Saturday, May 31, 2008

Quotable: Living Will

In Anything We Love Can be Saved: A Writer's Activism by Alice Walker. From a speech given in 1990 at a festival honoring author Zora Neale Hurston, on why it no longer upsets Alice that her heroine lies in an unknown, unmarked grave:
"But what is a dead body, what are bones, even of a loved one? If you mix Zora's bones with those of Governor Bilbo, for many years an especially racist oppressor of black people in Mississippi and, psychologically, of the whole country, the untrained eye would not be able to tell them apart. And nature, in its wisdom, has made sure that the one thing required of all dead things is unfailingly accomplished. That requirement is that they return to the earth, which in fact, even as living bodies, they have never left. It matters little, therefore, where our bodies finally lie, and how or whether their resting places are marked--I speak now of the dead, not of the living, who have their own needs and project those onto the dead--for our ultimate end, blending with the matter of the earth, is inevitable and universal. I hope, myself, to become ash that is mixed with the decomposing richness of my compost heap, that I may become flowers, trees, and vegetables. It would please me to present the perfect mystery of myself, prior to being consumed by whomever, or whatever, as rutabaga or carrot. Sunflower or pecan tree. Eggplant."

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Quotable: Why Bother?

From the article "Why Bother?" by Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine, April 20, 2008:

"But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."

Monday, May 19, 2008

Quotable: What Answer . . . ?

from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry:
"What answer can human intelligence make to God's love for the world? What answer, for that matter, can it make to our own love for the world? If a person loved the world--really loved it and forgave its wrongs and so might have his or her own wrongs forgiven--what would be next?"

Friday, May 09, 2008

Fasten Your Seatbelts

April 14, 1912 – We’re unsinkable. And besides, we don’t believe in icebergs. Full speed ahead!!

October 29, 1929 – What goes up must come down.

February 14, 1945 – Dresden is burning.

December 12, 2005 – On the authority of the U.S. Energy Department, we are sorry to inform you that last year’s figures were mistaken and oil prices will not be going down to $33 after all. But please believe that they will remain steady at a non-inflation-adjusted sticker price of $50 a barrel for the next 25 years. Scout’s honor.

May 9, 2008 – $124+ a barrel. Nearly double the record-setting prices from two years ago. Slated to go up another 50% in the next 6 months or so.

This is not going to be pretty.

Silly, silly Venezuela. We’re just minding our own business, taking our oil out from under their country, and they expect us to pay for it. The nerve.

Love is hate. We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Today I am wondering, and not for the first time—why did God create petroleum in the first place?

And who will guard the guardians?

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Quotable: How Good is Your Glue?

(I’m procrastinating . . .)

When gardening, I am often struck by how wondersome the whole process is and how little of the work I actually do. Transplanting lettuce seedlings yesterday called to mind this passage, which I keep bookmarked in my copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Enjoy.
“Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?

You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted—just a replica—it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk in the ground halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them of clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex, the exposed portions (closed cone) reddish brown, often wrinkled, armed on the back with a small reflexed prickle, which curves towards the base of the scale”? When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the replica limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella.

You are a starling. I’ve seen you fly through a longleaf pine without missing a beat.”

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Catechism II: Isms

(I know that I am thoroughly and vocally opinionated and fond of being right so I put myself at risk of some hypocrisy here. Please bear with me.)

Being finite and human, which most of us are, it is easy to insulate and forget that we play a role in many cause-effect relationships, and we are fond of assuming that our version of the world is the only one. This universal human tendency gets worse when one is a member of an elite class of any flavor, because of course your position gives you a sufficiently privileged perspective from which to call the shots. If you don’t know something, it must not be important. You have the luxury of avoiding knowledge of certain things in order to prevent them from becoming important to you. You are entitled to not being made uncomfortable. You have a natural right to evaluate, influence, and control other people but they have no business reciprocating. (Who do they think they are, anyway?)

