clothes clean when painting. So we got hold of a flood cleanup coverall which not only protected his clothes but made him look official and creepy at the same time (like the hazmat agents in alien conspiracy films):

Work began with Grandad wielding roller and I the brush:

In no time at all we had given the thirsty boards their fill of Cabot stain, sealing them up for years to come:

A few days later I got the trim boards placed under the rafters (the near end has yet to be stained):

On the outside, I wanted a piece of painted fascia in place before any gutter was put on. If I ever do something like this again, I'm going to put the fascia board on before the roof's drip edge goes on. It was difficult prying the drip edge out in order to slide the board underneath. (I suppose I could alternately set the drip edge 3/4" away from the ends of the joists.) Here's the raw fascia:

And then the whole kit-n-kaboodle, with perhaps as much paint and stain as I'm going to get on this autumn:

When we discussed colors for our home (which we bought almost entirely brown with a few marks of hunter green), I proposed that we give it three colors: golden yellow (siding), burnt orange (windows and trim), and dark red (doors and other minor trim). I like the idea of a brightly colored house, especially in winter, but keeping organic colors like those of the autumn here.

Sara didn't go for it. So we stuck with the dark brown siding, and every chance I get I add a little more hunter green. It's demure, but working well so far.

~ emrys

New Wineskins

2011-10-26T08:04:00.001-04:00

Sometimes the old ones just get worn out, and you have to get new ones. Here are a few of the replacements we've made in the past four months or so. See if you can guess which one is old, and which is new:

New lady bug wellies for old snow boots.

New black chacos for the ten-year-old beaters.

New Timberlands for the old EMS boots.

A new--aw, c'mon, I'm just kidding! We'd never trade in our GTot for anyone.

~emrys

The Mess

2011-10-25T08:33:00.000-04:00

I have a hypothesis about the editing of books published by major booksellers.

I think that in the early years of an author--the time in which the first few books are published--the editing of one's work is ruthless. Like a director seeking to break out at a film festival, the editor works over every piece to slim it down to perfection. "Does this scene really contribute to the story? No? Axe it!"

This editorial attitude changes as the author's books sell better and better. By the end of the career of a prolific author, the editors know that the name on the cover will sell the book, almost independently of the contents. So the editing grows slim, and the final work becomes less streamlined. Like a director who does a film just because she wants to work with So-And-So, the editor will not scrutinize too much the foibles and excesses of the accomplished author.

I just finished Eugene Peterson's The Pastor: A Memoir (2011). I noticed soon into the book a few of those tripping points that I have come to assume would be edited out. Small typos, tiny piles of split infinitives, paragraphs that seem to run on, and vignettes that seem not to connect to the larger narrative appeared as I read. I noted more and more frequently things that, if I were the editor, I would trim out or slim down.

For a finished product bound for the shelves of readers everywhere, the final work seemed still a little, well, messy.

Peterson reflects on many decades of pastoral ministry. He writes as someone who has seen a congregation through almost every phase of its life cycle. He considers his own movement from Pentecostal to Presbyterian to Presbycostal. He recalls the shift from preaching every Sunday to writing a contemporary translation of the bible. He remembers individuals, families, and communities in light of their successes and foibles.

As someone who shares Peterson's calling, I resonated both with his stories and with his observations about God's work in the world. I laughed at some of the things that only pastors can laugh at; I felt the starkness of the badlands through which every pastor must pass. Perhaps most of all, I shared his conclusion that pastoral ministry contains a lot of mess.

Just as God's grace is unbounded in Jesus Christ, the role of the pastor is unbounded. The places and directions in which the Spirit works in human life are unbounded. We humans are a grace in progress, far from finished and far from neatly done. Like a vinedresser pruning in the wind, those who tend the people of God wind up in a mess. Sometimes The Mess is painful, sometimes poignant; sometimes The Mess is grandiose, sometimes colorful. In any case, life-being-redeemed is usually messy. Life is full of errors, infinitely split relationships, voices that run on, and events that don't make sense in the larger scheme.

I have now let go of the editorial oversights. Perhaps I am allowing room for editorial wisdom greater than I have as a reader (and pastor of only five years). Perhaps Peterson and his editors knew what I am still discovering: the task of the pastor is not to cover up, neaten up, or pretty up The Mess, even for the sake of sales. The task is to point to where God's grace is redeeming The Mess and proclaim that love will emerge from it. Even as he writes his memoir, Peterson shows he is the pastor, revealing the grace in The Mess.

Thanks to my brother Wes for passing on The Pastor.

~ emrys

Before He Was Really Famous

2011-10-20T21:48:00.000-04:00

In 1987 Eugene Peterson published a book entitled Workingthe Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity. Two decades later I was entering ordained ministry, and Eugene Peterson had become a household name in mainline Christian, and especially Presbyterian, circles.

This book is a blast from the past, gifted to me from a retired colleague. On my last study week I dove into it.

Peterson describesthe pastor of the late twentieth century as a "shopkeeper"of the Church, no longer concerned with the things of God butconsumed by the routine tasks of keeping things running. He issues astrong call for pastors to reclaim their professional vocation asministers of the word and sacrament. To do this, he proposes threebasic areas in which pastors must find again their center.

First, he saysthat pastors must again become persons of prayer. He takes greatpains to redefine prayer as communication with God rather than asimple echo of the desires of society and congregants. He finds rootsfor a scriptural understanding of prayer in the Psalms, and assertsthat pastors must take their cue for a prayerful life from thevariety and richness found in those poems. (I see in this section prescient echoes of Peterson's work with the psalms which would lift them up as essential to Christian spirituality.)

Second, Petersonsays that pastors must listen to scripture. Once again, he goes togreat length to clarify how reading and studying scripture haveusurped the pastoral calling of listening. He accuses methods oflearning--test-taking, bubble-filling, written examinations--ofpoisoning our understanding of how scripture speaks and how we oughtto listen. Peterson touches briefly on a few ways in which somestudents of scripture have understood the bible as a documentspeaking to and connecting with all of human life. He also assertsthe primacy of the spoken and heard word (as opposed to the writtenand read word) in God's way of redemption.

Third, he assertsthat pastors must take seriously both their calling to be spiritualdirectors and their mandate to get spiritual directors forthemselves. He recalls a deep and wide history of the Church whichassumed that all pastors would serve in this capacity and wouldreceive direction from others. He bemoans the (apparently current as of 1987)belief that pastors are self-sufficient lone rangers tending acommunal flock.

I resonated withmuch of Peterson's book. In the worldview of academic publications,this book is old, published twenty-four years ago; yet hisadmonishments are timely to me. I read little which shocked me withits novelty; instead, I received helpful reminders of things thatfriends, colleagues, and teachers have been telling me for some time.(Maybe this shows that I am the inheritor of a generation of pastorsfor whom Peterson's insights were novel breakthroughs.)

I was surprised bythe urgency of his tone at the opening of the book. I was not inministry--or even high school--when this book was published; but Iknow from listening to the leadership of the Church for the past tenyears or so that the late 1980s may have been a time of reckoning forthe Presbyterian Church, in which Peterson labored for much of hisministry. The numerical (and financial) decline of the PresbyterianChurch (and especially the PC(USA)) began in the 1970s and continuestoday. The 1980s may well have been the time when congregations hadto shed the idea that decline was a temporary phenomenon and requiredno attention. Decline also frequently gives birth to twin devils:hyperactivity and peacekeeping, against both of which Peterson railsin the early chapters. The disciplines he encourages all require alevel of peace (abstinence from anxiety) which may have been in shortsupply in the mainline congregations of the 1980s.

If my guesses are accurate, I'm not sure howthis context affects the applicabilityof the book to the present day. I am convinced that one of theprimary roles of a pastor is to be an anxiety-abstinent presence inplaces of fear and foreboding--of which there are far too many in theChurch today. There are few better ways to cultivate the Spirit ofPeace than prayer, listening to scripture, and spiritual direction.Thus, although circumstances may have changed, the call may be thesame.

I would expectnothing less from a calling derived from scripture, for no matter therich variety of behavior to which we are called, it's all rooted inthe same God and Christ. If I had to co-author the 2011 revision ofPeterson's book, I would add a fourth discipline: to proclaim hope.Prayer is, in a sense, already conformed to this habit; listening toscripture will engender the need to do so; spiritual direction ofindividuals may or may not include it. But I believe proclaiminghope--the hope of The Resurrection for us and the Church--is anessential part of pastoral integrity.

~ emrys

Remembering the Future

2011-10-16T15:35:00.002-04:00

Mutually assured destruction. We rarely use the term anymore, being as it is the year 2011. In the year 1959, however, when Walter M. Miller, Jr. published A Canticle for Leibowitz, the world had just begun to reckon with the possibilities of atomic power.

By way of three acts, Miller paints a triptych with panels from the twenty-eighth, thirty-second and thirty-eighth centuries--spanning nearly two millennia after the twentieth-century nuclear holocaust ("the Flame Deluge"). Miller's storytelling, like the desert monastery in which each panel is set, burns away the excessive adornment of so much apocalyptic fiction. What he leaves is the gem of the human heart placed in a setting of bare and ruthless detail.

The initial plot seems almost absurd: a monastery devoted to the preservation of fragmentary pre-holocaust documents, written in a language now almost dead ("pre-Deluge English"). Yet the dedication of the monks so perfectly mirrors our common humanity that we will bite into Miller's world. And once we've taken the hook, we're yanked into a strange new world that leaves us gasping in wonder.

Miller sketches the monastery, its strange monkish characters, the "Empire of Denver," and a new world order with stark lines, leaving vast white spaces for our imaginations to fill. He spares us any attempt to explain every technological detail, which discipline only lends power to his story. The details he does fill betray the author's context. The Church of New Rome uses Latin, as did the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church. Computers with amazing capabilities still take up the space of a wall cabinet. And bindlestiffs are required for tramping across country. But these anachronisms from the 1950s do less to detract from the story than remind us that Miller was writing--as the cover reminds us--a "prophetic" book to a real world.

The best novels (of which Canticle counts in my estimation) weave together many thematic threads from human experience. One brilliant pattern in the story that surfaces in Canticle is that of memory. The monks of St Leibowitz struggle to keep the relics and memorabilia of a twentieth-century electrical engineer, even though they don't understand what his texts mean. When scientific discovery catches up again to what was lost in the Deluge (which was nearly everything technical), the monastery becomes an accelerator for humanity to gain again the power of the atom. But with the first holocaust eighteen hundred years in the past, will those who regain the same cataclysmic power choose something besides mutual annihilation?

Canticle has a dark conclusion, yet the blackness is not total. At the end of a strange story, full of monks but with only cross-wise references to the divine, we see a sprig of hope rise from the rubble. The sprig bears no blossom, however, perhaps because what Miller saw in the post-Hiroshima landscape also had not yet come into leaf.

Mutually assured destruction does not drone from news commentators in our day. Our fears are different from those of Miller's time, at least on the level of nations. Yet inasmuch as Canticle serves as an allegory for the human soul, its message is perennial: how do we rescue ourselves from cycles of evil--personal, familial, social--when we constantly receive new tools for evil to infect? Can we be rescued? Or does the destruction wreaked by human evil serve as an inevitable conclusion from which we can only hope some shred of new life will emerge?

In Canticle Miller draws us into these questions with compelling storytelling. Even sixty-two years later, his work is well worth the read.

(Thanks, Frank, for loaning me your precious copy. I shall try to preserve more than a shred of it until we next meet.)

~ emrys

Innovation

2011-10-10T08:49:00.002-04:00

Birthday parties are so much fun, especially when there are creative folks around to make it special.

Here's Grandma encouraging the kids to play a game that involves dropping clothespins into jars on the ground--perfect for the two- to three-year-old age group. To do so, they need to stand on chairs and lean over the back of the chairs. Note that this is not the use for which chairs are invented. In fact parents all over the world tell their children on a regular basis not to stand on chairs and never to lean over the backs. We might also observe that the designers of the clothespin and the glass jar didn't have kids' party games in mind.

In the foreground is Mom, holding up a laptop computer so that Dad--who's overseas right now--can be part of the action. Laptops were made to be mobile, but not to serve as hand-held recording devices. But they do double-duty if necessary.

I love this example of how we are always putting things to unintended uses. In the name of creativity we'll stretch tools and devices beyond the range of their original purposes. And thereby we sometimes invent or conceive things we didn't know we needed.

This may not be unique to humans, however. Notice the dachshund using a food supplier as a source of shade.

~ emrys

Not Really Famous

2011-10-05T11:37:00.002-04:00

"You're famous!" they all said, the day after a photograph with me in it appeared in the Binghamton paper.

Sure enough, someone supplied me with a copy of the page. There am I, with the driver of the truck filled with supplies for our flood relief and recovery station at Nineveh Presbyterian Church. (Lord, bless the Red Cross for their great generosity to us in this time!)

But what does the caption say? "Red Cross warehouse workers in Binghamton load cases of Moldex for flood victims in Nineveh."

Actually, I was a pastor, unloading cases of Moldex in Nineveh. Strange how the truth gets twisted in the recording.

Well, I suppose I could be doing worse things than unwittingly serving as PR for the Red Cross--like unwittingly serving as an advertisement for Moldex. (I've never used it; I have no idea if it works any better than chlorine bleach.)

In case you're curious, the article below the photo had no direct connection to Nineveh or the Red Cross. I guess the joining of image and word here was totally free association.

If I'm famous now, it's for the wrong reasons; and only to people who already know my name and face. Isn't there a phrase for that--"big fish in a little pond" or something?

~emrys

Illumination

2011-10-02T00:11:00.001-04:00

In my experience, for those who retain even a passing memory of high school history lessons, the Middle Ages are a vacuum of knowledge. For most of us, historical consciousness drops off with the Gothic sack of Rome in AD 476 and picks up again with Leonardo da Vinci's invention of the helicopter. The millennium in between is, at best, an echo of the Monty Pythonic declaration that "there's some lovely filth over here," and, at worst, simply dark. Hence this era has acquired the moniker "Dark Ages."

Except among us geeks. And so it came to pass that, after a lively discussion with a favorite fellow geek of mine, I found myself gifted with a copy of Chris Wickam's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000.

The Inheritance of Rome is a textbook, one of the Penguin History of Europe series, and thus it lacks the plot in a novel and the agenda of a book like Are We Rome? That is to say, the one-and-three-quarter-inch tome (in paperback) is not for the hobbyist historian, nor are Wickam's long sentences, packed as they are with the equivocation and hesitation common to serious students of history. Still, in spite of the fact that the pages don't turn like a John Grisham novel, I quite enjoyed the read.

I appreciated Wickam's intent (and execution of that intent) to shed the traditional tendencies either to romanticize the early Middle Ages or to dismiss it out of hand. He set out to review the archaeological and manuscript evidence, then to let those voices speak for themselves without the interpretive lens of twenty-first century hindsight. Inasmuch as the task may be accomplished, I think Wickam may have done it.

In his final chapter he makes several observations ("drawing conclusions" would be too strong a term for Wickam's work) that are supported by the previous 551 pages. I found them valuable, so I recount them here. (Reader beware: the remainder of this post may be dull to those without a taste for historical analysis.)

1. In a passing statement meant to introduce his main observations, Wickam commented that the Middle Ages lacked "liberalism, secularism, toleration, a sense of irony, an interest in the viewpoints of others." I could meditate for a year on that sweeping description alone.

2. One main "break" or "shift" in history occurred with the break-up (emphatically not the fall) of the Roman Empire. The world did not end in any sense with this break-up; but it was marked especially by the loss of the land tax as a means of gaining revenue to support a unified military--at least in the western Mediterranean.

3. Another main break in history came with the Arab conquest from Persia to Spain in the seventh century. Though most of our history books focus on the "fall" of the Roman Empire, the Arab empires from 600-900 actually did a good job of maintaining the economic structures of Rome, more so than Byzantium and much more so than western Europe. In the years 400-1000, the Arab caliphate maintained the greatest concentrated power and unification of any other political entity. Why do we leave that out of our texts?

