Just wondering

Unable to compose the planned blog post on the role of rhetoric in politics, I now share with you some things I'm wondering about...

Was the 1990s America's "Golden Age"?

What will ultimately be remembered as more significant in the history of our country the 2000 election or the attack of 2001?

Are libraries better served by shushing conversations or encouraging them?

Should we spend our time learning lots of different things or absorbing one thing really deeply?

Why aren't evolutionist more confident that life can adapt successfully to a warmer earth?

Why did the Romans value rhetoric so much? What is the relationship between rhetoric and cynicism? Do we undervalue the rhetorical role of our elected officials? ...

Why it is Better to Study the Bible in a Group Setting

Brief thought:

I think that after the many studies I have been in, it is better to study the Bible with a group of people. I am not saying that we should stop having personal Bible studies, but I am saying that maybe they should be in conjunction with a group study.


By studying with others, we are not allowed to wallow in our pessimism and doubt for long without someone having another idea just as valid as ours that contradicts it. Sometimes it's good to wallow, but usually only for for a certain period of time.

Also others are there to correct our whacked-out ideas. Likewise we are there to help others.

Studying alone allows our minds to get off track and stay off track. I do believe that the Holy Spirit is involved but what if he is involved by using others to aide us?

We need other people.

Snow, cold and music

I don't usually listen to music on my way to work. Well--I guess I don't really listen to music any time unless it's on a movie, or a TV show or someone else is just playing it and I happen to be there.

It's not that I don't like music. I do. It was a big part of my life from 6th grade until my second year of college. I played the tuba and trombone.

But I don't choose to listen to it on a regular basis. If it weren't for others in my life, I probably would not listen. My students enjoy listening to music when they are working on their assignments. And my wife likes listening to music.

So whatever she listens to, I usually listen to.

Anyhow, I was planning on listening to an audiobook this morning as I walked to work. I walked up the stairs to the Metra platform and as I waited, I got out my ipod, put the headphones in, and turned it on. My wife put a few songs on there for me.

Snow was coming down. It was cold. There was not much wind and the snowflakes were quite large. Cue the music.

And it was like I was transported to an emotional scene in a movie. Snowflakes dropping all around. As each snowflake landed on the platform it would immediately melt. Music was playing loudly in my headphones. No one else could hear it. I was alone. (Is this why teenagers put on headphones? To be alone and in their own world?) I was waiting for the Metra to zoom me off to school, but for those 4 minutes I was engulfed in a world where all was perfect. I was existing in a perfect world. Perfect in the sense that I felt it was perfect.

Sometimes I think that emotions are what life is about. I know this is not true. But sometimes I feel like I don't feel anything. I want to feel.

This morning on that platform, life was good. Great. Perfect. I was standing outside with snow coming down on me, cold, and listening to a song.

Come Inside... its Cold

"This is Merchandise Mart"

I'm really happy that I had this meeting downtown this morning. I don't get to walk downtown in the cold as much as I used to. I can't believe that Jake wrote about crossing that bridge last week. I totally get what he means. This is gonna be awesome, its about 10 blocks to my meeeting. I love getting off the train early to walk outside.

Man, Its cold out here. I'm gonna shift over to La Salle so I can see the board of trade as I'm walking downtown. Here it is, come on in. Sit there, just there, behind my eyeballs. Do you feel that, the frost crystalyzing inside your nose. Don't pull up the scarf. Ok, relax the shoulders, and all the muscles, stop fighting the cold. Feel it. Really feel it. let is get right into your chest. Ok, now take a deep breath. really deep. use my nose and my mouth, YEAH! feel all the snot and moisture in your nose freeze right up.

Oh man, Steve, I wish you could feel this. You're down there in Georgia, and don't even know how awesome winter can be. Look up there at that statue on top of the Board of Trade. What is it. Is it a grotesque idol? A symbol of worship to money and man's greed. Or wait, is it a picture of mankind striving against the world, against circumstance, against the very curse that God has laid on us. What!, is that blashpemy! NO! Did he expect us to take it lying down? To just roll over and say. "Well earth, if you won't yield crops to me without effort than I'll just die" NO! I'm gonna work. HARD.

