​ Yesterday: Listening to Camille Paglia, she of the AK-47 verbal delivery, speaking on world religions and their symbols. As an atheist, she bemoans the loss of religious narratives and, consequently, the inability to understand the great art of the Western canon. [One example: she described how, in a class she was teaching, she had to explain -- this is to college students -- who Moses was.] She did not turn this into a “kids today” argument, which I greatly appreciated. I find it a never-ending source of amazement when adults complain about kids -- teenagers and young adults -- and how this up-and-coming generation will walk us right over a cliff. There are two ideas embedded in here which need to be tweezed out. The first is: who taught this up-and-coming generation? If they don’t know the foundational stories, whose fault is that? If they don’t know Hamlet from omelet or Moses from Moby, it is not because they intentionally wiped these stories from their memory. It’s because they never heard them in the first place. Who didn’t tell them? A mirror would come in handy here. The second idea: somewhere -- I can’t pinpoint it on a timeline, but I suspect it’s much further back than one would think -- another story came along which was much more powerful. For lack of a better name, let’s call it the American dream. The happy marriage of convenience between capitalism and consumerism. Slowly, but with glacial certainty, this has been becoming the foundational story of American culture and, by extension, most of the developed wo

tie

​ The survey results reported here were undertaken to explore issues that have not been probed directly in that study and other related research on social isolation: the role of the internet and mobile phone in people's core social networks. This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People's use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people's full personal network -- their strong and weak ties -- internet use in general, and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular, are associated with more diverse social networks. A Word About Our Methodology and Findings

Perk you later/Thursday 18

Perks, early Thursday evening. First day of Lent, technically. There’s some headbanging music on in the background. A folksinger setting up. A couple of young girls talking about some romantic tangle in which one of them is involved. Seems inconsequential. Probably as inconsequential as my sermon would sound to them on Sunday. Good to remember that. Didn’t want to see the news today. Lent seems like such a good time to let the world -- the secular 24/7 world -- go its merry way. For the last fifty Lents, it has always been there when I got back. But I did happen, as I went from one site to another tracking something down (a sermon factoid probably) across a smiling picture of Dick Cheney. The Man Who Will Not Go Away. The money quote underneath: “Obama will be a one-term president.” There is a flaw in the American character. It’s not partisan politics. That’s been around since John Adams. Some of the screeds from back then would still singe the hair on your head. It’s the attention span. It’s like American Idol mated with Jeopardy. Random facts running around singing Mariah Carey songs. Gone instantly. Get rid of the president. What’s for dinner? How ‘bout those Sox? Lent: slow it down. Don’t watch the news. Appreciate that this town has a coffee shop in which I can write. Perk you later.

curious

It may have killed the cat; your mind is another matter, I suppose.

'curiosity' from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

No one writes letters anymore.

        

        In some respects, memory is mental archaeology.                  I now have a dig that is inestimably huge. Potentially infinite. The winds of time ceaselessly sift the sand of this landscape, shifting, always shifting. Further away, the seas churn and swell and worry the contours of the shoreline, changing, always changing. There are bric-a-brac, artifacts, here and there a bone, scattered everywhere.         Some of these things are real, actual, even factual. And others are illusory, chimera. It’s very difficult to separate the two. And then, there is the real with an accretion of the unreal. Of these bones are coral made. Those are the specks of dust turned to pearls.         In physical terms, this dig is the brain. In metaphysical terms, maybe the soul. Choose whatever suits you.         As I approach The Promised Land, I would love to think that I am crossing over that big muddy with Joshua at my side, coming forth to carry me home. But in my dreams, there is a toll booth, a guy named Charon, and instead of a river, there will is a lake. A mist-occluded lake into which Charon and I will disappear on a raft, like Huck and Jim, and only he will return.         I have ample tools for this dig. Boxes of journals, scribbled notes, address books, snapshots, and — very rare these days — letters. There is the gospel, the narrative that I have told myself over the years. But even more importantly, there are the letters. Remember: it wasn’t Jesus who created Christianity. He created a way of life. It took Paul to turn it into Christianity. How did he do it?         Exactly. Letters.