4. Until Charlemagne, it did not occur to rulers that a central purpose of governments (kings) was to bring people to religious salvation. But the Carolingians blossomed what Wickam calls "moralized political practice." Among other attributes, for the first time kings believed they ought to be "policed" for their morality by the heads of the Church.

5. At the end of the Carolingian era in western Europe, "structures of public power" broke down, which helped bring about what we now often call "feudalism," or the sharp division between peasant and aristocratic classes.

6. Byzantium (the Roman Empire's inheritance centered in Constantinople) flourished in the mid-900s in large part because the Arab empire broke up. If the latter had remained solid, would Byzantium have survived?

7. While the Roman Empire broke up and shook down, the "barbarian" territories from Roman history--especially northern and eastern Europe--underwent a "stabilization of political and social hierarchies." This stabilization established the seeds for many of the main players in Europe today (Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Denmark, England).

Wickam describes not only historical moments, but underlying structures of significance from that period:

1. In the West, wealth and power came to be based on land, rather than on prestige and money as in the Roman Empire. As local aristocracies became more powerful, this meant that those who worked the land (peasants) came to be under the control of the landowners.

2. Power also derived more and more from permanent political structures. (This point was more obscure to me--I'm less sure of how this differed from any other time in history.)

3. The "culture of the public" was a strong holdover from Rome, in which the most powerful people were civilians of influence (rather than military). These holdovers of public life took the form of tax-raising leadership in the Arab states, and the form of assemblies of free men in the West. In both cases, individuals could contribute to the policies and politics of at least their localities. As the middle ages progressed, the people's power in the public sphere waned in the face of waxing aristocratic power (who owned the land and the military) until what Wickam terms "the caging of the peasantry" came to pass.

I wrote most of the above to get it lodged in my mind (or at least on record) because information from a textbook does not stick the way a novel or op-ed piece does. As I read along, questions or insights would dawn on me then pass away. I hope that if any of them was important, it will return at the right time.

It has occurred to me while reading Wickam that I would like to know how the "rule of law" arose in Western Europe. It seems to me that in our society and religious culture this philosophical principle underpins so much of how we think and what we do. Yet as Wickam describes the cultures of the early Middle Ages, I see little evidence of this principle. So a 600-page book has left me with just one memorable question at present: when did the "rule of law" develop in society, and how was it absorbed into political and religious practice?

That should send me into another book right quick . . . as if I need any more books on my list!

Many thanks to Megan for an illuminating read.

~ emrys

Strange Fragrance

2011-09-30T13:27:00.003-04:00

In order to complete the new shed roof over the east side of the house, I had to buy a stack of 4x8 OSB (oriented strand board, for those of you who have my curiosity) to produce the roof surface. As I unloaded the truck with my materials on it, I smelled a familiar scent. I thought perhaps it was a passing thing, one of those strange moments the brain conjures of its own accord. So I gave it not a second thought. I walked back from the garage to the truck tailgate to retrieve the next piece of OSB and smelled it again.

Peanut butter.

I leaned in closer to the stack of new chipboard sheets. Yes: the scent became stronger. OSB smells like peanut butter.

Now, when the shingles have been placed and all that remains of the OSB is a few remnants stacked under the carport, I still catch a whiff of peanut butter walking around the garage. Every time I smell it I am taken aback, perhaps because fragrances carry more emotive impact for me than visual or auditory stimuli. Or perhaps it's the out-of-place-ness that snags me, like a picture of your mother hanging in a raspberry bush.

I bought some caulk with which to seal the chinks along my new construction, and chose brown to match the general tone of our house. When I drew the first six inches of bead, it happened for the second time this project: I detected a fragrance out of place. I leaned in to the fresh caulk, and there it was, unmistakable.

Chocolate.

Brown caulk that smells like chocolate. Clever marketing strategy? Perk purchased by Nestle to open up their market to construction workers? Mask for even more pungent volatile chemicals? I'm not sure I'll ever know. I do know it wasn't a fluke, because the second tube smelled the same way.

Our Mazda, at 187,000 miles and totaled by the insurance company, is in the sunset of its life. We are maintaining it as long as the engine is good and peripheral costs don't get too high. But it has some quirks which soon will make it qualify for jalopy status. One of those oddities is the fact that the windshield leaks over the steering wheel every time it rains.

Our mechanic said that a proper fix meant taking the windscreen off, patching the body, and resealing the windshield. "Couldn't you just caulk it?" I asked. "No," they said, "That will only result in greater erosion of the roof." I respect these guys: they want to get the job done right.

But our Mazda is not worth all that labor. And I have caulk. So I drew a bead (dark brown, unassuming against the gold-and-black exterior palette of the car) along the windshield. I've driven it in three days of rain since then, and not a drop in the cabin. Plus, I get a whiff of chocolate every time I get in and out of the car.

I asked the guys at the local construction supply store if they knew the brown caulk smelled like a Hershey bar. They just stared at me. "Oh, well," I said. Then, maybe trying to distract from my unique olfactory experience, I told them that I was testing the caulk to see if it had auto body applications.

One looked at the other and asked, "Didn't you do that to your car?"

"Yep," he said.

"Did it work?" I asked.

"Yep."

Ah, the sweet smell of success.

~ emrys

Processing a Flood

2011-09-29T18:30:00.000-04:00

** I (Sara) drafted the following blog on September 15th as I worked on coordinating a rural relief site for our community members affected by the flooding caused by Tropical Storm Lee in the Southern Tier of New York State on September 7th and 8th.**

I have heard and seen so much in the last three days as I helped to coordinated hot meals,non-perishable foods and cleaning supplies for many of our neighbors who havebeen flooded I hear stories that remind me that this is not a crisis event thatwill meet a neat and happy resolution at the end of the week.

Ihear stories from volunteers who are taking hot meals out into the communitywho stumbled up a family sitting in their kitchen in tears, not knowing what todo next, and afraid to leave their home for fear of looters.

Ihear stories of houses that have been yellow tagged and have to have aparticular inspection before the power can be turned back on, but theinspections are not expected to be done in our area for two weeks.

Ihear stories of families who had already received their fuel oil or wood pellets forthe winter, some still owe on payment plans, but have lost all their heating fuelin the flood.

Ihear stories of families who had their freezer stocked with their gardenproduce, their butchered livestock, their winter's groceries, who have lost it all.

Amidst all these stories, I see amazing things happening around me.

I've opened my mailbox to find boxes of supplies, thanks to blogger friends spreading the word of our area's needs.

I’veseen our volunteer fire fighters, and some trucks and crews from other communities spend dayspumping out the basements of homes and our church.

I’vewatched as local folks brought in boxes and boxes of produce from their gardenthat would have been sold at farmer’s markets, but they’re not going to havemarkets to go to for the coming weeks.

I’vewatched as food has piled through our doors so that we can meet the immediateneeds of hot meals for those who have spent their days throwing ruined itemsfrom their homes out into their yards.

I’vewatched teenagers spend hours loading up those piles into trucks to haul intothe town dumping site.

I’vewatched car-loads of clothing arrive to be shared among those who need somethingclean and dry to wear.

I’ve had folks walk up and hand me cash donations from anonymous donors for use wherever it is needed.

I’vewatched a community rally around our own who are devastated, again.

Thisis not a one week relief effort. As weare heading into fall and winter, our church had already begun collecting itemsof gently used children’s clothing, gently used toys and non perishable fooditems for distribution near Christmas as part of our church's Christ’s Bounty program. Last year, we had 125 families in our arearequest food baskets and we were able to meet that need. This year, we expect the need to be greater.

Inthe fall and winter, our schools request donations of boots and jackets to helpchildren who arrive at school without adequate seasonal clothing. Again, this year,we expect these needs to be even greater.

Whiletoday folks in our area need cleaning supplies, a hot meal, and a listening ear, as wintercomes and the temperatures drop, the needs will become even greater. We hope to be able to minister to them today in away that will help to alleviate their worries of tomorrow.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?” Matthew 6:25

After the flood waters receded we were able to provide two weeks of hot dinners - over 1,000 meals served, countless quantities of cleaning supplies, toiletries, clothing and other household items have been shared among our neighbors.

The work continues, as less frenzied, less urgent pace. The needs of today include more cleaning supplies, sanitation of wells that have been contaminated by flood waters and the subsequent testing to see if the water is potable.

Down on the Farm

2011-09-27T22:26:00.001-04:00

Gwendolyn and I went to the graduation party of a friend of ours from the Church. She finished her associate's degree in agriculture and business; she's going to continue the family tradition of tilling and reaping from the soil. So the graduation party took place in the barn, around which were lots of cool pieces of machinery just perfect for crawling around and over. Here is Gwendolyn with James, Emma, and Lina on the corn head of the combine:

That's probably the most expensive piece of equipment she's yet sat on. A few more years and she'll be asking if she can drive it!

~ emrys

Sadness

2011-09-18T19:57:00.000-04:00

I am sad.

I wish that I could euphemize the feeling by saying I'm "just a little blue," like when we sugar-coat anger by calling it "frustration." But I cannot.

I finally said it out loud today. Even while praising the Lord for all the blessings I have seen this past week, I feel sad.

I have seen so much suffering and so much loss in the last ten days. I have watched and listened to too much pain. It has resonated in my heart and dyed the fibers of my soul. I am sad.

Exhaustion makes it impossible to hide; its intensity makes it impossible to ignore anymore. So I shall dwell in it until it is time for something else.

~ emrys

An Unruly River

2011-09-09T14:20:00.000-04:00

In June of 2006, the Susquehanna River rampaged past its banks. It was called a "100 year flood" as the last one that was that bad was in 1914.

It is 2011 and Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee have both come to visit this week, bringing with them lots of rain. The Susquehanna has again defied its banks. Our house is high and dry. The village where the church is, is not.

More on our local flooding can be found at www.wbng.com. Prayers are greatly appreciated. If you're interested in helping in any way, please email me at thrivingmama (at) gmail.com

Studying the Past

2011-09-07T22:34:00.001-04:00

Several history teachers have reiterated the maxim (formulated in several different ways), "Those who fail to study the past are doomed to repeat it." The implication (or explication) made is that we should study history so we don't repeat it.

One of my friends and colleagues, a student of history by education and hobby, says, "Those who fail to study the past are doomed to repeat it; those who study the past are doomed to repeat it." He is not convinced that study of history exempts one from getting caught in the cycles of human failure, social evil, and structural collapse.

I am not sure which maxim to take to heart; but I do know that I enjoy studying history.

I took John Thompson's course on Early Church History in the autumn of 2004, for which I had to purchase Cyril C. Richardson's book Early Christian Fathers. Though not an exhaustive compendium of Christian writings for the period, the book includes some of the writings from between AD 100 and 200 which, aside from scripture, have had the most influence on the culture of the Church. I picked it up again to read during this summer's study leave.

I find that scripture's status within the Church causes me to read it differently than other texts. Usually this bears good fruit: I read the scriptures more closely, more frequently, and with the expectation that they will speak to my life. Sometimes, however, because they are the "word of God," as we say, they become dehumanized and disjointed from life with which I can relate. When I read texts chronologically close to the scriptures, however, I give myself permission to chew on the human a little more intensely. I accept that these could have been written by someone I know--or even by me!--if I had but been born in the proper century. And thus I relate more closely, and find some fascinating gems.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same" (le plus ca change, le plus c'est le meme chose). In some ways, reading the early Christian writers reminds me of our own day. They insist that Christians must accept the paradox of the Incarnation: to slide Jesus into the categories of entirely divine or entirely human is to do violence to the good news. We still have a hard time holding on to this paradox. They struggle with whether Christians are living an ethic befitting the gospel. They try to explain the Christian faith in ways that intersect with contemporary philosophy and culture. We're still doing all these things.

On the other hand, how strange it is to read Irenaeus, writing to the congregations who visit and pray for him, exhorting them not to try to deliver him from martyrdom (by force or prayer)! He considers himself to be less than perfect as a disciple of Jesus until he's been killed for his faith. How foreign this is to the Christianity in my culture! The growing emphasis on Church tradition as a guide for the faith seen in so many of these authors points to the culture of what is now known as the Roman Catholic faith. The Reformers of the sixteenth century railed against the authority of Church tradition--their invective helped to define the Protestant faith. Yet in the context of the early Church there was good reason to lift up tradition as a light for believers.

Through all the writings, there is agreement, as there is today in all Christian Churches, that Jesus Christ is Lord and head of the Church. In this all the early authors agree, as do all the New Testament authors. As my life and ministry become deeper and murkier with knowledge, experience, and the conundrums of the human condition, I am comforted that the Bedrock of faith is consistent throughout the aeons: we follow Jesus Christ, God With Us. In that we are united and in that confession lies our salvation.

The important thing has not changed in eighteen hundred years.

~ emrys

So Much Information

2011-09-07T08:11:00.002-04:00

I've heard it said that getting a PhD amounts to learning more and more about less and less until one knows everything about nothing. I've had several--may I say dozens?--of professors whose positions required them to get PhDs. I've gone back to see a few of the PhD theses they wrote, to discover that the thesis has been printed maybe three times and covers a topic so specific or obscure that no general publisher would touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Maybe this is the destiny of PhD theses. I suspect they serve a different function than the thrill of reading.

Recently I thumbed my way through a thesis entitled The Role of Zechariah 1-8 in the Development of Apocalyptic, by Steven R. Swanson (1982). I had a hold of the only copy of the two-inch thick tome in existence outside the University of Edinburgh. There was something earthy about reading the text, typed on one-sided archival paper by an IBM Selectric, complete with handwritten corrections. It brought me back to a time when writing was dirtier, and riskier, because the writer faced the page directly rather than enjoying the clean service of a purifying computer screen with its infinite second chances.

The thesis was exhaustive. I became drenched in a deluge of scholarly names and competing theories. My mind followed down rabbit trails as long as a two-line dependent clause into dead-end counterexamples. Conclusions stood, instead of on the bedrock of convicted certainty, on the loamy soil of differing authorities.

This is the purpose of PhD theses: to display how much information one has acquired, and how it all fits in. Nothing can be left out, if it's been published in peer-review. A book for the casual student might be titled, Grasping for the Thread, or A Foot in Both Worlds, or some other metaphor to evoke the excitement of a prophet (or prophetic school?) navigating the re-establishment of post-exilic cultic faith. (Oh my gosh, there I am doing it!) But this one isn't: the title is too honest, too gritty for common consumption.

But The Role of Zechariah 1-8 in the Development of Apocalyptic does not intend to suck the reader into the great drama of prophetic history. It seeks to display to a host of academically savvy examiners that the author has done his homework. This end--since Mr. Swanson is now a Doctor--it achieves. To the less academically savvy reader like myself, sometimes the forest gets lost for the trees.

Now I've read more about Zechariah chapters one through eight than I'll ever have time or will to use. But I know that the work's been done, the concepts have been thought out, and I have a Doctor to call if I ever get stuck on the interpretation of one of these chapters.

~ emrys

Maka Funzowd!

2011-09-06T07:57:00.001-04:00

A few days ago Gwendolyn and I were on our way out to pick veggies from the garden. Geared up in pink hoodie and bright red ladybug boots, she opened the back door and led me onto the porch. Then she went through the screen door with the gait of a woman who knows what she's about. She had crossed the stone patio when I came through the screen door and eased it shut behind me.

At the far edge of the patio Gwendolyn turned and said, "No, Djadjee! Maka funzowd!"

I try not to pass over toddler-speak that I don't understand. I usually ask Gwendolyn to repeat something I don't get until we can make a connection. Sometimes she becomes visibly irritated at how long it takes me to comprehend.

"Djadjee" is "Daddy." I had no idea what "Maka funzowd" meant. "What was that?" I said.

"Maka funzowd!"

Still uncomprehending, I would have asked again, but she didn't give me time. With determined steps she walked back past me, mounted the top step to the screen door, and swung it wide open. She watched as it opened to its farthest reach, then swung back with a bang against the frame.

Then she looked at me with a broad smile. "Maka funzowd!" And with that, she tramped past me toward the garden.

Translation: "Let the door go, Daddy! It makes a fun sound!"

I laughed out loud and followed my daughter to the tomatoes.