This is true not just of politicians and business magnates, but academics and church leaders as well. Quandaries of interpretation, abstract theological musings, responses and (over)reactions to contextual circumstances, or interpersonal and factional grudge matches tend to land somewhere in the untidy realm of reality, playing out powerfully in human lives whether or not those in the ivory tower pay attention to the fallout. Paradigms trickle down haphazardly piecemeal to the masses, losing any sense of nuance, process, and ambiguity in their origins. Or, worse, an erroneous or oversimplified approach to an issue gets deliberately packaged and delivered as The Truth.

Inherited ideologies are dangerous. If one does not know where one’s ideas come from, chances are one believes that it ‘just is so,’ and one is not capable of defending what one believes except by shutting out evidence and arguments for all other options. To open things up for discussion would be to betray The Truth, and changing positions, budging even a little would require shaking the very foundations of reality. (Forget embracing new paradigms or, heaven forbid, repenting.)

We are conditioned from the cradle to perceive the world in certain ways, and all education is to some degree re-education. No one comes to a situation un-formed, and many of the formative influences bombarding us in are daily lives are fallen, causing our perceptions of ourselves and our surroundings to be de-formed. We can learn to identify these to forces in order to counteract them—discernment and re-formation. But we will never be able to do this completely even for ourselves, let alone when we are teaching or learning from people whose stories we do not know. So we need to pay attention and ask ourselves why anyone believes or acts the way they do.

What ‘isms’ “colonize your imagination?” (Phrase coined by Stanley Hauerwas or Sam Wells, I think). Who paid for the version of reality you are being fed? Who profits from ideological enforcement of the status quo? What would you stand to lose by letting new ideas change you? Ignorance may be bliss, but is it innocence? At what point are we morally responsible for what we choose or pretend not to know?

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Catechism: How do we ‘know’?

11 days left in 19th grade. More than enough to do, less than enough inclination to be diligent about it. Unfortunately, being interested in what I am reading does not necessarily translate into being efficient. More often the reverse. It is against both my religion and my personal nature to compartmentalize anything, and the more I am affected by whatever I am reading, remembering, hearing, or seeing, the more likely I am to spin off on tangents and mull over them for eons. I am focusing, really, just on several things other than page 93. (What follows is highly relevant to Christian Ethics, I promise. And the New Testament, Global Economics, and Strategic Management of Non-Profit Organizations, at least indirectly.)

Seminary has given me many ideas and opinions, some answers (or at least articulate statements about my ‘working theology’), and lots of new questions. It has been a process of un-learning and reconsidering as much as anything. Enduring, becoming, being refined. The more I study, the more I become aware of how much responsibility one has as a minister and scholar. We’re not just dealing in ideas here. Many different people contributed to the traditions that formed me (for better or worse). How I think, speak, write, and live will in turn influence the people in my life in ways that I cannot foresee or control. It’s daunting and makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

Where do our notions about ‘how things are’ come from, and how (by what influences) do they change? How does one distinguish between learning and indoctrination? What is the purpose of knowing, and how does knowing relate to being and doing?

How can one know one’s mind and speak one’s mind without being afraid to change one’s mind? How to maintain a healthy degree of humility about convictions of faith and worldview without falling off into relativism? How to be confident without being inflexible? How to be principled without being judgmental? How to be uncertain, conflicted, or in process without using ambiguity as an excuse for thoughtlessness or inaction? How does one honorably represent one’s thoughts while being hospitable to someone else’s?

How can I get better at asking the right sorts of questions in conversation so that I both make space for someone to speak on their own terms and help them think about things in a way they haven’t before? Am I too quick to interject with ‘answers’ rather than listening and responding thoughtfully? When to just listen and acknowledge what has been said? How can I learn to see people for who they are and appreciate them as-is, accepting frustrations and disappointments, expecting that people will surprise me, giving people freedom to change? How well do I allow people to know me?

Whatever I don’t know, about knowing or anything else, I do know that the learning process is fundamental to being, becoming, and remaining fully human. And the fully human life is not a spectator sport. Whether or not we have a clear sense of direction at any given time, we are all actors and every role is important. Knowledge of God, of people, of information, ideas, and skills are all interrelated and should infuse and transform how we play.