Murano glass

Here is the story of Murano glass

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oh-oh: dunbar's number

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I just noticed, I am one friend shy of Dunbar’s Number. (Of course, that may change after the comment I made concerning yesterday’s senatorial election.) Dunbar’s Number, according to the anthropologist Robert Dunbar, who was clever enough to name the number after himself, has to do with the size of our brains and the number of people we can keep track of. (Yes, I know: ends in a preposition. But “of which we keep track” is pretty stilted.) Dunbar’s number shows up all over the place. In Malcolm Gladwell’s books. In the size of congregations. In the size of tribes. In the number of Martha Coakley’s friends on the planet earth. There’s also a FaceBook Fan site for Dunbar’s number. So I became a fan. And that made 49. What?

i'm twenty minutes out ... of touch

“Up against the dumpster!” That line from the second hour of Day 8 (5:00-6:00 PM) pretty much sums it up. It’s not quite ready to throw away, but 24 has reached its expiration date. As the new (?) intro says: events occur in real time. And real time has, quite apparently, caught up with Jack Bauer. He’s a grandfather. There is the predictable exposition about Jack being an unusual grandfather. (Like we have to be informed of this?) At its inception, 24 perfectly captured the breathless sense of danger and doom that hung in the afterglow of 9/11. We wanted a savior back then. So much that in 2008, we elected one. And then, proceeded to crucify him. Even Katee Sackhoff isn’t enough to salvage the show. Her first entrance is a stunner, but twenty minutes later she’s back to her Starbuck from Battlestar Gallactica, alternately kicking butt and crying into her sleeve. Note to Keifer: Start checking the traffic cams!

billie holiday was right

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Above the fold in the Wall Street Journal today: “Haiti Despairs as Quake Deaths Mount” and “Panel Rips Wall Street Titans.” The dirt poor and the filthy rich. Billie Holiday, “God Bless The Child”:                 Them that’s got shall get                 Them that’s not shall lose                 So the Bible says                 And it still is news. Luke 8.18 “... for to those who have , more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.” Next time someone tells me they’re sure of God’s plan, or that they know what God thinks, I’m going to pull out this picture.

emoticons !!!!!!!!!!

​

I am reasonably sure that I do things that other people find annoying. I can’t tell you what they are. Because if I knew what they were, I think I would make an effort not to do them. Which mean this: those annoying things I do? I’m not aware of them. Emoticons and exclamation points, I find ... annoying. I say that with some trepidation because people that I love, people that I think highly of, people who I know would lend me a hand if I were down, use one or -- !!!! -- both of these in communication. If it weren’t for email or Facebook (Twitter seems curiously immune to these two habits), I wouldn’t know this. I could go through life, running into these folks, and be blissfully unaware they were typographical terrorists. Just a guess here, but I’m pretty sure one of the world’s great advances was when the alphabet replaced pictures. When, instead of painstakingly drawing a picture of your dog, you could just write: “my DOG is dead.” Oh, and by the way, an unhappy smiley face would not make me feel any better about this. Also, I’m not crazy about reading things that move. Moveable type was an enormous leap ahead for Western civilization. But the wonderful thing about moveable type was that it didn’t move. As for exclamation points, perhaps we can think of them this way: they are very lethal, and one shot does the trick. Two, and you’ve just put a bullet in a dead body. For those of you who move into the double-digit zone with exclamation ! points !, I stop reading after exclamation point number 10. The noise is just too loud. Soon, we’ll look at people who overuse italics and people WHO WRITE EMAIL IN ALL CAPITALS.

what's the story?