~ emrys

Hurricane Motivation

2011-09-05T22:29:00.000-04:00

The outward movement of our east wall (see previous post) produced an unusual trim on our house: the first floor wall comes out about six inches farther than the second floor wall. Thus we have a ledge at the top of the first floor wall. We found out the first time we got a heavy rain--and to a greater extent when Tropical Storm Irene made her way through our woods--that in spite of our contractor's best efforts, water gets in through the ledge. We had water dripping from the inside of our door frame and window. It made our hearts sink: our next dream was to get new flooring in the kitchen. But there's no point in new flooring if it's just going to get wet.

When we started dreaming about moving the wall, we also dreamed about a shed roof that would keep weather off the front door and window, and give visitors a place to stand when arriving on rainy days. With the discovery of water entering the wall, we took the money that would go to the flooring and pushed up the schedule on roof construction to . . . right now.

Last Monday I dug the hole for the corner post, and borrowed a truck (thanks, Bobby!) to pick up the building supplies. Here's the roof, all stacked up in our garage:

On Tuesday, Conner and I sank the first post and got the other two cut:

On Wednesday I got the header up on the posts and kerfed the siding for the plate. The bear of the job was getting the flashing under the tar paper, so that in the future any water that got in through our old board and batten on the second floor wouldn't slip through to the first floor. It was a blessing and a curse to discover that the guy who built our house didn't put up any plywood on the outside of the exterior studs. The blessing was that it made it easier (though not easy) to get the flashing in; the curse is that we've got one fewer layer of protection and insulation than most houses have.

On Thursday, Brandon came over and helped me to get the plate up:

On Friday, Conner and Brandon helped me to secure the plate with lag screws:

I'm into public service--like putting teenagers to work so they don't have as much energy to get into trouble elsewhere.

When they weren't arguing about the existence of faeries or whether The Hulk could survive a nuclear winter, these two did a respectable amount of labor--for freshmen.

While we were at it, we got the rafter stencil cut and the first two rafters in place:

That evening I had a little extra time, so I got the first half of the rafters done; the haze in this photo is from the humidity and coming rain building up in the air:

On Saturday, I finished the rafters:

On Sunday afternoon I got the first half of the sheathing on:

As of this evening (Monday), I finished the sheathing but for a few nails. The light drizzle in which I had been working turned to real rain, so I had to knock off for the day. At least now there's a physical watershed away from that exterior ledge, so I don't feel under so much pressure to work fast.

I think I'll need a holiday from major house construction after this project's done.

~ emrys

Eastward Expansion

2011-09-05T22:00:00.003-04:00

Three years ago we noted that the concrete slab on which our house sits extends out to form the floor of our front porch. The second floor overhangs it, giving the front door and windows some shelter from the elements, but we decided to try to keep the house warmer in the winter by inserting panels between the porch columns. The result was a set of makeshift walls that could be set up in the winter:

and then taken down in the summer:

About a year ago, we began to dream of having enough room for a proper dining table in our kitchen. The current configuration of walls would not allow that. We figured, however, if we pushed the front wall on the first floor out over the porch so that the whole slab was inside, we'd hit two birds with one stone. First, we'd get more kitchen space (the kitchen is the front room on the first floor of the house). Second, we'd have the whole slab covered by heated space, so lose less heat through the floor in the winter. When we got an estimate for the construction to do so, the number came in significantly lower than we'd thought. So in July, Colwell Brothers construction (Windsor, NY) came in and gave us 120 new square feet inside and this look outside:

They pushed out our retaining wall, making room for garbage and recycling bins as well as keeping groundwater away from the house walls:

Inside, we got more kitchen floor space and a bigger window in the front (ahem, this is before the window was inserted). We found out, however, that the porch actually was a separate slab. Oh, well.

Opposite the kitchen, where the south end of the porch used to be, we got a mud room and a "pantry," or, more to the truth, a new storage space for all of Sara's candle stuff:

Now instead of running into the front door as soon as you hit the bottom of the stairs, you have room to breathe, put on your coat, sit down for a snack, or meditate on the complexities of life--not necessarily in that order:

When LeWayne Colwell was arranging the estimate with me, he asked if I'd be doing the joint work myself. I thought for only a half second before remembering that I despise spackling and sanding. I told him that I'd gladly pay them to have it done. (The work is actually so specialized now that general contractors rarely do it themselves; it's cheaper and faster for them to hire out to someone who does it forty-plus hours per week.)

Thanks, Colwell Brothers, for a great new space! You do good work. The proof is that my daughter had fun helping to paint the walls of the mud room:

To match the old part of the kitchen, we got more of the cream and red paint. I'll be taking the old window and door trim and making a chair rail soon. (And really, there is a window there now--made by Madison Vinyl in Bainbridge, who made every other window in our house.)

A few days after the construction was complete, we got a good dose of rain. The dirt patch outside the retaining wall slid pretty well down in front of our door, so I gathered up all the stones I had removed before they did the construction and built a little retaining wall of my own, punctuated with hens-and-chicks harvested from the south side of the house:

Note in the above photo that the electric meter is not hooked up. We found out that until the utility guys hook up the meter again (you can't do it yourself), you get free electricity! Run that dehumidifier with the windows open--Boo-yah!

~ emrys

Blackout Gwendolyisms

2011-08-30T09:45:00.000-04:00

We are on day three of no power thanks to the aftermath of Irene (thanks friends for letting me hijack power, internet outlets and your washer!) Here's a bit of last night's dinner conversation.

G: Mommy, lights broke!
Me: Yes Gwen, the lights are broke. (We'd gone through this one at least 4 dozen times since the power went out on Sunday.)
G: Mommy, potty broke!
Me: Yes, Gwen, the potty's broke because the power is still out so the water doesn't work. (She made this connection on Monday when much to her dismay, she couldn't flush the toilet.)
G: Mommy, water's broke!
Me: Yes, the water's broke until the power comes back on.
G: Mommy, HOUSE IS BROKE!
Me: Yup Gwen, the house is broke.

Then in all seriousness, she turns to Emrys:

"Daddy, fix it!"

Just Stand Still!

2011-08-24T14:47:00.000-04:00

In the name of all that is sacred: stop "moving forward"!

Stop beginning letters, blogs, and press releases with "Moving forward." Stop diluting the perfectly good verb "will" with this trite participial phrase. Stop overstating our knowledge that we want most things in life not to go backward.

Just stop it.

~ emrys

From the Ground

2011-08-23T22:46:00.000-04:00

I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania as it became a suburb of Philadelphia, then New York City. I high-tailed it to the urban grit of Montreal for university--and loved it. I took my first real job in a resort town in the Rockies--and miss it dearly. I went to seminary chewing the subtropical air of Los Angeles County.

How do I survive in the rural reaches of upstate New York, where the nearest cafe is twenty miles away?

I realized how just yesterday, as I rode my bike the ten miles home from soccer practice amidst fields of seven-foot corn stalks and August lushness:

in the country we see more clearly that life always springs up from the ground.

~ emrys

Very Serious Work

2011-08-23T19:32:00.000-04:00

Bubbles are very serious work. First you have to fish the wand out of the bottle.

Then, you have to be able to blow through the wand just right...

Once you practice a little it will work:

And with practice and if you turn your head just right, you can blow big bubbles.

Finally you get to watch them float away!

Book Review: John Knox

2011-08-22T07:00:00.000-04:00

In preparation for my Reformation Sunday sermon this year, I read a biography of John Knox (Rosalind K. Marshall, 2000). Before reading Marshall's book, my knowledge of John Knox was limited; I could only recite that he was one of the great reformers of the sixteenth century, a father of Scottish Presbyterianism.

I discovered about three-quarters of the way through the book that it is not quite accurate to attribute to Knox the flowering of Presbyterianism in Scotland. That accolade, according to Marshall, goes to Andrew Melville, who imported "fully-fledged Calvinism" to Scotland after Knox died, in the 1570s. However, Knox and his preaching were indeed powerful in combating Roman Catholicism in Scotland and giving Calvinist (or, maybe better, Swiss?) understanding of the Lord's Supper a foothold there--as opposed to the Lutheran understanding of the Lord's Supper.

Marshall convinced me that John Knox was a complex character who cannot be fairly reduced to this or that contribution to the history books. (This revelation, repeated over and over again in my life, is what keeps me studying history.) His motivations, obscure and muddled at best to those of us looking back, do not submit to simple categories or judgments. Like all of us, John Knox had the full complement of human complexity and changeability. If there was one thread that ran through his adult life, it was his dedication to simple obedience to the will of God revealed in the scriptures.

Even this thread, however, is dyed with different colors than we recognize today. I recently listened to a preacher declare (quoting someone else) that "Where goes the family, there goes the Church; where goes the Church, there goes the nation; where goes the nation, there goes the world." John Knox's world saw the structure of human society differently. Knox and his contemporaries, if I might dare to put words in their mouths, would have expressed it thus: "Where goes the King, there goes the kingdom; where goes the kingdom, there goes the Church; where goes the Church, there go the masses." Knox's age differed radically from ours in how the world worked, therefore how God worked, and therefore how the gospel should be preached.

Of his thirty-year career as preacher (at the end of which he died), Knox spent ten of those preaching directly against the female monarchs of Scotland and England ("Bloody" Mary I, and Mary Queen of Scots). He wrestled, in conversation and correspondence with the likes of John Calvin and Theodore Beza, with the question of what Christians ought to do if their monarchs disobey God. Knox formulated an interpretation of scripture by which Christians were allowed to rebel against kings and queens, an idea which was beginning to take hold in the philosophical corners of society but was still repugnant to most Church thinkers. The constant fear of those who heard Knox--both friends and enemies--was that giving authority to The People would mean descent into chaos.

Knox also lived and preached in a time when everyone was Christian. Or, perhaps more accurately, it would not occur to anyone (except Jews) in sixteenth-century Europe to declare faith in anything or anyone else than the Christian God. To be alive was to be Christian. Battles were fought and heretics were burned over differences in Christian faith; but atheism, Buddhism, genuine agnosticism, or others were never on the table.

On the other hand, as a parish pastor, some of Knox's work and tribulations sound stunningly familiar. While in Frankfurt, he endured great pains for a congregation in conflict over what form of worship service to use (Genevan book of prayer versus the English Book of Common Prayer). The fractures and debates have deep echoes with present-day debates over traditional versus contemporary forms of worship and music. After four hundred years, we have not come very far.

I will try to capture something of the spirit of Knox for my October sermon. To do this I think I will imagine what contemporary characteristic of the Church would inflame Knox the most. He behaved like a prophet, outraged at disobedience to scripture and "never fearing nor flattering any flesh." If transported in a time machine to 2011, to what reformation would John Knox call the Church? And then, what would he say? Time to find some of his sermons to read.

~ emrys

Reading Material

2011-08-14T15:30:00.000-04:00

A modification made by the online publisher Lulu has given me the excuse to remind you that we've got a couple of cool things in print (or downloadable in .pdf format). Check them out by clicking here.

~ emrys

The U2 Experience

2011-08-01T07:49:00.000-04:00

On 20 July Sara and I went to the long-awaited fulfillment of my 2009 Christmas gift: the U2 360 concert at the Meadowlands. The show, billed to start at 7:00, opened at 7:45 with a mediocre heavy rock/metal band called "Interpol." Then the two-thirds-full arena entertained itself for half an hour while, we presume, the star act made itself ready. Finally, at 9:15, the Irish four took the stage to open with some of the classics from Achtung Baby.

Since the Zoo Station tour of the late '90s, U2 has combined good showmanship with technology and videography at their concerts. Perhaps emboldened by the fact that in an 80,000-person stadium the nosebleed seats can't see a lead singer, U2 has put cameras and oversized screens to good use. They amplify both sound and light to make a larger-than-life impact on the masses. The performance was as stunning as I'd hoped; what surprised and intrigued me was less the band and more the audience.

We used public transit to get to the stadium, which involved standing on the train platform for about an hour waiting for rerouted trains to get in order. As the platform filled up with fans ready for U2 action, I watched the restless throngs. I saw middle-aged couples with wedding bands; I saw college frat boys; I saw Baby Boomers who looked to be enjoying the first fruits of retirement, preppy high school kids, washed-up hippies, and dapper dressed professionals. I even saw a six-year-old girl with black ug-boots, tutu, jacket, and purple streaks in her blonde hair; she could have been a fast-forward version of my own daughter. The U2 age demographic would make most Church congregations jealous. Only skin color was uniform; my rough estimation, from observations made until the lights went down for the main event, is that the crowd was ninety-five percent white, two percent Asian, two percent Latino, and one percent (or less) African-American.

The repertoire for the concert revealed what I saw at the Pop Mart concert in 1998: as a whole, U2 fans connect more with the old classic songs than the new ones. The songs from the early '90s elicited more clapping, dancing, and singing along than those from the last four albums. When the band played I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, all eighty thousand fans were on their feet, singing, clapping, and swaying. All around us were closed eyes, raised hands, and straining voices, anticipating every line and echoing every refrain. Under the night sky, immersed in the amplified beat and soaked in The Edge's aching string-work, I sang along with Bono, lifted my palms to the sky, and wept. Like the ancient clans brought to tears by Gaelic bards, I succumbed to the power of music. And it felt like . . . worship.

Now I know why folks follow bands like U2 across the country for entire tours. They want to feel part of something bigger than themselves. They want to feel larger than life, ecstatic with sound and light so bright they can only come from heaven. They want to be carried out of themselves, if only for a moment, and into something powerful and orchestrated and harmonious and . . . more than human. They want to worship. And the opportunity comes only once very four years at the cost of one hundred dollars a pop.

~ emrys

When I Grow Up

2011-07-23T07:46:00.001-04:00

I want to be a Bank.

Banks get money loaned at 0% interest, and can then loan it out at any interest rate they choose (right now 3.5% at minimum).

That's as close as I've ever seen to free money.

I want to be a Bank.

~ emrys

Book Review: The Philippian Fragment

2011-07-17T12:56:00.000-04:00

What do you get when you set the problems of twentieth-century ministry in the context of the first-century Church?

You get Calvin Miller's genius little read, The Philippian Fragment. With an insightful mix of contemporary congregational foibles, Latin and Greek erudition, and people getting thrown to the lions, Miller lifts up the heart of parish ministry. This series of letters recounts the trials and tribulations of Eusebius of Philippi as he writes of them to his confessor Clement. His (mis)adventures catalog some of the timeless conundrums of being a pastor: prerogatives of rich parishioners, competition with charismatic traveling evangelists, and whether Mother's Day has scriptural warrant.

I resonated with Miller's character Eusebius, laughed at the perfect Latin names, and found myself pricked by the implications for life in the Church from any age. What a fun read! Thanks to my friend Wes for passing it along to me.

~ emrys

Broken

2011-07-14T16:22:00.000-04:00

(A meditation on the mystery of Genesis 32: 24-32.)

"Broken"
(emrys tyler 2011)

Out of the darkness and sliver of moon
Drifted a stranger, a wraith-man of doom;
He came without greeting

Night-wrestling strangler, he grabbed at my limbs
Muscles contorting, teeth gritted and grim
My strongest grip meeting

Till in the deadlock with twist and a bend
Out of the hip-joint my thigh did he rend
A strike for defeating

Whose hospitality shows up at night,
Welcomes a stranger by starting a fight?
Who leaves his name never spoken?

Clutching in spite of the star-spinning ache
I dreaded, terror-struck, that he would take
My breath in his pressing

Then his first words, “Let me go,” did he say
“Dawn-light comes quickly,” the warning he gave
My weakness addressing

Trick-fearing, wary I'd never survive,
Needing a sign that he'd leave me alive,
I asked him a blessing

Who offers mercy right after the fist,
Back-handed love, or a grace with a twist,
Good words in agony soaken?

“Jacob,” he told me, “your shadows grow long
With your close blood-kin a record of wrongs
Has made you notorious

“Israel is your new name for all time
Nations will tell of you in song and rhyme:
In struggle victorious!”

Dawning then came to my soul what I'd done:
Gone nose-to-nose with a heavenly one
An enemy glorious

Who was this messenger, able to bless
Me with a name to be wrung from duress?
Surely an angelic token?