Ok, now we're walking, and the blood's pumping, and the cold on the outside is at war with the fire on the inside, and the no man's land is about an inch beneath my skin. Much closer to my heart than it usually is. But at least its still a battleground. All of the dead, lying cold in their graves, they've stopped fighting. What am I gonna do, wrap myself up tighter, try and ignore this wintery blast? No, you can wrap me tight when I'm six feet under the ground. I'm gonna fight this cold with blood, and life.

God! Why can't anyone else see this from in here. I'm never gonna be able to right all this down and really capture what I mean. About half way now. Don't really even feel the cold anymore, except on my nose, and my cheeks. Listen to that, thousands of cars. A million marching humans all around me, just strugling? Is it futile? Yes. Is it noble? Yes.

Man I love this. I don't get it. I don't understand why someone wouldn't want to live a thousand years on this beautiful earth. People are so quick to comfort the grieving. They say, death is natural. Fuck that! Death is wrong. I feel it in the fiber of my being. I hate it. I absolutely detest it. Jesus Wept.

I love this cold. Went camping just a couple of weeks ago. And for about 30 minutes, I felt it: this cold is deadly. You can't just lie down. You can't! I love walking it it. I love knowing that walking it is keeping me alive. How did I ever survive without winter? Winter teaches us. Yes, it can be depressing. So what! You can't be happy all the time. Its not about being happy. Its about being winter, so suck it up and quit your whining.

Large coffee.
Don't let it cool. Come on, take that little sip, and swallow too fast. DANG! Ouch! Hot Hot HOT. That was dumb. Don't do that again. Ahhhh. Right in the belly. Yum.

A healthy world

The shootings at NIU are just the latest piece of evidence that we live in a sick world. I have been thinking about the health of the world all week after reading an essay by Wendell Berry last week-end.

Berry argues that we must attend to the health of our country and by country he means literally our dirt, if we wish to improve the health of our human communities. Here is a quote:

The health of nature is our primary ground of hope - if we can find the humility and wisdom to accept nature as our teacher. -- Berry, Sex Economy, Freedom, & Community p. 11

Why is the health of nature the ground of our hope? First b/c the continuation of our lives are dependent upon the air, water, and food we harvest from the world. I doubt we truly understand how contingent our lives are. But second the flourishing of the natural world is a source of beauty, joy, and intellectual stimulation. Nature can affect us with wonder and tenderness, or it can call forth courage and fortitude. It also challenges our minds to understand its complexity. Third, nature teaches us our limitations. This is often unwelcome lesson. Often the heat or cold of the natural world assail us, the pace of the natural world wearies us, and the decay of the natural world frightens us.

We chafe at these limits and attempt to isolate and overcome them. We insulate ourselves from the uncomfortable temperatures, we seek diversions that happen on our schedule and our under our control, finally and most decisively when come up with all types of schemes to deny, or actually reverse the decay we see in nature. Schemes, that draw little from the patterns of growth (often slow and difficult) and renewal (usually involving transition to new generations) nature provides. But unfortunately our pretensions at limitlessness often reduce the diversity and vitality of the natural world leaving it ugly and dull and denying our selves the joy and beauty once found there. And of course all of this ultimately threatens to poison the very essential sustenance upon which we (still) depend.

Maybe none of this is very new to you. This week as I've chewed on this I've been reminded of another role that nature fills. The role of divine revelation. Once considered God's second book, I think our increasing distance from nature, indeed posturing ourselves as nature's antagonist, is also taking us further from nature's God. I fear our distance from the created world only compounds our difficultly understanding a God whose plan takes generations to bring to fruition, who promises salvation through suffering, and who promises us an abundant life.

Finally, circling back around to NIU. I don't think you can blame our estrangement from the natural world for the crime, but if we seek to make crimes like this more rare I think we need to be open to asking some big questions. Especially questions about who we are as humans and how we are related to this world around. Leading to questions about what really satisfies us and allows us to live with joy.

My name is John and I am a pack rat. Or, how do you know when to stop a hobby?