Yesterday: Listening to Camille Paglia, she of the AK-47 verbal delivery, speaking on world religions and their symbols. As an atheist, she bemoans the loss of religious narratives and, consequently, the inability to understand the great art of the Western canon. [One example: she described how, in a class she was teaching, she had to explain -- this is to college students -- who Moses was.] She did not turn this into a “kids today” argument, which I greatly appreciated. I find it a never-ending source of amazement when adults complain about kids -- teenagers and young adults -- and how this up-and-coming generation will walk us right over a cliff. There are two ideas embedded in here which need to be tweezed out. The first is: who taught this up-and-coming generation? If they don’t know the foundational stories, whose fault is that? If they don’t know Hamlet from omelet or Moses from Moby, it is not because they intentionally wiped these stories from their memory. It’s because they never heard them in the first place. Who didn’t tell them? A mirror would come in handy here. The second idea: somewhere -- I can’t pinpoint it on a timeline, but I suspect it’s much further back than one would think -- another story came along which was much more powerful. For lack of a better name, let’s call it the American dream. The happy marriage of convenience between capitalism and consumerism. Slowly, but with glacial certainty, this has been becoming the foundational story of American culture and, by extension, most of the developed world. Like it or not, it will remain the foundational story until a more powerful idea comes along to replace it. [A general collapse in the global economy would birth another idea.] But for the time being, all those stories about “I was happy playing with a speck of lint and a matchbook cover when I was a kid” are simply nonsense. You were also watching “The Ten Commandments.”

what if church was more like comedy?

On New Year’s Eve, my wife and I went to a comedy show. I hadn’t been to one in the last decade, being content with watching John Stewart and the occasional George Bush press conference. There is something about live comedy. Perhaps the danger? The thin line between living and dying up there all by yourself, no props, no dancing monkeys. Only your wit. When comedy is really good, it may be the greatest of all arts. Because really good comedy flips the human condition on its head and lets us laugh at the gods. We are fragile, life is ultimately tragic. In the end, laughter and love are the only defenses we have. [This is, I think, the gospel message.] All three comedians on the bill were quite good. Their craft was honed. In addition to the standard airport jokes and the weather in Boston jokes, each had some quirky way of looking at the world. We laughed a lot. But we laughed hardest at the things that weren’t the craft, weren’t the rehearsed bits. These were the moments of interaction -- improvised -- between comedian and audience. When the comedian stepped out onto the high wire and started an exchange with a (sometimes willing) member of the audience. These were little moments of transcendence, when art replaced craft, and comedy soared into something else: the creation of a community, a communion, sharing the same feeling, laughing with each other, inhaling and exhaling cathartically. Because we all knew we were in a dangerous place and anything could happen at that moment. Worship is boring, church is boring, because we are in a safe place and we know everything that is going to happen. We have a printed order of worship. No surprises. No improvisation. Just follow the cut-out dance steps on the floor. Worship a predictable God, and you’ll get predictable results.

Fox News: 700 Club? (nod to: Andrew Sullivan)

No comment really necessary. Or, unfortunately, even useful.

how big was the manger?

​

Just me probably, but for virtually my entire life I thought “manger” was synonymous with “stable.” When we sang “Away in a Manger”, I was seeing in my head “Away in a Stable” -- as in makeshift barn, lean-to. In the etymology department, this was low-hanging fruit. Manger. Staring me right in the face: in French, to eat. Mangia in Italian. Duh. And so, a manger is a trough. Sort of a bathtub-shaped place where the hay and oats for the animals would go. Which, if you think about it (as I am right now) makes a lot more sense. In a pinch, not a bad replacement for a crib. Not particularly sanitary, however. Which, when it comes to the Christmas story, the nativity story, is our cause célèbre: sanitize it. Make it sentimental. Questions not to ask: was there any cow dung near by? What did the sheep really smell like? And: do little newborns really like drumming? I am not picking on The Little Drummer Boy on a whim. The Christmas story is filled with characters who have sharp-elbowed their way into this seasonal narrative: Rudolph, Frosty, the Grinch, Charlie Brown. But they, at least, are outside the stable. The Little Drummer Boy is in the stable. Beside the manger, playing a drum. What? Apparently this story (not the song, the story) is a medieval jongleur’s tale about giving the only thing one has to give. In the original, it was a juggler who had no gift, so he juggled. Fair enough. And at least it’s quiet. Sometime today, a baby will be born in Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem. Most likely, he or she, will be poor. With little prospects. And the constant threat of danger. Only a few neighbors will drop by to say hello. Juggle that for a while.