Sunrise revealed him gone without a trace,
Save for the cripple that's twisted my face
And soured my song

Curious grandchildren point out my limp;
“God,” I then tell them, “has made me a gimp;
The story is long.”

After they’ve heard it, I make sure they know
Hobbling pride is the way our God shows
To whom we belong

What kind of visitor comes in the night?
What kind of angel hides from the light?
What kind of God leaves me broken?

~ emrys

In Touch

2011-07-04T16:05:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I took Gwendolyn out to cut back some of our overgrown bushes. After only a short time of watching me work, she wanted to try the hedge clippers. So I helped her put her small hands on the handles in the right direction and led the blades toward some snapdragons. (Snapdragons don't require much force to cut.) The clippers were too heavy for Gwendolyn to hold up, but if I bore the weight then she could manage to pull hard enough to cut the weeds. She remained quite focused and patient with the task, more so than I would have expected from a young lady who throws a fast tantrum when she can't get her arm in a shirt sleeve right away.

When I go out to check the garden in the morning I take Gwendolyn along. She helps to weed the squash beds, getting very dirty in the process. The carries the bucket behind me to pick strawberries and, today, early green beans. She knows which asparagus spears to grasp and how to break them off. (She also knows that they can be eaten right there in the lawn.) Soon she will know where tomatoes come from and how to pull up carrots from the soil.

I have some agendas for my daughter's education. One of them is for her to learn that food--ultimately all food--comes from the soil. I want her to understand that dirt--the stuff we wash off before meals and bedtime, the stuff we pave over with concrete, the stuff that looks lifeless and bland--is the substrate of life. I want her to know that no matter how advanced we humans become in areas of technology and medicine we still have a symbiosis with soil. I want her never to think that food "comes from" the supermarket in any broad sense. Behind every bunch of grapes in the produce aisle I want her to see a hillside in Chile or a vineyard in Ithaca. I want her to have a keen awareness that humanity cannot, strictly speaking, produce food for itself; God must grow food from the earth.

We are blessed to live in a rural community where the green of life grows up all around us: where weeds take over, alfalfa thickens on the curves of the land, and cows are milked for the cheese we eat. Wherever we live in the future, I want Gwendolyn to know about earth, and what it means to have one's hands in it.

~ emrys

Book Review: Fannie Flagg

2011-06-22T14:22:00.001-04:00

When a man who is a dairy-farmer-turned-accountant recommends a book by Fannie Flagg, I read it. "It's hilarious," he said as he put it in my hands.

Can't Wait to Get to Heaven, a novel with all the Southern charm of Paula Dean, by the aptly-named Fannie Flagg, is indeed hilarious. The matter-of-fact relation of common foibles and anxieties brought out the human nature of the characters in sharp relief. The narrative danced between rapid-fire dialog and revelation of characters' inner thoughts. The unselfconscious quirks of the actors mixed a concoction of amusement that left me wondering what I'd be laughing at in the next chapter. Just shy of caricatures, the characters had enough reality that I could imagine knowing them for real.

The plot revolves around the death of Elner Shimfissle, who passes into the Great Beyond only to be sent back, to the chagrin of obituary writers, physicians, and anxious family alike. After a few hours spent visiting with Ginger Rogers, wondering at orange squirrels with purple polka dots, and having a slice of heavenly cake with an old friend, Elner wakes up in the hospital and sends everyone around her scurrying to figure out why she's not dead. Her small Missouri town froths with the kind of antics only a sleepy community can put on.

Flagg's work kept me smiling all the way. It was only near the end that I finally realized what the book missed.

I enjoy listening to Prairie Home Companion, the Minnesota radio show hosted by Garrison Keillor. (I can't when Sara's in the car; she won't abide it.) I find his vignettes, especially "The News from Lake Wobegon" and "Guy Noir," quite funny. I have, however, also noticed that his work--for this seems to be true of all the radio pieces I've heard as well as the one book of his I've read--lacks something essential. His stories have no real tension.

The stories of this midwest radio show bring the listener into no real danger, no real risk, nothing which would generally draw one to the edge of one's seat. This absence of conflict or vital uncertainty no doubt makes the show safer for listening while driving, but that essential peak of conflict about which we learned in high school English (thank you, Aristotle) sucks the life out of the narrative. More than that, the sound of Keillor's voice conjures the idea, right at the outset, that nothing's really at stake, everything will be all right, and if I miss something it won't matter. Keillor's work is shot through with hakuna matata, but without the catchy Disney beat. After all, what can go wrong when "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average"?

Elner Shimfissle's glimpse of heaven offers the world no stunning insights; in fact, it offers no insights at all. The one plot hook that offered potential was the presence of Elner's pistol in her hamper. She takes the secret to her grave (again) at the end of the book. And we're told, in the words of one of the characters via flashback, that the only lesson from that secret is "Think what you want, but some days luck is just on your side." With a back-from-the-other-side opportunity, Flagg could have shown us the excitement of life, the danger or the thrill. She could have used Elner Shimfissle to ignite our passion for something or someone transcendent. She could have cracked open the mundane and revealed the numinous. Instead, like the flaccid young men of Lake Wobegon, she shrugs her narrative shoulders and declares that good or bad is all about luck.

The legacy of Elner Shimfissle gave me lots of chuckles and a few laughs out loud. But if life is up to chance, and heaven is just a place where the squirrels are orange and the cake tastes better, Elner and Flagg can have them. I want a life with more grit and an afterlife with more hope.

~ emrys

Gwendolyn-isms

2011-06-22T12:57:00.003-04:00

As a child’s speech develops, there are always words and phrases and mispronunciations are such fun. Then as their speech advances, those slip away into the “correct” words and become a memory. Since my memory is already slipping, here are a few that I don’t want to forget.

:: Until the end of May, Emrys was known as “Gaga” (as was a drink). Towards the end of our vacation, he was promoted to “Daddy!”

:: When we would drive by a pasture or look at a book with large four-legged equine animals, G would happily pronounce “nays!” This has recently turned into the more correct term: horse.

:: As mentioned before, “gaga” was G’s term for drink, usually accompanied with the sign for drink as well. “Gaga” has given way to one of my personal favorites, “gwink”.

Then there are the phrases that are said that bring chuckles to all around. Like the other day when we were sitting in the kitchen with another friend of ours. I was making cake and G was licking the beater from the mixer. She was covered in chocolate cake batter (thanks for the picture Megs!). I commented something like “holy cow, girl, you’re a mess!” To which she promptly replied “I’m a holy cow!”

Solo Hide & Seek

2011-06-12T17:46:00.002-04:00

One day last week, my precocious 2-year-old daughter sat on her knees at the counter in the kitchen, her hands behind her back. She started counting: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, fourteen, fourteen fourteen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty!

Then she pulled her hands out and waved them palms out and cried "Hands, I find you!"

Pictured is another side of my two-year-old known as "I do myself!"

Seventeen Months Later

2011-06-03T11:43:00.008-04:00

On 18 January 2010 we started the renovation of our bedroom. We planned out what we'd need, and roughly how much it would cost. And I thought to myself, "We've got this so well organized, it won't take more than three months to finish."

The proverb has been stated in various ways, "If you want to make God laugh, make plans."

The third-to-last item on the list was replacing the baseboard trim. Here's a sample of the process (which involved more sanding and re-urethaning than I'd hoped):

Then the closet doors needed to be urethaned to match the trim. Actually, "urethaning" is the wrong verb, because I used Minwax Polycrylic. I find, however, that in casual conversation, more people know what "urethaning" is than "polycrylicking."

The last bit? Replacing the door stop on the wall behind the bedroom door. I kept forgetting to stop at the hardware store to get a new doorstop, so this step dragged on for a month. When I got to the store and looked at the new stops, I discovered that I could actually use the old one again. Waiting for Godot.

With Doorstop Godot on the wall, and all the trim finished, here's what our renovated bedroom looks like (standing-on-the-bed view):

And from next to the old closet door:

Estimated price of the project before beginning: $690.

Actual cost of all supplies (not including untold labor): $838.10.

Actual cost as percentage of estimated cost: 121%.

Hm.

At least the cost projection was better than the completion date projection. It took almost six times as long as I thought.

But now . . . it is done!

~ emrys

Kickin' Off Summer

2011-05-29T16:42:00.004-04:00

Hot and humid hit our area today and since the kiddie pool went MIA in recent storms, it was time to hook up the sprinkler! Last year she didn't quite get the hang of the whole playing in the sprinkler game. This year, Dad gave her a refresher and I think she's good to go.

Jamestown: Life Complicated

2011-05-29T09:34:00.014-04:00

Last week David and I rode to Jamestown, one of the other two historic sites near Williamsburg, Virginia. Before last week, if you had quizzed me on early American colonial history, I could have told you that Jamestown was one of the first three English settlements, founded in the early seventeenth century. It's come a long way since then, with motorized fountains, bronze sculptures, and flags from all fifty states at the entrance:

After our tour from the National Park guide, I now remember that Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in North America, founded by the Virginia Company in 1607.

I remember learning that the first settlers encountered native Americans immediately upon their arrival. The character of those encounters depended both upon the history book one was reading and the person recounting the story. In elementary school we learned to make black paper Pilgrim hats and eat squash given by the native peoples on the first Thanksgiving. In middle school we learned that the threat of attack from the natives meant that every settlement had to have a palisade. This singular part of colonial history was full of ambiguity.

Less ambiguity now: I don't think any native American flags fly over the Jamestown monument.

The first Jamestown settlers chose the location of their landing mostly to avoid the camps of natives and to hide from Spanish vessels in the Chesapeake. They imagined that the most significant obstruction to long-term life in North America would be Spanish competition (which had already founded a colony in St. Augustine, Florida). Boy, were they wrong.

Agriculture jumps to mind as the primary economic engine for the first colonial settlements. But as we found out on our biking tour of the old Jamestown sites, glass-making also brought in some dough for the colonists. According to the placards at this site, English glassblowers could not satisfy the demand for glass in England at the turn of the 1600s. So there was a market for American glass.

We walked around the excavated site of the former glass works, and looked on as craftsmen in period garb showed us how the art is done.

I learned that glass is naturally green because of latent ferrous deposits in the silicate base. In order to make glass clear, one has to add other minerals.

I imagine glass in the 1600s to be like plastic in the late twentieth century: cheaper and easier to make than its forebear, and lighter. We have plastic (better in some ways than metal or glass); the Jamestown settlers had glass (better than pottery).

David and I had a fun National Park guide. I'm amazed at how much adults are like middle-schoolers. Give them a lecture, and they get fidgety and bored. Give them a class in which they might be called on to answer, complete with visual and tactile aids and role-playing, and they pay attention. Here's David, playing the part of a "savage," whom the colonists are asking for corn.

Which brings me back to the original Jamestown settlement. They landed in the middle of a drought, but did not know it because they'd never lived here before. As the fresh water decreased, the brackish water from the river increased, and their wells became salty. Our guide told us that drinking brackish water too long "makes you stupid." As a result, when the settlers needed their wits the most, they were losing them.

Leaders of the colony had been chosen by the Virginia Company, and the names of leaders were not revealed until after they landed--to prevent factions forming on the boat ride over. Thus leadership was not democratic, but appointed. The personalities of some of the leaders did not lend themselves to good relationships with either the natives or the settlers.
The cultural divide between European and native widened when the English discovered that the native women did all the farming, gathering, and tending the home. The men went hunting and went to war. The former male activity especially was a luxury of the nobles in England; English men were expected to work, tend the fields, and build homes. Because of the delegation of tasks in English culture, native men received the stigma of being "lazy" from the get-go. When it came time to ask the natives for help, believing the other culture was inherently slothful could not have made the conversation easier.
The Jamestown settlers' motives for coming to Virginia were not entirely economic. The group had an express intent to spread the faith of the Anglican church to new continents. The colonists had a zeal for the spread of the faith, even if it was more imperialist than the sort of zeal most Christian missionaries share today.
Last week our power went out for forty-two hours. Not only did I discover how much of my life requires electricity, I gained a new appreciation for cultures and times that live without it. The matter of clean water, for instance, that I take for granted as long as we have a water purification system, the Jamestown settlers could not take for granted. Disease that now keep us in bed for a week (until the antibiotics do their job) could wipe out a whole town in 1607.
I remember first learning about the colonists of Jamestown and Plymouth as if their success in America were a foregone conclusion. Since we're here today, there must have been a sort of manifest destiny at work--like SuperBowl champions saying they knew all along they'd win it. I have discovered this view is far from the truth. Not only did the colonists have drought, disease, relations with the natives, and poor leadership working pretty hard against them, they had the looming spectre of financial loss. The Virginia Company was a for-profit firm in London, the shareholders of which expected a return on their investment. If too many years passed without profit, the colonists would be called back home--whether the natives had become Christian or not.

[this photo needs explanation: it's a view of Jamestown ruins through a glass floor in the museum:]

During their second winter, the settlers lost two-thirds of their populace to starvation. The natives were hurting, too, because of the drought, but being natives they had the resources to tough it out. The Virginia Company settlers were in trouble. The next time a ship stopped by Jamestown, all the settlers got on board for London. The Jamestown settlement was over.

[here is a piece of slate, a permenant record of writing and drawings from Jamestown:]

Over, that is, until they ran into the next supply ship sent by the Virginia Company, at the mouth of the James River. The Company had put a new commander in place, and he told the settlers to turn around and get back to work in the colony. With so many variables at work, after all it was one new head honcho and an extra supply ship that kicked the town into feasibility. And the next season the weather improved greatly.
The following year a Virginian variety of tobacco was cultivated from smuggled stock, and the colony had her first cash crop. In the end, what made the colony viable in the long term was neither religious zeal, nor abundant health, nor perfect relations with the natives. The clincher was humanity's long-standing addiction to tobacco products, and the theft of a plant from the Caribbean.
Contrary to the simplified lists of dates at the beginning of your textbooks, history is more complicated that multivariable calculus. One just never knows if or how a new venture will pan out. It might even become the beginning of a new empire. And if you dig deep enough in your history, you might find it much messier than you expected. Your victorious civilization might hinge on international thieves and cancer-causing addictions.

Life is complicated.

~ emrys

I made it!

2011-05-25T21:39:00.003-04:00

For some time now, I have been writing gags for the comic strip "B.C." I usually write gags for the "Wylie's Dictionary" strips, which are glorified puns. That's how my mind works. I'm not generally so good at devising narrative jokes, the kind which comprise multi-frame strips.

However, the B.C. crew informed me two weeks ago that I've made it to the big time: one of my gags will be a Sunday strip! My joke will be illustrated in full color on Sunday, July 31. Check it out!

If you don't get B.C. by conventional newspaper, the strip can be found online here.

~ emrys

Always a Reason

2011-05-23T22:50:00.009-04:00

My first mistake was breaking the pipe.

While working on the stone patio and walkway in 2007, I uncovered a perforated, four-inch PVC pipe just below the surface of the ground. In order to put in the gravel and sand for the patio foundation, I cut off the last six feet of the pipe. (I write "cut off," but in fact I remember whacking at it with my spade until it broke off, leaving a jagged end by the retaining wall.) So focused was I on getting the patio done that I did not stop to think about the purpose that pipe served.

In my line of work, I encounter suffering with some regularity. I participate in numerous conversations around folks' response to suffering. One response I hear often from the pious facing pain or struggle whose cause cannot be readily identified, is "Everything happens for a reason." When I ask what the reason for this particular trial might be, I usually receive an affirmation of faith that God is in control of everything, and God is reasonable, so everything happens for a reason.

I'm not entirely sure this line of thinking is valid or sound, but it is not my calling to condemn those who hold to it. Whether or not the attribution of ubiquitous reasonability applies to God, I do in any case find the assertion of little use. At worst it seems to dodge more difficult, more important questions; at best, the logic becomes circular.

I am finding, however, that when applied to humans, "everything happens for a reason" is both true and useful. The more I ask into folks' experience and decision-making, the more I find that few people do things randomly. There is always a reason.

I finished the patio and went on to the next item in the endless list of projects that is homeownership. Two years later, I began construction on the pellet shed. The southeast corner of the shed sits next to the location of the capped end of a four-inch PVC pipe just below the surface of the ground. Never having seen this pipe before, I pulled off the cap and discovered it empty. The last thing I want on our property is something that might collect standing water in which mosquitoes can breed. So I filled it in with dirt. Then I went back to the pellet shed.

Everybody does things for a reason. We have habits, which cause us to step outside and smoke something, or chew on something if we can't get outside. We repeat behaviors our parents did, which cause us without thinking to go shopping or strike someone we love. We have emotions, which enter by the back door and take control until we say or do things that seem insane to those around us.

I am surprised by how reason-able people are, even in their crazier moments. When we dig deeply enough in conversation, we unearth motives, thoughts, and memories that would not otherwise gain attention. And often they are directly linked to actions which the actors themselves would rather not have committed. What freedom it is to discover the reasons behind something we wish to be rid of!

A few weeks after I filled in that pipe, we had a week of very wet weather. The side of the house on which that pipe was found faces the uphill slope; ground level is about five feet up the exterior wall. After a week of rain, the southwest corner of the living room became moist, and mold began to grow at the base of the wall. At that point, I put three and four together, and realized that I had filled up (and earlier, cracked the end off) our home's French drain. Ignorant of the reason for the pipe, I had clogged the thing which diverted groundwater from our house.

I went out and dug out the pipe I'd filled, until I could see down to the T where it met the horizontal drain. Then I tore up the patio around the cracked end of the pipe so that future water would have somewhere to go. I resolved, in the near future, to finish the end of the pipe and rebuild the patio. That was last summer.

Someone more famous than I once said (or wrote) that "an unexamined life is not worth living." This piece of wisdom has rung true for me for a long time. I think part of the examination of life is digging into the reasons why we do things. To understand our motives allows us more opportunity for repentance, change, and joy. And such circumspection would have saved me much time and effort on my back patio.

~ emrys

Deallefication

2011-05-19T21:09:00.009-04:00

or, Twentieth-Century Feudalism

Ironbound Road runs through the west side of greater Williamsburg, Virginia. It winds through the woods and mercantile centers of the west end of the historical triangle bounded by Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. As we discovered yesterday trying to find a Target on the way back to our timeshare unit, Ironbound Road also has a break in the middle of it.

Route 199, a largely limited-access highway that loops around the region of Colonial Williamsburg, broke through Ironbound Road a few hundred meters north of our timeshare complex. The experience of misleading maps and strange traffic patterns intrigued me enough that I decided to go out for a bike ride this morning in search of the real Ironbound Road.

As I explored the territory of old Ironbound Road, I discovered the impact of progress on our nieghborhood in Williamsburg. The installation of Route 199 occurred simultaneously with the widening and repaving of major roads which crossed under or over Route 199. I rode the circuit of these major roads around our timeshare, and discovered a host of residential developments packed within the matrix of their courses.

I rode past housing developments with names like "Graylin Manor," "Settlers' Green," and "Brooklawn Estates." I cruised into a few, hoping to discover the back roads by which I could return to our hotel, only to find that none of the developments communicate with each other. Each has one entrance, also its exit, with an ornate sign announcing which territory one enters. The street signs sport unique styles which inform the rider not only of the name of the lane but also of the ethos of the development.

Upon entering a development not one's own, one knows that one is in foreign territory. This is twentieth-century feudalism: the visitor is in a strange land, with no business in the realm unless invited and in the good graces of the lord. One has no excuse to be "passing through." The lord of the realm is the triumvirate of Covenant, Condition, and Restriction, to whom all residents ultimately render service and owe their proper fealty.

I spent several years of my adolescence living on Fourth Street in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. Next to the house was an alley, called Raspberry Street, which the city kept in barely navigable condition and which ran for only one block, between Fourth and Fifth streets. I learned to ride a bicycle on that tiny road. I also remember, on at least one occasion, someone stopping on Raspberry Street next to our back yard to ask for directions. It was a public way, off the beaten path, where the public could see over the honeysuckle into the privacy of our yard.

The rise of the "gated community" and the non-gated "Sherwood Manors" such as I have seen here in Virginia limit access to private neighborhoods for the sake of privacy and safety. This phenomenon tries to restrict outsiders to the paved thoroughfares, fencing them out in the land of retail stores while fencing in the manicured lawn and domestic quiet. Short-cuts from one side of town to the other have been eliminated, replaced by "No Outlet" signs. It is the removal of the alley from the community: the deallefication of society.

Deallefication, the removal of strangers and uncertainty from our communities, is in a sense natural. Humanity has a deep impulse to make itself safe, or at least to make itself feel safe, in any way it can. The impulses for safety, quiet, and comfort have given rise to deallefication and CC&Rs. They turn our cities and counties into fractals: tight expensive ghettos pocketed along the edges of fast-moving roads.

I recognize the ambiguity of the alley: it is the place we conjure when we want to scare women into buying mace for their purses. It is a place of danger, where we might meet anyone, even the most unsavory characters. Deallefication allows us to cast off a shadow of threat, and convince ourselves that everyone on our street belongs on our street (because no one would be just passing through). We can feel more safe if we deallefy our communities.

And yet, I am not sure I want to remove myself from all contact with strangers. I am not sure it is healthy for me to pinch off community interaction with the outside world. Perhaps I need those unknown to come by my backyard, just to pass by, so that I may be reminded that the world is more than that which I or my homeowners' association has constructed for me. As I recently found in a book about public life, maybe strangers regularly appearing in my life is good for my spiritual health.

Maybe I need alleys in my neighborhood, where people from other neighborhoods intrude and peek into my back yard, then ask for directions. Perhaps cultivating the alley will give me the chance to offer hospitality to a passer-by, and make one more tie between me and the rest of the world. Too much control and privacy might actually be stifling to the community's growth, and to my growth as a member.

An alley short-cut would also make for more pleasant bicycling to the other end of Ironbound Road.

~emrys

Discrimination

2011-05-18T20:01:00.003-04:00

I own a 1979 Schwinn ten-speed bicycle. The frame is made of steel, which, if I ever wreck it, I will sell on Craig's list as a boat anchor. The brakes pivot on a bolt above the wheel, and because of the condition of the hardware one front brake pad rubs constantly against the rim. The height measures nineteen inches, three and a half inches too short for me. This combination of factors makes any ride heavy, difficult, and exhausting. But it's the only bike I have.

Yesterday morning my father-in-law and I rode into Williamsburg on their new bicycles. The frames are aluminum, the brakes attach to the forks, and my seat adjusts until my leg reaches full extension. As a result, the twenty-one-mile ride today was a delight. (Of course, getting brie-stuffed French toast for brunch at the half-way point makes any journey delightful.)

Ten minutes into the ride we stopped at a traffic signal. The intersection had three lanes; the right lane was right turn only, and we were going straight, so I sat behind David on the white line in the middle of the road. I thought it a blessing that no cars had come up behind us at the signal. I hate that kind of pressure to accelerate.

The opposing traffic received its green light, complete with a green arrow that allowed them to turn in front of us. David decided not to wait, but pulled across the intersection through our red light. I figured our green light was about to come, so I remained behind. As David started picking up speed on the other side, the cross-traffic got a green light. Cars started cruising past across my path. Where was my green light?

I then remembered that some traffic lights change according to photo sensors on the poles or magnetic coils under the asphalt. The sensors and coils detect the metallic presence of a car and change the signal accordingly. They did not detect the presence of my ultra-light hybrid road bike.

I cursed the city planners that failed to take cyclists into account. I'm used to riding with the mentality that cars cannot see me, but I don't expect to be discriminated against by the civil engineers. Don't they want their citizens to ride bicycles more? "Ride your bike, sit at a light" is not an enticing PR slogan.

Thank God some internal combustion engines pulled up behind me before the next signal rotation. I huffed and puffed for a few hundred yards, but managed to catch up to David. We cycled on in good stead to Williamsburg.

Good thing there are no traffic lights on my commute to Nineveh. Then again, if I had been riding my '79 Schwinn, I would have set off the signal sensor.

~emrys

Farther on Less

2011-05-18T19:59:00.001-04:00

2005 Hyundai Elantra GT + 70mph speed limit = 38 miles per gallon.

Thank you, Virginia!

~ emrys

Another Road

2011-05-04T14:43:00.006-04:00

Jim Burklo has a heart for people. In his book, Open Christianity: Home by Another Road, he opens his arms wide to the hearts of humanity. His passion for the hurting, the confused, and the homeless (in physical and spiritual terms) really comes through, especially in the last few chapters. As campus minister for Stanford University, minister of a local Christian congregation, and founder and director of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto, Burklo has had ample opportunity to learn how to love people. His chapters on humility, social activism, justice, and simplicity bring home his desire for communities in which people care for and are taken care of by each other.

Burklo is a "progressive Christian." That is, he believes, with Vaclav Havel, that "the same basic message [is] at the core of most religions and cultures throughout history: people should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them; they should revere one another; and they should not harm their fellow humans" (quote within a quote from page 82).

Open Christianity describes the theological underpinnings of this progressive Christianity, and argues that mainstream Christianity has gone astray in its theological and dogmatic assertions. In order to accommodate his theology in the reading of Christian scriptures, Burklo re-interprets the gospels' narrative of Jesus. To Burklo, Jesus was not unique in his divinity; Jesus was unique in uniting his human self with his "divine Self." This becomes Burklo's ultimate goal for all of us. He reinterprets the gospel of John's "no one comes to the Father except through me" to mean "no one comes to God except through encountering God within him- or herself."

Burklo rails against the idea that one must believe something to be Christian. Instead, he centers the Christian life on an experience of God, "knowing God," which happens only through one's own inner discernement. This experience of God is possible for all of us individually, because we all comprise our selves and divine Selves. As such, Burklo makes God more immanent and, contrary to his quoting of Havel, less transcendant. His insistence on a God who can be experienced at will by every person relieves us of the burden of trust, of believing in a God who is outside our realm of experience.

The power of Burklo's conception of God lies not so much in what he asserts by affirmation, but in what he asserts by omission. First, Burklo's God is not a person. Because God is a Self to humanity in Burklo's thinking, God is absorbed into humanity. Inasmuch as God may be transcendant--not human--God is a "principle or process" which humans experience. God does not have an identity to which I can relate as an Other. In this--as with many other things--Burklo departs from central themes storied in Christian scripture.

Burklo's second omission declares that God is not active. God is a passive entity which, being within the Self, has no prerogative to act. In the self-realization of Burklovian Christianity, the self does all the work, the creating, and the realizing. This may feel liberating for most people, but it relies upon making oneself into god, the primary problem against which Jesus and all the scriptures warn.

Without person-hood or power, Burklo's God is neither threat nor comfort. God is a take-it-or-leave-it experience, as passive and static as the Joshua Tree National Monument. One could live as fulfilling a life without visiting the Monument as one might spending every day there. These two omissions make all the difference to me, being a follower of Yahweh, the god who redeems (in power) and engages me in love as a genuine other (as a person). These two attributes of God--whether or not one articulates them in strictly orthodox terms--underpin the value of Jesus and his ministry.

For the spiritual quest through the desert of human life, Open Christianity seeks to lovingly discard the doctrinal baggage which will exhaust us before the journey's end. In the process, however, it has cast away also the food and water for the journey.

~ emrys

Spring On High

2011-05-04T06:53:00.007-04:00

In April the local schools take their spring break. Thus for one week last month the kids had some free time on their hands, we had some warm, dry weather, and my treehouse needed work. It was a perfect syzygy that led to some significant progress on Phase II. On Monday of the week I had Conner and Nolan over. Here's a shot from across the creek:

Here is Conner's foot (he's screwing in the next plank) and Nolan's orange shirt (he's holding up the tree by leaning against it):

A view from the top of the ladder on Phase II:

Nolan still faithfully minding that tree:

On Friday I had planned to have three young gentlemen over, but schedules changed so it was Josiah and I going it alone. I always knew that Josiah had endless energy, but I also discovered he has no fear of heights:

With his energetic help, we put in three new cross-joists that day:

Treehouses are for young kids and the older kids, too. When Megan came to visit over Resurrection weekend, I put her to work up there. It turns out that those chic jeans and snazzy Manhattan boots can stand up to the wear of hemlock and power drills:

We set a few more cross-joists on both sides of Phase II:

It turns out that being a poli-sci Master's student does not preclude proficiency with a DeWalt 14V cordless drill. Thank God for the liberal education:

I told Megan that if her poli-sci degree fell through, she could get a job as a riveter on a Manhattan skyscraper crew:

She told me that would be her mother's worst nightmare. So in the interest of letting her mom know how far she's come, I got a shot of Megan reaching out over dead space, twelve feet off the ground:

This one's for you, Ginny!

Thanks to all my willing helpers on Phase II: Conner, Nolan, Josiah, and Megan. I look forward to our next project days together.

~ emrys

Ready for Next Winter

2011-05-04T06:39:00.004-04:00

The pellet shed wall has been reinforced and the raw wood painted to match the surrounding decor. With the help of a friend, I retrieved three tons of wood pellets--three pallets of fifty forty-pound bags--to stash away. (My back got a little sore, but didn't go out on me: Hallelujah!) Last summer, when I finished--or thought I had finished--the modifications to this end of our porch, we had two and a half tons stacked comfortably within it. Now we've got three tons in there, ready for October:

I wasn't sure which bag to pull out first, or whether the whole thing would collapse when I did so.

In order to spare me the anxious anticipation of collapsing the pile, the weather was gracious enough to turn cold again three days ago. The temperature in our house dropped below sixty degrees, and I have been informed that the price of propane--our secondary heat source--is sky-high. Thus, after cleaning the pellet stove for the summer (so I thought), I have loaded it with a brand new bag. Now we've got three tons minus one . . . or two . . . or maybe three bags, for next winter.

And Sara gets the credit for the pile not collapsing on me when I pulled out the first bag.

Thanks, Glenn, for the precious help moving all those pellets!

~ emrys

Mapping The Cosmos

2011-04-30T10:23:00.003-04:00

I just finished Michael Ward's hefty volume, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. Ward offers a clear and nearly exhaustive argument for how C. S. Lewis used the medieval structure of the cosmos as his underlying theme for the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia. I enjoyed the book very much, and find the work of Ward (now a tutor at Oxford and priest in the Church of England) thorough and compelling.

Part of my interest in this book comes from my own vocation as Teller of Significant Stories, which Ward argues The Chronicles are for several layers of reasons. Part comes from the fact that I experiment with writing (including the fantasy genre) myself; so I see parts of myself reflected both in Ward's analysis and in his portrait of Lewis the author. To those who have leisure and endurance for the entomed outgrowth of an Oxford PhD thesis, and ample interest in The Chronicles and Lewis himself, I recommend Ward's book.

One of the praises quoted on the back of the dust jacket says, "Michael Ward presents an absorbing, learned analysis of C. S. Lewis's best-selling and beloved series, The Chronicles of Narnia. Readily accessible to the average reader, Ward's book reads so much like a detective story that it's difficult to put down."

I agree with the first sentence of this review, and for that reason readily recommend it. The second I affirm only inasmuch as "ready accessibility" means we can get it on Amazon for less than twenty dollars. As much as I enjoy the writing of someone who easily makes up verbs like "endragon," Ward's book still reads like an Oxford PhD thesis. And I did not experience the "detective story" until the final chapter, where Ward tells us the story of how he discovered the secret theme behind Narnia. Thus the first ten or eleven chapters are icing on the cake; then again, the icing is my favorite part of the cake.

Ward's analysis of Lewis' authorship asserts that Lewis believed that although God is very present in all of human life, the divine is not something best described or experienced directly. God and divine power in life can only be known indirectly. Throughout his book, Ward uses the analogy of appreciating the power of light by looking "along" a beam rather than "at" the beam. Perhaps the best way to grasp the value of light is to see what it illumines rather than what comprises it. Thus light itself is a "hidden" reality, like the divine in our lives is "hidden" in the mundane.

As someone who preaches the story of Christ--rather than rational principles of Christianity--I resonate with this indirectness of the presence of God. In spite of the skew nature of truth, I am called to tell the story again and again in the hope that, perhaps like Lewis, listeners will at last hear the underlying theme of redemption, to their jovial pleasure.

Thanks to Kyle for introducing me to the book and lending me his copy.

~ emrys

Hallelujah

2011-04-20T21:18:00.003-04:00

Last Sunday I played soccer (on the field, not in the goal) for the first time since I threw out my back. Praise the Lord for no pain!

Now, if I can just get in shape enough that I'm not wheezing after a twenty-five meter sprint . . . .

~ emrys

Opening the Agora

2011-04-15T13:50:00.004-04:00

I don't go out in public anymore.

I didn't realize it about myself until a couple of weeks ago, but there is no public in my life.

Parker J. Palmer, the author of a 1994 book entitled The Company of Strangers: Christians and the Renewal of Public Life, helped me to see the gaping hole in my life.

Before I gain a snap reputation as a hermit, let me clarify that I do go places where anyone can see what I'm doing. As a preacher, for at least an hour every Sunday morning I put myself out there. I walk to work sometimes, using state, county, and town roads. And I go to the bank, to Wal-mart, and TGIF on occasion.

What's more, I post stuff on the internet in the form of blogs and facebook comments. My daughter and I sit at the breakfast counter and watch CNN, FoxNews, and World World. I get exposed to stuff that a significant chunk of Americans and the world are witnessing.

None of this, argues Palmer, is truly public.

The first challenge of Palmer's book was redefining (or, in my case, really defining for the first time) the word "public." He asserts that the "public" is the body of strangers to whom we are connected by proximity but with whom we have no mandate to become familiar. To be "in public," for Palmer, means having to encounter, listen to, converse with, and perhaps for a time work with those who are strangers.

When I post a blog, I'm not really interacting with anyone. On facebook, I'm not encountering a real person; even when I take the typewritten words to heart, it's often from a person I know or to whom I am related. When I preach, I do so amidst a community of people who are far from strangers. When I get mad at, say, Eliot Spitzer's commentary on the CNN site, he can't see me and I'm in no way part of a conversation.

Town meetings, well-used local parks, protests, and free pools are examples of what Palmer considers truly public. Even schools, which we often call "public" and tout as the focal points of our communities, have tight reins on communication and get sub-divided into groups of narrow age or interest. Of Palmer's truly public fora, I frequent none.

I'll leave the well structured argument of Palmer's book for you to discover. If you're a Christian who considers part of our calling to be engagement with and witness in a wider world, then I recommend this book to you. If you're a reader who likes pictures, be prepared: it sacrifices stories and illustrations for abstract (though not extremely academic) discussion. Still, it will be worth your time.

For me, Palmer had the greatest impact on my present life with his first topic: the spiritual importance of encountering the stranger. Scripture is shot through with the Spirit's working between strangers. And I interact with strangers very rarely. Maybe too rarely. I wonder if the Lord is calling me to find (or make, a la Palmer) the public from whom I have become estranged.

And to discover the merciful truth that real people are not like the yelling heads on the "news" networks.

~ emrys

Are We Rome?

2011-04-13T21:49:00.003-04:00

I take more than a passing interest in the Roman empire. As a student of the Christian scriptures, much of which came about inside the confines of the Roman empire's zenith of power, I have spent some time reading about things Roman. That reading, combined with a couple of decade's exposure to voices decrying the United States of America as another Rome, provides me with a filter through which I take in much of current events. I do ask, with more than academic interest, How is the United States similar to Rome?

Cullen Murphy takes up this question in his 2007 book Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Before beginning the read, I took in the back cover, where we are told that Murphy served as managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The bread and butter of the Atlantic (which has shed its adjective of late) is the cross of journalism and historiography. The magazine (to which I have a subscription, given by a friend) attempts to dig deeper than present phenomena to get at the significance and effect of diachronic patterns on current events. It caters to hyper-educated yuppie elites, who use words like "diachronic" and "historiography" without looking them up. It assumes that the reader will be equally familiar with names like Cicero, Sagan, and Schwarzkopf.

I walked into Are We Rome? with expectations that the book would, with suitable punctuation of Ivy League humor, offer a clear but thorough comparison of America and Rome. I expected that it would refrain from the trite conclusions of the talking heads (e.g. since both have the strongest military forces of their times, they are equal) and pursue deeper similarities and differences. And I assumed, as I have come to expect from the Atlantic, that it would shy away from instructing us to do anything, and remain happy just to describe the landscape with academic distance.

On all three counts I was pleasantly surprised. Murphy displays his exhaustive research without exhausting the reader. He cuts through the normal accusations and platitudes about imperial powers and gets to the marrow of both empires. And in the epilogue he makes a few suggestions for how Americans can use the comparison with Rome to avoid what might become a similar fate.

Had I read them on their own, I would have objected that Murphy's lessons smack of familiar liberal hobby-horses. But my cynicism has been stayed by his compelling arguments and generally tight logic. In fact, I think they're worth hearing, even if one doesn't pick up the book (spoiler alert!). What can Americans learn from the example of Rome?

1. Become aware of the wider world, and start by learning another language (and stop wringing your hands over "English as the official language" concerns).

2. Recognize what government can do well, and use it for that; recognize what the private sector can do well, and use it for that (don't absolutize one or the other).

3. Think in terms of centuries rather than the next episode of American Idol.

4. Assimilate immigrants by affording them every opportunity (don't make them the dreaded Other).

5. Give the military fewer tasks and theaters (don't micro-police the entire globe).

If you're convinced that the United States could never diminish, fade, or fall, then move on to the next thing on your reading list. But if you wonder whether America could follow in the footsteps of Rome, the Ottomans, the Mongols, and the Brits, I recommend Cullen Murphy's book.

Thanks to Megan for recommending this book to me.

~ emrys

Read It

2011-04-13T21:29:00.003-04:00

Society is freaked out about money right now. Republicans say the government spends too much of it. Democrats say the government should be collecting more of it (especially from the rich). Everyone says she's not making enough of it. Words like "persistent" modify "downturn" and words like "sluggish" modify "recovery." The marketplaces and households of America, always afraid of not gaining more, now fear having less.

So the words of a book from 1981 ring still with prophetic clarity. Although Richard Foster's Freedom of Simplicity had been recommended to me several times in various venues, I just read it last month. What a piercing and graceful essay on the power of living with less--intentionally!

Foster lays a groundwork for simplicity as a way of following Jesus. He does so with a completeness which avoids the dreaded comprehensiveness of academic works. His writing glimmers with subtle humor, shines with faithful clarity, and radiates with love. He strikes the perfect balance between theory and practice, convincing the reader of the need for disciplines of simplicity and bolstering her with concrete examples of practice. Most of all, with grace and wisdom Foster steers the middle way between excusing Christians for their failures and whipping us into lives of ascetic austerity.

I found myself feeling something which written works rarely do these days: I felt convicted. Convicted to change, for the better.

Freedom of Simplicity. If you want to follow Jesus in the twenty-first century, read it.

~ emrys

I Skipped to the End

2011-04-03T23:59:00.005-04:00

There are two kinds of people in this world. The first kind begins reading a book, but if he doesn't enjoy or appreciate the authorship, puts it down and goes to another book. The second kind begins reading a book and, no matter how bad the writing, reads every word to the end. For most of the life I remember, I have been the second type of reader. I have become aware of this through some anguish, because I have read some very bad books. Yet when I open the cover and start reading, I feel as if I've committed to something. If the first chapter is bad (and I can identify bad writing now with some speed), I hold out hope that the second chapter will be different. If the second chapter is bad, I try to imagine some exciting nugget of fact or plot that might emerge later, making the slogging worthwhile. If I get near the end and it's all been bad, I pretend that maybe the last chapter will redeem the whole book and I'll be vindicated in my commitment. This process, by the way, requires more work than anyone should put into a book written in one's own generation. So I am slowly becoming the first type of reader. I am discovering that no one will question my lack of commitment if I don't finish a book. I am discovering that if the first chapter is bad, very rarely is the second chapter good. I am learning that really dull books do not hide exciting nuggets somewhere near the epilogue. I find that the last chapter never redeems a book. Completes it, yes; gives it all meaning, yes; brings it all together, yes; redeems it, no. And I am discovering that if the editor did not do her work on the first part, the rest of the book will only get worse. Last month I read Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends, by Lonnie R. Johnson. (All right, "read" may not be the right verb; I'll let you decide.) The title piqued my interest because of our three months in Central Europe five years ago. And I like history. Early on in the book I realized that Mr. Johnson had command of massive amounts of data, was capable of brilliant historical analysis, and passionately loved the complexity of Central European history. I also learned, by about the third chapter, that he had an aversion to short sentences, loved adversative dependent clauses, and had a chip on his shoulder about how people use and interpret history. In the fourth chapter, I started to hope that the next chapter would be better. I started to hope (against hope) that certainly the editor, in the next section, would have woken up and begun crossing out large chunks of text. By the sixth chapter, I realized that wasn't going to happen. So I skipped to the end. That's right: I let go my fears of missing something, losing some important detail, lacking some all-important fact from history. I went to the epilogue and discovered . . . more of the same. This part was slightly more interesting, because now Johnson wrote about events from my lifetime. But the phrases still made my head ache, and the venom for errant interpreters still stung, but like an annoying ache rather than a startling pinch. I'm glad I skipped to the end. Reading only the epilogue gave me a sense of satisfaction and freedom that would have drowned in the fatigue of slogging through the whole. This kind of reading definitely has its uses. Oh, did I say I "read" the epilogue? I really just sort of skimmed it. ~ emrys

Preparing for Next Winter (Already)

2011-04-03T23:41:00.002-04:00

Last summer I decided to do away with trudging through the snow and wet to access our stash of wood pellets. I cut a new hole in the screen and wall at one end of our porch, then closed in the other sides of that end to make a pellet shed. Later we filled it with two and a half tons of pellets, stacked to the ceiling. I discovered the following syllogism by experience: A: Two and a half tons is a lot of weight. B: When you cut out a third of the length of a wall which is half screen already, it can't bear much weight. A + B = a buckled wall in my pellet shed. In this shot you can see the interior wall (with pale ends where I sawed through it), pushed out toward the porch from a winter of serious pressure: Now the shed is empty (we'll use the last bag of pellets tomorrow), so I've thrown up some 2x4s for vertical support. (By the way, these are still home-cut boards from the summer of 2009. Those hemlocks went a long way!)

With the added support, I hope that next autumn I won't have three tons of pellets come crashing into the porch (which at times I feared last year).

I need to paint the boards to match the brown and green motif of the house before we get next year's three tons. The pressure is on: in order to get the best price on pellets ($199 per ton again this year) we need to order them this month.

~emrys

Moving and Shaking

2011-04-03T23:32:00.002-04:00

A project for work has led me to need shakers: small hand-held percussion instruments that produce a light, atonal sound. The local music store would, I'm sure, happily sell me some expensive shakers made from mahogany and dried coffee beans from Ecuador. I figured, however, that making them myself with old plastic Easter eggs and rice would be more fun. All right, it's even more fun if I don't do it myself, but invite my favorite toddler to help. Gwendolyn hesitated not at all when I told her about our project.

One half hour of entertainment (and father-daughter bonding time), four shakers, and the saved cost of mahogany and exotic coffee beans: all ours thanks to a stash of rice and old plastic eggs. The only extra price: sweeping up afterwards. And Gwendolyn enjoyed helping with that, too.

~ emrys

Going European

2011-04-03T22:57:00.002-04:00

Travelling across the Pond gives one the perspective that things can be different in so many ways. Cars can be smaller. Vacation can be a given. Flushing can be customized. That's right: instead of the unwieldy one-size-fits-all, six-gallons-on-every-flush handle most Americans have on their toilets, Europeans--and, by our experience, especially the Brits--enjoy the option of a "light" flush or a "heavy" flush, depending on what type of product needs to move down the pipes. For most of December and January, our upstairs toilet ran on and off even when we were nowhere near the handle. An old fatigued flapper allowed water to seep through until the tank refilled itself every hour or so. Not only did this sometimes keep us awake at night, it drained our water treatment tanks faster than we'd like. At last I trundled down to the local hardware store to find another flapper. As I perused the shelves for the cheapest option, my eye alighted on a box whose front face announced, "Save Water." That convinced me to pick it up, at which point I noticed the familiar face of a two-button flush handle allowing for different excretory circumstances. Save water, spend less time tending to the chlorine tank, and teach our daughter that less can be more, all in one purchase? Count me in! I brought home and set about installing this complicated contraption in place of the original rubber ring:

Push the small upper button when you only need to incite a stream; push the lower button (marked with two dots for the blind?) when you want to open the sluice all the way.

We've had it in for a month or so now, and it seems to be working well. Even if we're not saving that much water on each flush, the random running has stopped, which makes for quieter nights and fewer trips to the cellar for the chlorine tank.

Thank God for tips from across The Pond!

~ emrys

A Rose In Any Other Hands

2011-04-03T22:48:00.002-04:00

On Valentine's Day (aeons ago now) I bought flowers for the two loveliest ladies in my life: a rose for Sara and a carnation for Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn especially loves to sniff anything that looks like a flower (including pictures of shamrocks in board books), so she savored the gift perhaps more than most toddlers would. After a time, however, despite their setting in water and full light, the flowers reached the point at which they testified less to the triumph of love than to the sad end of all biology. So I determined to send the sagging flora to the compost pile. That was the moment Gwendolyn decided she wanted the rose. After two weeks of fending her off from the thorn-adorned stem, I gave her full authority now over the spent blossom. She wielded her executive power with impunity. I don't know that she's had exposure to the game of "he loves me, he loves me not," but one could be forgiven for drawing the conclusion that she had: Or maybe she was preparing someday to be the flower girl in a wedding. Either way, she discovered that when the petals are gone, so is the rose. ~ emrys

For Jesus?

2011-03-22T13:11:00.003-04:00

Really? Check this out:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4591280/pole-dancing-for-jesus/

Finally! Some gals who understand what discipleship is all about: feeling good about ourselves, being empowered, and being able to say, "I'm good with God, and . . . I really don't care what people think."

If only the gospel writers could have said it so elegantly.

And high heels would have really dressed up those bulky robes.

~emrys

A Nation At War

2011-03-22T07:53:00.003-04:00

Many pixels and, later, much ink are spilled over the military affairs of the United States. Even in the distant eddy of mainstream culture that is our rural community, I hear echoes both of insistent nationalism (labeled "war-mongering" by the other side) and disgruntled anti-imperialism (labeled "socialism" by the other side). I feel a great deal of heat--and sometimes a little light--radiating from the filaments of war: war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, now war in Libya. I also feel the tension between an empire's need to secure its boarders, no matter how far out they may be, and the danger of becoming the iron fist hated by the rest of the world.

However, a recurrent realization has dawned on me in the last few weeks--one that certain history teachers from secondary school would, I'm sure, be thrilled to hear. (For it means that their work was not in vain!) A nation, like many of us individuals, must always be at war. The question is not whether a nation will be at war. The question is, Which war will we fight?

The only war that matters in the United States is the outgrowth of our most cherished possession: the freedom of speech. The front from which we must never divert too many resources is the War of Words. We, the people of the United States, must always fight each other's words with more of our own words.

Republicans and Democrats, no matter how many times we roll our eyes at the endless iterations of each, must keep talking at (or past) each other. Both must argue with the talking points of Ralph Nader. Criticism of foreign policy must continue to grace the air waves; complaints about too-soft welfare systems must continue to besiege the local papers. Peace-hawks and war-niks must continue to shout their slogans for all to hear, keeping the War of Words raging, spilling the blood of theories and commemorating dead ideals next to editorial tombs with garlands of metaphor.

Does it go without saying that fighting words is not the same as fighting each other? That ad hominem arguments are against the rhetorical Geneva Convention? Civility can reign between persons, but not between words. For without ludicrosity, against what will the plain truth shine? Without mad rantings by commentators gone over the edge, what will define sanity?

This is our struggle, unser Kampf, the jihad of the American nation: gaining ground in the theater of those things which come before reality yet shape and define it, words. Whatever your stance, whatever your philosophy, whatever your gripe, whatever your purpose, take up arms and answer the call to battle! Speak, write, blog, and sing! Let not the wearied warrior fall!

As the United States military gets involved in Libya, making its presence felt again for better or worse in the Arab world, I feel a sense of foreboding. This could mean more troops, more young men and women off to strange territory to be shot at, bombed, and sent home irreversibly damaged. My inclination is to speak against greater military involvement.

For a moment, however, I step back and think about how it could be, how it might be if our empire were not covetous of a homeland nurtured by a War of Words. What if the Peace-hawks could not speak their piece? What if nationalism had such a hold on us that we feared to voice criticism? What if our elections were driven by something other than Great Ideas versus Bad Ideas?

We would be undivided, unremorseful, and unstoppable. The United States would be the uncontested ruler of the world.

Then we might conscript an extra hundred thousand soldiers, send them to Libya, and take it like a twenty-first century Genghis Khan. Then the Libyan people would have no choice about becoming democratic. Ghadafi would lose his land--and the people would lose their voice.

But this won't happen, because as much as the United States is at war abroad, he is even more at war at home. The empire does not get whatever it wants, because it has a conscience--or thousands of them. Its wars at the far reaches of the earth will always be tempered by the War of Words.

I, for one, am thankful. Vive la guerre des mots! Soldier on, for the sake of the world!

~emrys

Flight of Democracy

2011-03-21T07:48:00.005-04:00

In a recent speech to the people of Brazil, the President of the United States said, "the future of the Arab world will be determined by its people." What he didn't say was that the future of the Arab world would be assisted by French and American air strikes.

Some years ago an author posited that relations between the Arab world and the North Atlantic world would turn into a "clash of civilizations." Many interpreters since then have taken this to mean a clash between a "Christian civilization" and a "Muslim civilization." In the decision to open an assault on Ghadafi's forces this weekend, however, I see a different clash: a confrontation between democracy and monarchy.

It appears from the present military action that Ghadafi's authority over the people of Libya--specifically, authority to control and punish rebels--no longer stands in the eyes of NATO. That is to say, because of a perceived shift in Libya's intramural politics, Ghadafi is no longer the rightful ruler of the country, no longer sovereign over his land. The people of Libya have spoken, and Ghadafi has not listened. But the French, the Americans and, as I write this, the Dutch, have heard loud and clear.

(It is a great irony of history that the French and Americans, along with the British, have been unwelcome interlopers in Arab politics at least since the beginning of the twentieth century.)

The message: if the monarchical leaders of the Arab world will not submit to the mandate of the people, then NATO will force them to do so. This is the emerging triumph for Arab peoples everywhere who want democracy. They need only cry out enough to get the attention of Western Europe and needle their monarchs into forceful action--and the military might of constitutional democracies will come to their aid.

Not so different from the history of the United States, whose own revolution depended on military might from France, Spain, and Holland. Of course, these three allies were absolute monarchies, not yet sold on the idea of democracies. We could argue that these three European helpers, had they realized what would happen to their own leadership after the image of the United States, might not have intervened.

Perhaps a similar realization has overcome the members of the Arab League, who now wish to step back from military action against Libya. After all, as one CNN report has suggested, the idea of attacking other Arabs brings more trepidation than failing to support a NATO action. Or maybe the concern is less the appearance of fratricide and more the paralyzing fear that if Ghadafi's monarchy has no legitimacy in the face of NATO air forces, neither will their own.

~emrys

Hospitality

2011-03-20T19:58:00.009-04:00

Several weeks ago our dryer overheated, melting two cord-locks on a fleece jacket of mine and threatening to combust many other articles of apparel. We knew our dryer was old (the same age as our now-defunct washer), so we prepared to bite another bullet and get a new dryer. Before we could go that far, though, a little spirit told us to at least give it a Google and see if the fix might be quick.

After just a few magic clicks by Sara and the undoing of a few screws by yours truly, we discovered that the problem likely could be solved by the replacement of a couple of twenty-dollar fuses: much cheaper than buying a few hundred dollars' worth of new dryer. We opened up the machine and found the wires supporting the offending bits:

The parts came in a week later, at precisely the same time that a dear friend of ours from Manhattan came for a weekend visit.

Nothing says "Welcome to our home" like "Help us fix our dryer." So we exercised our hospitality muscles by inviting Megan to help fix the fuses and--the really fun part that we only let guests do--clean out the remnants of melted plastic from the inside of the tumbler.

Here's Megan, enjoying the best view afforded by le chateau de Tyler:

I now have it on good authority that adhesive remover applied while one's head is stuck in a dryer tumbler might as well be considered a controlled substance.

Huffing aside, Megan did a great job. With dryer fixed and tested, we decided to celebrate with two rounds of Settlers of Catan.

Thanks, Megan, for playing along with your hosts!

This just in:

The dryer has gone on the fritz again (though, we assure you, through no fault of Megan's). It seems the central problem is with the "automatic" setting: the setting that supposedly senses when your laundry is dry and turns off the heat. Sara has discovered that the "timed" setting (i.e. the Neolithic way of drying, when you set the knob for "30 minutes" and checked to see if your underwear was dry after the buzz) still works. The dryer may not turn itself off based on moisture levels--and may, in fact, still catch stuff on fire--but it does obey the timer.

Since line-drying is just a couple weeks away, Sara has decided that we can wait on a new dryer until we've grown another arm and leg to pay for it.

~emrys

These Boots Are Made For

2011-03-19T20:59:00.004-04:00

I'm in the midst of composing a photojournal from a few years back--about 1998-2000. In May of 2000 I travelled to Portugal with Habitat for Humanity, where we worked on two construction sites. At the second site we did a great deal of sanding walls and ceilings. So I was on ladders and makeshift scaffolds much of the time. In one instance, another member of the team got a photo that I still have. I'm wearing the team t-shirt, dirty jeans, and these boots:

This photo was taken a few weeks ago.

I bought these boots in 1997 at Eastern Mountain Sports. They were designed for hiking, but I have used them for snow-trudging in the city of Montreal, working on all sorts of construction projects, as well as the mandatory long hiking trips. These have been the pair of boots for me for over thirteen years.

I've had them resoled twice (Vibrams--good stuff). They've received about three coats of spray-on waterproofing, and five or six coats of bacon grease. (Yes, just as water-repellent but cheaper, since you're going to eat the bacon anyway.) I've put rubber cement on cracks at the base of the tongues two or three times. Two years ago the inner leather lining got so ratty that I took them to a nearby cobbler. He patched them up for about fifty bucks, and told me when I picked them up, "That's the last time we can fix these." It was also the first time the interior had been fixed.

This year the leather cracked all the way through on the right boot. No amount of grease or glue is going to patch the hole--and I can see other holes on their way. Thus I'm going to bite the proverbial bullet and get a new pair of boots. Good-bye Old Faithfuls! You have gone far beyond the call of duty.

I hope I can get another pair from Eastern Mountain Sports. I can't think of another piece of clothing that has lasted thirteen years.

~emrys

Evolution of a Puddle Jumper

2011-03-16T16:43:00.003-04:00

G's new galoshes came today. Fortunately rain fell and snow melted, creating the perfect conditions to try out the new "boos".

Cheating on my Wife

2011-03-16T10:58:00.007-04:00

Every year I try to make an anniversary gift for my wife out of the material that is designated for that year of marriage. For instance, the first year is paper, the fifth year is wood, and eight is bronze (see the entry about last year's gift). In 2010 we celebrated our ninth anniversary. The material was ceramics.

You'd think this one would be easy. I took a full course in pottery at university, and Gwendolyn and I get out the play-dough often. However, getting one's hands on clay, a wheel, and a kiln really entails finding a potter who offers classes. So last summer I planned that we would attend a two-day class together in the autumn, and I'd throw something on the wheel based on what Sara would like.

My idea was perfect in theory. However, as with so many others of my great ideas in life, money was a limiting factor. The cost for two of us to do a two-day workshop together runs in the several hundreds of dollars. Last year, this stash of cash was not there.

So it came to pass that on our ninth anniversary, I cheated.

I found out that Sara wanted a straining fruit bowl and that she had eyed one up made by her pottery-throwing colleague at the Made In Chenango co-op. I made a secret run up to Norwich one day, and bought this little beauty:

I hope that someday we can do that pottery workshop together. Until then, the work of a pro will have to do.

~ emrys

A-Go-Go-Go

2011-03-13T17:41:00.002-04:00

"A-Go-Go-Go" has become G's chant that comes out when she gets excited that we're going somewhere. It is usually accompanied with a little shuffle of her feet and a very excited look on her face.

Emrys has a meeting tonight and we had just done our good-bye kisses and he headed out to the car. Just as he closed the car door I realized that he didn't the snacks he had prepared for the meeting. I picked up the phone to grab him before he got too far. His phone was off. I threw on shoes and headed down the driveway, breaking into a run as he started to drive out of the carport. He finally looked in the rear view, or heard me yelling, and stopped. I told him he had left the food on the counter and he gratefully backed the car up and headed back for the house.

As I came back into the house I was met with a grinning, prancing Gwendolyn chanting A-GO-GO-GO MAMA!

Southwest in Snow

2011-03-13T16:10:00.002-04:00

Drive across the Southwest United States, and eventually you'll come to vast expanses of smooth desert, out of which thrust giant pillars of stone. Only the most daring of climbers will make it to their flat tops. Everyone else is left to wonder from below at the straight-sided megaliths that appear as if God had carved them out of an Earth-sized block of wood.

Here in the rolling, forested hills of the Northeast, we can't see those wonders of geology up close--that is, until sleet falls on eight inches of soft snow atop a railing. Then in negative silhouette, the Southwest comes to us.

Have I mentioned that Yahweh did a great job with physics?

~emrys

Table Games

2011-03-13T15:56:00.002-04:00

Games are one of the simpler and more important joys in life. They provide a medium in which stories may be shared at leisure, points may be debated (even when it's not over the rules), and three family members may gang up on the one who married into the family. Games keep the business parts of a person (reason, hands, eyes, etc) occupied so that the identity may come out--to play.

Whenever Sara's parents come over, we usually devote time to playing games. Our favorite strategy table game is Settlers of Catan, a German game that has won awards on the international scene. It has enough complexity to keep us coming back for more, but can be played in a couple of hours (unlike, say, Monopoly, which is really a game about growing old gracefully).

Hand and Foot (or, when you're losing, "Fist and Boot"), is a variation on Canasta, played with four decks of cards for four people. Opponents are split in teams, and deciding who will play with whom establishes the first basis for friendly harrassment and goading. The game requires little skill except the abilities to needle and look really perturbed when your team has lost a hand. (Note the optional equipment featured below: wooden card boards that little hands can use for card games.)

Ah, the hours of fun that can be had with a six-foot round table, four decks of cards, and coffee! What a wonderful way to rest from the rigors of life.

~emrys

Serendipity

2011-03-13T15:43:00.002-04:00

I always struggle when someone in the family asks me, "What do you want for Christmas?" or "What do you want for your birthday?" The few moments in life at which I really think, "Gosh, I'd really like to have one of those," pass by and are forgotten swiftly. I don't have a mental list of things that I want, and I don't really spend much time coming up with things to want (except maybe more time, which ironically usually means owning less stuff). When someone asks, I generally stammer, pause, and then make something up that will suit the occasion.

I was chatting with my mom in December when she said, "You and Sara need to tell me what you want for Christmas." Pause. Stammer. "Well, I--OK, I'll get back to you." The conversation went on, in which I told her that three days earlier our washing machine finally bit the dust. (It came with the house, and I suspect it entered the house upon construction, making it at least nineteen years old. The instruction manual is printed with brown ink on beige paper, and the picture of a telephone in it has a rotary dial.)

"How about if I make my Christmas and birthday gifts to you guys a new washer?"

I was as relieved about not having to come up with gift ideas as I was thrilled that she offered to solve our laundry woes. "Sure! Sara's got the one she wants already picked out. We were going to get it this weekend."

So a story that began with a load of laundry sitting in its own filthy water, undrained, gained a felicitous ending. For the sake of history, here's the old goat that finally gave up the ghost (with exploring toddler blurring by):

And here's the new, sleek, high efficiency washer, on whose buttons you could play a piece from Tchaikovsky if you studied hard enough:

There is no central agitator, so we can fit the whole duvee in there (makes Sara very happy). And it has an extra rinse cycle, so diapers are a whole lot easier (makes everyone very happy).

Thanks, Mom. You rock!

~emrys

Spur of the Moment

2011-03-13T15:36:00.002-04:00

~emrys

Christmas Invention

2011-03-13T15:14:00.003-04:00

The Wheat side of our family has begun to pull names out of a hat for Christmas. Instead of getting gifts for everyone, each Christmas we only need to get a gift for the name drawn. (We don't actually have a hat--there are websites that mediate this kind of thing now. Thank God! Where would be get just the right hat?) This year, I "drew" my brother-in-law Josh.

I don't see Josh much, so I have to go on family rumors about his current interests. The rumors are spare, since Josh doesn't let much slip about what he's up to. I had just two hard facts to go on last Christmas: Josh enjoys cooking (and works in the restaurant field), and like all the Wheat males, he's a Red Sox fan.

I decided to get Josh a Red Sox-themed fondue set. It's the perfect combo for a man of fine cuisine who hates the Yankees, right? Search as I might across the infinite field of the cyber-market, I could not find a Red Sox fondue set. Strange. Hasn't anyone thought of this before? Aren't the addicts of Boston baseball fame also interested in dipping pumpernickel in a white wine and gruyere sauce with their friends? Doesn't every Sox fan have a fondue pot on the simmer for his World Series party?

Left wanting (and disappointed) by Amazon and eBay, I decided to make it myself.

First step: cut dowel for the handles, then affix them to bare fondue forks:

It turns out that handle-less shafts of fondue forks are also in short supply. To pinch-hit, Sara found seafood doohickeys (no lie, the technical term is "doohickey"), normally used for getting crab meat out of the exoskeleton. Well, these eight would have a higher calling.

Then I designed and printed up handle-wraps with various combinations of Red Sox insignia on them. I needed eight distinct patterns, so that each guest would be able to tell which fork is hers:

A little mod podge will keep the designs on the fork handles:

But even dry mod podge doesn't hold up to water. So I applied one of my favorite newfound products, polycrylic, to the handles. I'm not sure that it'll hold up to a dishwasher, but warm water and dish soap I'm sure won't bother them.

I was on a roll, but I decided against making the fondue pot myself. First, I was pressed for time. Second, my electrical engineering and forging skills are a little rusty. So I had Sara pick me up a fondue pot, and put the custom-designed forks in (with a little sign that says, "Hand wash only").

No word yet on whether Josh has put it to use. We'll see him in May, I hope, so I can ask him then.

~emrys

New York Minute

2011-03-11T14:13:00.007-05:00

In July of last year I attended a seminar in Manhattan. I stayed with a high school friend in Jersey City and commuted onto The Island for four days. The trek into The City included a brisk thirty-minute walk to the train station, a twenty-minute trip on the train, a ten minute trip on the subway, and another five-minute walk to the seminar offices. The return trip, done after 10:00pm, included a ten-minute subway ride, a twenty-minute bus ride, and a five minute walk to my friend's house.

The same commute done by car would have been, well, a nightmare.

Every time I visit one of the larger cities in the world I find my appreciation for public transit refreshed. What blessings they are to let someone else do the driving, enjoy predictable schedules, and be able to read or type during transit. Every time I experience these blessings, I lament the lack of public transit in so many places in the U.S. Especially the lack of passenger trains.

It's one of my enduring dreams to one day see a rail line (high-speed, or monorail, or maglev, whatever) put in along the median strip of I-95, the artery that runs from Miami to Boston. How cool would it be to ride one train all the way down the eastern seabord? I have written letters to congressmen and -women (last year our district's rep sat on the Transportation committee) about this idea. And I think about how easy construction would be along all the other interstates with massive, unused median strips. I-40, I-80, I-25 . . . so many places for faster, cheaper travel.