Hello. My name is John and I am a pack rat. I keep everything. Everything. Receipts. Old letters. Old emails. Pictures. Things I've written. Things I've read. Things I want to read.

So when I have a hobby, I jump in. All the way. And I tend to keep it around for a long time.

Take homebrewing for instance. We were at a Waccamaw Pottery that was going out of business a few years ago and they had what looked to be some sort of can that one could use to make more beer. I had recently discovered that beer was not evil and that it tasted pretty good too. So I bought it.

There were three cans of dark syrup. I read the cans. I then read the intructions online. Mr. Beer. Mr. Beer Home Brewery to be more precise. That was the name of the company that had produced the three cans that I now owned. But I only had the malted syrup and I needed something for the beer to ferment in and so I found a bucket. I brewed my first batch and it was not so great. Then one of our neighbors had a yardsale and they had the real Mr. Beer kit, with the fermenter and bottles. Sweet!!

I proceeded to dive further and further into the world of homebrewing. I bought more buckets, "recycled" from trash piles, read books, shopped ebay, went to scrap metal yards, went to stores going out of business. I purchased cornelius (pepsi) kegs. I purchased 8 gallon tamale pots. I made a lauter tun to sparge my grains. I bought a small refrigerator for the kegs. Pretty soon, all this equipment took up a lot of room.

It also took up a lot of time. Whenever my wife was occupied on a Saturday, I would take advantage of the situation by having a brew day. If I made a 5 gallon batch from scratch (all-grain), it would take 8-9 hours. The beer was good. But it wasn't GREAT. I wanted it to taste like Bells', like Goose Island, like New Glarus. It didn't.

And I had other hobbies. I started doing more backpacking. I got into that. But I also kept brewing. One only has so much space in one's basement. One only has so much time.

I liked brewing. It made me feel like I was producing a product that I could enjoy. Others liked it more than I did. It was fun. But I wasn't great. And it took up entire days to brew, and then more time to transfer, and hours to bottle. And then more days of waiting -- usually two weeks after bottling.

I made an IPA following the best recipe for extract brewing. I used the best yeast. I followed the direction meticulously. In the end, it was good. Maybe even pretty good. But not great.

So . . . . . finally, after many years and many batches and many bottles, it is now time for the pack rat to clear out space in the basement. I need the room down there and I can buy a GREAT beer for $9 a six pack. I can buy awesome beer for $12 a bottle.

I have other hobbies and maybe someday, I'll return to brewing, but for now it is time to stop a hobby. Farewell.



(As I write this, I am corresponding with a gentleman from Milwaukee who is going to purchase all my brewing supplies.)

Memory and Consciousness

I often hear people tell me that they don't remember much of their childhood. That before a certain date or period in their life, they just don't have much there. My usual response to this is to wait about 15 minutes in the conversation until that topic has passed and then ask questions that evoke memories from when someone is young. Usually, I'll talk about a cartoon or something and then see if we can talk about the stuff somebody did during or after the cartoon. Thundercats works particularly well. Its very easy to disprove the claim that a person doesn't remember their childhood.

Then, there is the issue of whether or not the memories that we have of childhood, or yesterday for that matter, are constructed. Certainly to some degree they are tainted and filtered through our current conciousness, but how much do the core facts change?

I'll leave the theoretical and academic discussion for another time. I'm interested in a few very practical questions. In particular, I've always had, and still have a burning desire to share the experience of my consciousness with another person. Words are such a poor means of communicating internal reality. First, both parties can have no guarantee that the words being used are understood the same way by both parties. Second, describing a total set of senses, impressions and details would be very hard. Third, that which is communicated is necessarily conscious.

Now what do I mean by saying I've "always had" this feeling? Well, more accurately, I remember thinking about consciousness (albeit without the same complexity) from an extremely young age. And further, I firmly believe that these memories are not constructed because I have memories of these memories. This iterative recogitation of recogitation goes back in a chain every several months all the way to the age I was 5 or 6. This is probably very weird. Not many 6 year olds are concerned with consciousness, nor of memory. But, hey there it is.