crèched by the weight of tradition

I read yet another op/ed piece, this time in a local newspaper, bemoaning the prohibition of crèche displays on public property. I honestly have no dog in this fight. Or, more accurately, I am betting on both dogs. Yes, I think the nativity scene, despite its wildly inaccurate theology (the magi never consorted with the shepherds), is a nice little touch. Not because it reminds me to be moral or compassionate. (It doesn’t.) But because it reminds me of an idealized Christmas, a mélange of memories cobbled together to create a near-perfect, Bing Crosby, White Christmas. It feels good. It produces nostalgia which, in its Greek origin however, was not necessarily a good thing. Literally, nostalgia means “ache” or “pain” for home. It is, technically, well ... a sickness. That said, I like nostalgia as much as the next person. As for the argument against the use of public land, 100% in favor. The founding fathers got it right: no official religion. Official religion leads to an official god and the next thing you know, Glenn Beck is using Thomas Paine to promote his vision of an official Christianized America. (Paine was an atheist and would have been thrown in a pauper’s grave if not for George Washington.) But back to nostalgia. While the ache of nostalgia may be sweet, it is a dead-end emotion. That is: the only action it leads to is going backwards, grabbing for shards of the past that, no matter how hard you try, you can never glue back together again. And Christmas, despite the gravitational pull of tradition, is about going into the unknown. It is about a birth. And a birth is always risky, fraught with danger. A birth makes one want to do something. For example, to be compassionate, to clothe, to feed. I don’t think plaster figures, no matter how brightly colored, have ever moved anybody to an act of mercy.

Life is faire

The Church Faire conjures up images of earnest people engaged in an earnest pursuit. To most, I imagine, it is a relic of a kinder, gentler time -- the 1950s maybe. When home-made apple pies, books for a buck, knitted sweaters and costume jewelry were the currency of Christmas. I think of the Church Faire as the most subversive, counter-cultural day on the church calendar. Think of it: we reclaim a full Saturday from frenetic month of December. (There is no other day in the entire church year that we do this.) We spread good will, effortlessly. We sell hand-made articles, made by the hands of folks who attend the church. Kids wander around with a few bucks shopping for something for their mom or their dad with a ferocious dedication. There is no sermon, though there is music. There is no reading from Scripture, but there is lived theology. The doors are wide open and all are invited in. Somehow, against all odds, this Faire tradition continues. I think, in part, because it gives us something we wish we could have in worship all the time: a full-bodied, incarnate sense of community. In part, because there are people who are willing to be keepers of the flame, who understand, perhaps even on a subconscious level, that they are engaging in the sacredness of covenant. The covenant that is this: that we walk together. For most of the year, we walk to different drummers and that’s fine. But on Faire day, we all walk to the same beat. The beating heart of community.

Autumn Sonata by John Hamilton

Autumn Sonata by John Hamilton

friends or purpose?

An email from Emergent Village showed up in my Inbox this morning. No, it is not a retail outlet. It is a ... well, it’s hard to describe. It’s a loose confederation of Christians, across denominational lines, trying to figure out where Christianity intersects with postmodernism. (Yes, that is sufficiently pompous and vague, so: www.emergentvillage.com) Usually, I just skim these emails. And, in the event that I click and find myself at YouTube and the video is over 2:30, I don’t watch it. I use early Beatles’ songs as my yardstick: if you can’t say it in two minutes and thirty seconds, then you’re nowhere, man. Well, I watched the video below. Twice. All 4:38s of it. There are any number of wonderful quotes. “Those who know history aren’t afraid of change ...” (I think that was Diana Butler Bass) “... we are more often than not people of doubt who have moments of faith than we are people of faith who have doubts.” (Not sure who that was, but I am definitely stealing that line.) But the line that stopped me dead in my tracks: “We need to make a philosophical shift from the idea that church is a place to make friends over to an idea that church is a place to find a sense of purpose.” This must be a season of hope, because I just felt a twinge of it.