I think that the United States still operates from the belief that the individual or family car is the best way to get around. And the longer we invest in automobile-based infrastructure, the longer that prophecy will fulfill itself. After all, trains will continue to be an expensive investment as along as few people are investing in them. Maybe as gas prices rise, however, we'll begin to rethink our foundational beliefs about transport. Maybe instead of assuming that it's best to be able to drive fifty or one hundred miles at the drop of a hat, we'll begin to live within a twenty-mile radius most weeks, but enjoy fast, convenient, and relatively cheap rail service which allows us to go four hundred or a thousand miles more frequently.

For the past three years we (Sara and I) have been trying to fit a trip to the Midwest into our budget. Our choices are flying or driving. With a toddler, both options are expensive and, in different ways, troublesome. One train to Chicago (along I-90) and another to OKC, on which we could recline or walk around with Gwendolyn, would be a no-brainer for me.

Maybe my dream will come true after we have fuel prices as high as Switzerland's.

~emrys

Floral Migration

2011-03-11T14:03:00.003-05:00

The south edge of our property has a sharp embankment bordering the road on which we live. It's not a pleasant stretch to mow or tend, so we plan to plant successive stages of day lilies to cover this zone. These flowers will dominate their section and produce attractive orange blossoms in midsummer.

To establish this band of hardy flora, however, the bushes that reside there now must migrate. Last summer I moved one of the few plants that Sara wants to keep--the peonies--from the bank to another bed she's cultivating. Here's the peony bush, in its original position (under the Queen Anne's Lace, marked by the blue shovel):

Two holes for the two halves of the uprooted peony, in the other flower bed:

The vacant lot left by the emigrant:

And the peonies (one become two!) in their new habitat.

We'll see this summer if they really took to their new home.

~emrys

Cast of Character

2011-03-11T13:43:00.009-05:00

Way back in September we told you the story of how Gwendolyn broke her leg. Living with a toddler in a cast presented extra challenges and adventures. I took several photos of these interesting times which have set ignored on the camera for too long. Here they are at last.

Gwendolyn's cast required coverage with a plastic bag for bathing, and neither full immersion nor being in the shower were options. So for six weeks Gwendolyn sat on a towel in the downstairs bathroom, cast wrapped in plastic, for her "baths." We sponged her down to get her clean, and Sara had the brilliant idea of inaugurating a set of foam bath letters which, when wet, would stick on the outside of the shower door.

Gwendolyn had no less fun in those bathtimes than in the old way.

You can see the plastic on her right knee, and two buckets: one with foam letters and one with soapy water and sponges.

The trick, we discovered, was not letting the bath go too long. If she got cold, she'd wet the towel with something other than bath water.

My girl is a tough chick, but one part of the whole healing process did her in. The vibrating cast saw used to take off fiberglass casts scared her. It doesn't touch the skin at all, but the jet-scream of the machine made her want to get away as fast as possible. She cried louder than she does when she gets shots.

As I remember my cast-wearing youth, the doc took off the cast and said, "Go easy on it for a week." Otherwise, we were good to go. No more! Now orthopedic patients--even the eighteen-month-olds--get protective boots for two weeks after the cast is removed. Here's Gwendolyn showing off the remains of her cast:

You can be sure no emotional trauma remains when the patient pretends to use her cast as a cell phone:

Two weeks later, Gwendolyn walked normally without the boot, and the two hunks of fiberglass, signed by family and friends, were just another pair of toys to throw around the kitchen.

And Gwendolyn will not remember a bit of it.

~ emrys

Pain

2011-03-03T20:03:00.002-05:00

I had never felt pain like this.

In 1998, while touring the Isle of Skye, I pulled a moped upright from the wrong side, wrenching my back. But I could walk, and in a few days I was back to relative normalcy.

This morning, as I set Gwendolyn down on the kitchen floor, my lower back erupted with searing pain. I cried out and fell down on one hand, but the pain kept surging through my body, and especially down my legs. After seeing it on countless white boards across from hospital beds, I finally knew what the "10" stands for.

The blinding spike squeezed tears from my eyes as I crumpled to the cold tile. It came in waves, with every inch I lowered my body toward the freezing floor, pounding like a hammer on my spine and sending shocks of spasm through my limbs. After several cries, gasps and moans, I was face down, cheek to the tile, spread-eagle, prostrate. Any move I made caused new paralyzing slivers to stab out from my back. So I embraced the frigid stone pressed up against my chin while my confused two-year-old daughter looked on and until my wife came down the stairs.

"Are you all right?"

I can count on one hand the number of times I have been this not all right.

And now I know the difference between what has happened to me periodically over the last thirteen years--straining my back--and the nearly indescribable experience called "throwing out your back."

Ten hours, eight ibuprofen, three cold packs, and one chiropractic visit later, I can barely hobble across the room without stopping to cringe and pant. I'm praying that before a weekend full of scheduled work rolls in, I'll be able at least to stand up fully erect and lift both arms without flinching.

Tonight I sleep on the floor, feet raised, and pray that my spazzing muscles give me a break.

~emrys

Last Rites

2011-03-02T21:48:00.004-05:00

I sat this evening in a large common space, joined by fifty or sixty others of various generations, all seated facing the same way. We sat in a building open to the community, but which had been constructed for a singular purpose. We discussed tighter budgets, the need to trim programs, and the possibility of merging with another nearby group of similar convictions, out of fiscal need. Members expressed the spectrum of possible opinions on whether to merge, or how far to do so. Anxiety of potential change and loss hung in the air.

I have been privy to many of these kinds of situations lately. Serving in the position I do within the Church, I witness congregations which have become smaller over the years and are now faced with tough choices driven by finances.

Tonight's conversation, however, took place in a school. It pertained to the merger of sports programs between two schools, and flirted with the possibility of a full merger between schools. With a few transpositions, the conversation could be a script for a congregational meeting in a small rural assembly of believers.

What struck me with the greatest weight was the central anxiety wrought by dwindling budgets and populations. Folks attach their identity, their sense of value, and the life of the community to the building-clad entity--be it a congregation or a school.

When asked about the prospect of the state fully merging this district with another, the superintendent said, "If we lose this school, this building, the town will die."

Really?

Another parent said that the kids needed this school because it was part of their identity. Being a student in this school, this town, defined them.

Really?

I have only a peripheral interest in this district's choices about merging. I'm a volunteer coach for one of the sports, and just an assistant coach at that. I don't live in the district, or in the town. But I have an intense interest in the things that make us--individuals, families, communities, congregations--come to define ourselves by building-clad institutions. As I have seen from Bethlehem Steel, the Nineveh schoolhouse, and countless empty cathedrals in Europe, building-clad institutions eventually run their course and crumble.

If the numbers just get too tight, what will happen to these folks who define themselves by their school? Will they go into communal depression, as a teenager might who cannot find her identity in life? Will they become angry and vengeful--and how does that manifest in a community? Will they seek to define themselves around some other building, like the firehouse or a community center?

Or will they find identity in something more fluid than brick and mortar, which can weather financial ups and downs, thrive in country and city, and last for a lifetime?

~emrys

A Daddy Duet

2011-02-27T20:36:00.002-05:00

We have a board book that is the lyrics from The Little Drummer Boy and we got it while I was still pregnant with G. Emrys has been singing this song to her since before she was born. It is a designated Daddy bedtime book, as when I picked it up one night I was told "Gaga pum pum!" and handed a different book. Which I think translated to, "Daddy reads Drummer Boy!"

Tonight, The Little Drummer Boy has advanced to a duet. Emrys' voice carries out the lines of the song and the pause left at the end of each line is followed by a little two year old "PUM! PUM! PUM!"

Big C Adventure

2011-02-23T11:36:00.004-05:00

or, Ten Minutes Well Spent.

Gwendolyn and I laid out the bathtime letters on the table to do some alphabet work, only to discover that the "C" was missing. So we spent ten minutes scouring the upstairs looking for the missing yellow C, singing about what we wouldn't be able to do if we didn't have a C.

At last we found it, brought it downstairs with much rejoicing, and made our complete alphabet.

~ emrys

G Turned Two...

2011-02-14T11:38:00.005-05:00

...about two weeks ago - I'm a little slow on the blog stuff lately! She is a healthy, tall (35.75 inches) little girl who is talking more every day. She exhibits the independent streak of ~~her mother~~ a normal two year old. She's quite the little helper and mostly, a lot of fun! Here are a few pictures from her birthday celebration. We were visiting my brother and his family. Gwendolyn's cousin Reese and Aunt Lara made the present cake for her and after build your own pizzas and cake, punching balloons brought great entertainment for everyone!

Really?

2011-02-11T12:34:00.002-05:00

Just got an email from a friend decrying the makers of the following t-shirt (Old Glory):
My first thought was, "Really? There are people who would make this t-shirt today? Wait--there are people who would buy this t-shirt today?"

My second thought was (and often is), "Ah, this is why I believe in Total Depravity."

The email mentioned something about "First Amendment rights." The imposition of this topic occasioned my third thought, which is that excusing the content of one's words using the First Amendment is a tactic especially reserved for idiots.

Vive les idiots!

~ emrys

Dangerous

2011-01-29T20:34:00.008-05:00

is getting even less cool.

When we bought our house, the staircase to the second floor was open on one side. On your way up, you might put your hand on the railing against the left wall, but on your right side was a sheer drop to the kitchen floor. This is all well and good for those of us taller than five feet; by the time we're high enough on the steps to fall off and hurt ourselves, we're high enough to catch ourselves on the overhanging ceiling. No problem.

Except for a toddler. As she learned how to crawl, then toddle up the stairs, Gwendolyn could easily have pitched off the fourth-to-top stair and fallen to her death on the kitchen tile below. So in July of last year, we did something to change that.

With the help of my father-in-law and the hemlock from our property (yes, we're still using this wood), we constructed a railing and spindles in order to make it just a little harder for our daughter to hurt herself.

I failed to take photos of the project in its early stages, so here are the images of the last few steps. In July we had the unfinished railing and spindles in place:

Since that day, of course, its muster has been tested over and over again by the most important user.

It turns out that spindles make good hand-holds for someone shorter than four feet tall.

Instead of the usual polyurethane, which chokes the user indoors and requires thinner to clean, I tried out "polycrylic," a water-based acrylic sealer and protectant. It went on smooth, dried fast, cleaned up easily, and did not yellow the wood as polyurethane does. Awesome.

And since I had more than enough for the railing, I decided to put a protective layer on the table top I made two years ago for GBaby's room.

Now at the top of the stairs, the only way to get to the kitchen floor is down a forty-five degree slope, rather than a vertical drop. (She's taken the forty-five degree route as fast as possible twice now, and come away with nothing broken except her sense of security.)

And four inches between spindles leaves enough room to grab, poke, and tickle but not enough for head or shoulders. Perfect.

Thanks, David, for the help, Sara for the support, Gwendolyn for the inspiration, Yahweh for the wood, and Bobby for the shop!

~ emrys

Die!

2011-01-29T09:31:00.004-05:00

Our daughter learns most things by imitating her parents. Sometimes those things we intentionally try to teach her, like brushing her teeth or how to say "blueberry" ("blbzhry"). More often, however, she is learning things without our encouragement. But never without our example.

For instance, Gwendolyn is gradually learning how to discipline our dog Sadie. Mind you, she can't yet say Sadie's name--our dog, and all dogs, are named "Gah" for now--but she can order the mutt around. At the supper table two of the most frequent commands the adults use are "Bed!" (to get her away from the table) and "Stay!"

Gwendolyn, ever interested in efficiency, currently skips the first command and goes right to the second. But her skills of enunciation have not yet developed to the point that she can say "stay" the way the rest of us do. She points a directive finger at the dog and shouts, "Die!"

You must imagine the glee of the adults when, at the supper table with her aunt and cousins, Gwendolyn spotted Sadie across the room, raised a disciplining finger and with all the confident presence of a two-year-old yelled, "Die!"

We're grateful that Sadie didn't obey.

~emrys

The Incognito Stay-Puff

2011-01-08T19:16:00.004-05:00

Gwendolyn had one of her first sledding adventures today. It's good that Emrys is a big kid because I'm not the biggest fan of cold or climbing up hills. G is already heeding advice regarding eye protection and snow after Emrys' experience with sunburned eyeballs. Those stylin' shades didn't come off the whole time we were out, or for the ride home in the dark either.

Family Gift

2011-01-03T19:26:00.005-05:00

Two years ago my brother- and sister-in-law gave us a gift of two frames with leaves designed to hold the names of four generations of family members. In the last month I finally finished them, reattached leaves that didn't stick properly, and hung them in our living room:

On the right side is the tree of Tylers, starting with my brother and I at the bottom:

On the left are the Wheats, with Sara and her brothers at the bottom:

What a great way to take all my family research and make it an attractive addition to our home. Thanks, Adam and Lara!

~ emrys

A Wrinkle in Time

2010-12-29T22:19:00.002-05:00

I received as a Christmas gift the Loeb Classical Library translation of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Marcus was a Roman emperor from the second century whose meditations (written in Greek) have survived. As I cracked the spine of this little gem, I anticipated having to strain my grey cells in order to find the parallels and analogies between the writings of a second-century philosopher-general and twenty-first-century America. Then in Book I, part 12 I read this, in the midst of Marcus' list of virtues learned from various persons in his life:

"[I learned] from Alexander the Platonist, not to say to anyone often or without necessity, nor write in a letter, I am too busy, nor in this fashion constantly plead urgent affairs as an excuse for evading the obligations entailed upon us by our relations towards those around us."

This from an emperor of the second century, read now in a time when the most popular response to "How are you?" is "Busy!" and when Veggie-Tales' recasting of the parable of the good Samaritan makes busy-ness the excuse for not helping a stranger. I look no further for relevance, and rest assured that there is no significant gap between the humanity of Marcus Aurelius and that of our world today.

~emrys

Sacred Writing

2010-12-27T22:17:00.003-05:00

When we arrived in Pasadena and I stepped into the classrooms of Fuller Theological Seminary, I was reading from a copy of the Jerusalem Bible, a Roman Catholic translation, given to me by a friend some years before. I was told early in my Fuller studies that the faculty encouraged the uniform use of the New Revised Standard Version for coursework. Thus in the spring of 2003 I purchased my first NRSV (with Apocrypha). It went with me everywhere, almost every day, during my three years of study. By the end of seminary, it had been pulled out of and stuffed into my bag so many times that the plastic laminate had peeled off more than a quarter of the cover's surface.

But the tome carries more than scars of overuse. Unlike some whom I have met, who believe that only the printer's ink may shadow the pages of the bible, lest the punishments of Revelation 22:18 come upon them, I write often in my bibles. (I even cross out English words, though never Hebrew or Greek.)

And stuff which I consider worthy of memory finds its way onto the flyleaves of my bibles. Here is the front leaf of this artifact:

The top paragraph reads: "The Bible is not like a bookcase of oils, ointments, and pills, to be drawn on when crisis occurs and in uniform fashion. Rather, it is like a personal trainer and dietician--it shows us what techniques to mix and try, always affording accountability and discipline, in pursuit of a final goal which is higher than we are now."

Below that is a (inaccurate?) quote from the Dave Matthews Band song, A Christmas Song, "Father, with all this hatred, why do you fill me up with love, love, love . . .?"

Then the three locations of the Shema (Deu6.4-10; Num15.37-41; Deu11.13-21).

Then a yellow post-it note with phrases in Armenian, learned from Sara's boss in Pasadena: how to say "Good-bye" (manak parov), "How are you?" (inch bess ess), and "Well" (lavem).

I wrote in the table of contents where each of our canonical books is found in the Hebrew bible (Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim), and my own abbreviations for the books (because for some reason I thought three-letter abbreviations took too long to type?).

As I studied the scriptures in seminary, I marked up my NRSV, always looking for patterns, main ideas, and the nooks and crannies where the Spirit whispered.

Now, five years after graduating seminary, it's time to retire this old faithful. I have been using a new copy of the NRSV that Sara gave me four years ago (perhaps she took the hint from the curling laminate); and when I preach in Nineveh I use the New International Version because that's what's in the pews. Sara's NRSV is already more full of scribblings than this old one, and it would take me longer to figure out what these old notes mean than it would to find again their inspiration.

A Dieu, old friend. Your words have not been lost.

~ emrys