In particular, I remember just before 1st grade, thinking about why I am "me" That is, why doesn't mommy, or brother, or grandpa feel what I am feeling. Why when I tell my arm to move, does my arm move, and not Matt's. Why can't Matt make my arm move (without hitting me). Oh, "me" is different from "not me" ok. where is my GI Joe...

Another moment, I remember walking from my house to the bus stop in 2nd grade. I remember the hill of the house next to mine on the way up to the intersection where we stood. I remember stopping and saying. "I will always remember this moment. And stopping at this moment. And remembering to remember this moment."

Also, I remember making that same assertion at other times. Yet, I can't remember some of the times I made that assertion, only that I had made it several times, and that some of the times I had made the assertion didn't stick, although the memory of failing the assertion did.

My next post is going to be an attempt to share as much of the full experience of cold whether running as I can. I've picked that experience because it is incredibly rich with both internal and external sensations, and those senses are more important than the conscious thought experienced during the activity.

Foxhole theology

Look down upon the earth - a beautiful swirling kaleidoscope of clouds and water and dirt and snow. Come closer - see these masses of land - unchanging save for the top few inches which scroll through an endless progression of colors - green orange brown white green orange brown white. Look closer - see villages rise, grow, die. There is life here - life slowly reshaping this world. Ah! Slow down! Look here! A flash of light - and another and another. All along an ugly scar of dirt the lights flicker and flash. Listen carefully - a sound like endless thunder runs up and down this scar. My how it roars, like a mortally wounded lion. Here, here - let us go all the way down. Here is a building of some sort - made of stone. The entrance is half-buried with dirt from some titanic explosion. A crack, just enough to admit a little light and noise, let us enter - quietly now. Hush - many men are here in the dark, two hunched in the corner. The others laying on the floor in attitudes of supreme indifference.

"What was that? They are coming!"

"Listen you fool - the bombardment is falling all around - front and back. No one is coming. Not yet"

The bombs fall closer. The world of sound dies for a moment, leaving only pain. How long? It roars and roars. The earth shakes - the world is being unmade. More pain. Then sight dies - all that remains is a grey dusty featureless void. Time passes.

"It is moving on - at last"

"This is my first time in a bunker under such an inferno"

"We are lucky - the boche built this dugout well"

"If only they had dug deeper"

A shrug

"You are with the second company?"

"Yes - how did you know?"

"I saw you when our companies ware billeted together at Minervois. I saw you at the old chapel"

"A beautiful place. I found a pew near the niche with the statue of St Domitius where the sounds of the front were almost inaudible. That fat old priest thought me very pious. He mewed endlessly about my devotion. The silly fool. I'll tell you this - in '14 I learned to sleep on the march; last month I learned to sleep on my knees. Still - I found some peace there, if not the peace the priest thought he was doling out."

"Bessette"

"Eh? What's that?"

"The priest - his name is Father Bessette. You shouldn't speak of him so."

"Why!? He's a charlatan and a profiteer - no better than the factory owner that makes shoes which fall apart at the first sign of rain!"

"You've misunderstood him. Father Bessette offers words of life, and hope. These are real treasures, especially in such a place"

The world ends for a moment. Dust and the stench of cordite fill the room.

Choking, the sergeant spits out one word "Hope!"

Dust settles, minutes pass.

"Yes, hope. Here, under bombardment, when the world shrinks to almost nothing - just the pain in your ears and the retching in your stomach and the fear in your heart. Hope remains"

"Hope? You mean some willful ignorance of your chances out here."

"I understand all too well my chances of seeing tomorrow. That's not what I speak of. Call it perspective. Or understanding. An understanding that all this vileness raging around us is just a shadow of what is truely real. When the world disappears like that, you see that everything we've been taught, everything we see, everything we think is so important - all of it is so petty. Just a shade away from illusion"

"See - this is what I was talking about. Your dear father tells you what you want to hear, and you give him a little tithe or tip. He sells false comfort. I am serious - tell me how this is different than the scum selling the government helmets made from pot metal"

"Ah! You only see what you want to see"

"Me! What does your hope buy you? How does your perspective shield you? Does it ward off bullets? Does it keep the shells from bursting over your head? It does nothing but coax men to rush over the top - to death and maiming."

"Look. The point I care about not is not the benefits of hope - of having something firm to grasp onto when life shakes and bucks like some wild horse trying to be rid of you. Look deeper - if anything can be saved from your time in this bunker, it is to take advantage of this time, when we are stripped of everything - everything but God Himself."

"Ach! Here we are, buried under concrete and steel and dirt - half-interred with a room full of dead germans. Outside, these germans' brothers search for us with high-explosive and shrapnel and gas and machine guns. It is madness, is it not?"

"Aye - no ordinary madness"

"Exactly! It is extravagant! What intelligence could act with such callousness?"

"Well, get it out. I mean it - say it"

"You've been out there for some time no doubt. I'm sure you've seen the same things - and done the same things I have. That old book says that God once killed the whole world over for sin."

"The great flood"

"Yes - the very story. Imagine the sin going on all around us. Imagine the sins we each carry about us. Is the cannoneer loading shells that rip and tear any less guilty than I, who have..."

"Brother, I understand"

"No you don't. Not if you retain a shred of self-love. If it were only me, if I were the only villain, if I were just Cain, then perhaps I could forgive God for his carelessness. But it's millions of us. Millions! If there were a god, he'd stop all this - even if it meant killing me. Killing all of us. I've killed Abel. When he sent the flood he killed the innocent to deal with the guilty. Why won't God return the innocent the favor? Why won't God save the innocent from us? From me?"

The two men sit in silence for some time. The barrage has grown quieter

"They will be coming soon"

"Perhaps. I'll dig out this loophole"

"Don't dig too far"

No one comes. The barrage returns. Twelve kilometers away the german gun crews are starting to drop from exhaustion. One gun crew loads a cannon they have nicknamed "Satan".

"Is that all?"

"What's that?"

"Is that all? Will you give up so easily? Are you so embarrassed by your own God you demur to give a defense? I hope you fight for France with more devotion"

"I'm not sure He needs me to defend him."

"Coward! Fine! Then I need you to defend him. I need ... some hope ... some hope I will be saved ... or punished"

"The truth is, I've been in your shoes. The first time I saw men die in a gas attack I hated God - really hated him. Then, I was at Verdun - at the beginning."

"You are a rare specimen then! Not many lived through that bombardment"

"I had a lot of time to think. No - think isn't the right word. Something much deeper, much older that thought."

Satan is ready. The gun commander triggers the rusting device and a shell begins it's ascent.

"I don't have proof of God, not in the way the old theologians tried to make him appear out of a series of arguments and contradictions and proofs - like a specter at a seance. But I have worked out where He is in all of this war and evil. I understand how to love him amidst all the pain"

The shell halts it's climb, perched for a silver moment amongst the clouds. Then it is cast down from the heavens like lightning, a shining terrible foe.

"Consider that infinitesimal plane where the ocean touches the sky. Now, that place is the human soul. Consider the depths of the ocean - my - listen to that shell, this one will be close"

The shell strikes the bunker, strikes deeply. Concrete vaporizes, steel bends, flesh perishes.
The german soldiers are coming soon. They will retake this line of trench. Next week a notice will appear in the French papers about a successful raid on the enemy in the Somme sector. The Germans will rebuild the bunker and eventually hold this line for another nine months. So many little stories up and down this line of trenches, no?.

Let go of time. Let it slide free. See? The war was not so long after all. Look at how the scars of the land heal. Life returns to no-man's land. Peace.

That one bridge

My favorite bridge is the one over the river at Monroe. The bridge is made of wood & iron, threading a stout line between water and air. It's all very elemental. In some way I can't articulate, I feel like crossing a bridge (on foot - any other mode doesn't count) is one of those activities that is quintessentially human. Like eating cooked meat or singing or witnessing childbirth, when you cross a bridge (especially an elemental one) you are somehow sharing an experience with our vast cloud of ancestors. So crossing that bridge I feel doubly grounded - grounded in the earth and grounded in humanity