waiting for the carpathia

I read somewhere -- don’t remember where -- that the Titanic would have been better off if, instead of swerving, it hit the iceberg head-on. I have no idea if this is true, but it offers an interesting metaphor. Christianity, in its malleability, has swerved, zig-zagged, veered and tacked to accommodate itself to a consumer culture. (I am very much a part of this.) There are many absurd examples to draw upon, but one will serve: the prosperity gospel, as preached by Joel Osteen. This is what has fallen out of the gash in the side, what has spewed from the bowels of the ship? That the gospel is about getting yours? Why aren’t we rolling around on the floor laughing at this? To say the gospel is about getting rich is like saying Ulysses is a guide book to Dublin. And yet, in its brilliant and startling contradiction -- not paradox, contradiction -- it goes on uncontested. It goes uncontested, perhaps, because mainstream Christianity is in lifeboats, singing old hymns, pretending they are still on a cruise ship. There is applause from the lifeboat every time a signal flare goes up, mistaking it for yet another triumphalist celebration. As the minutes tick off, there is new meaning to the words God’s frozen chosen. No sense in redecorating the lifeboat. Better to huddle together. The signal has been sent to the Carpathia. Now, there is only the waiting. Which is no small task.

Threadspinners

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        Threadspinners. Weavers. Jigsaw puzzle makers.         Archaeologists. Geologists.         There must be a story. Otherwise, only solipsism. Collecting the shards, the little pieces of experience that have alchemized into memory (true or not) -- how can we live without that? Without the story, there is only madness. A random set of pictures with no “I.”         Why even look back? Turned Lot’s wife into a salt tablet. (Will have to look into that story a bit more.)         And, to look back, on -- of all things -- the 60s?         Lame.         Who cares?         I found a site today with several photographs from the late 60s, epicenter photographs from Berkeley and other Bay Area sites. Black and white. First thought: creative explosion after pent-up 50s. Perhaps even World War II. Something needed to be released -- life itself perhaps. A wild garden, weeds and flowers. Crazy.         Now, to someone looking today, these pictures would look like Depression-era breadline pictures looked to me. Something that was real, but had absolutely no applicability to my own life. I remember looking at Depression-era pictures and thinking: “So. That happened.” There was no resonance. It could have happened in alternate universe for all I cared.

advent moths

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I’m sure there is a perfectly logical explanation: there always is. But I say: never let science get in the way of a good metaphor, never let logic override the happily coincidental. These moths started appearing, on windows and glass doors, sometime last week. Any place there was a source of light, they were there. Little wisemen following their star. Where did they come from? Why now? It has been unseasonably warm, no killing frost, and here we are already into December. The ground, perhaps, has issued them, birthed them, in this strange season. They come from a warm November: harbinger. They come seeking light and, it would seem, warmth. They gather, like a congregation, on the glass, Wings spread, praying as angels must pray. Terror and beauty. Revulsion is the first reaction when the lens exposes this presence. But then: amazement. These wings, veined instruments of flight. Light, weightless. Unmakeable. Only created. The billions of accidents and permutations that have led to this moment. This brief, brief moment. Soon, the frost. And death. Only to rise, from the ground, next year.

reconstructing the deconstruction

​ A photo archiving project has led to this. No, not this picture specifically -- although this picture as well as any highlights the process. In this house where we live, this suburban Garrison colonial, this place where we have lived for nigh on twenty years now, where the kids grew up, there are boxes and envelopes and folders and containers with the effluvia of daily life, even the dead art of physical communication (letters, postcards, notes). It is, in a way like an archaeological dig. The shards of pottery and the scribbled drawings of a lost civilization. Although that civilization is but a few years old. Filling in the missing pieces. What were we thinking? This picture, above: A fellow named Chuck Arris. Here we are at Boston University, late winter of 1969. This would have been after we got our grades which totaled 3.75. Together. I had a 2.0, Chuck a 1.75. We were draft bait. Our grades would have been a direct reflection of the amount of time we spent studying. Which was but a small percentage of the time we spent drinking and carousing. Not in a wild way. No: worse. We only were learning how to carouse, just having escaped the tentacles of the Jesuits (Chuck) and the Christian Brothers of Ireland (me.) Unfortunately for he two of us, we did learn.

Irish proverb / music

Irish proverb: The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens