We have survived another winter season.
Today is baseball's Opening Day. Six games are scheduled.
Let's hope Old Man Winter doesn't get in the way.
PS: In case you didn't notice, the Chicago Cubs are now tied for first place. But that's okay- they don't play until tomorrow.
March 31 - The 53rd Academy Awards. The ceremonies, which were presided over by Johnny Carson, were originally scheduled for the previous day but were postponed due to the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
Best Picture: Ordinary People
Actor: Robert De Niro - Raging Bull
Actress: Sissy Spacek - Coal Miner's Daughter
Supporting Actor: Timothy Hutton - Ordinary People
Supporting Actress: Mary Steenburgen – Melvin and Howard
March 30 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C. hotel by John Hinckley, Jr. Two police officers and Press Secretary James Brady are also wounded.
I heard there was some controversy going on again about a president waging some kind of war action in Libya. This time both right and left got kind of upset about it for all kinds of reasons. Sure, some were supporting it, but most didn't want anything to do with it. That of course happened after all kinds of people criticized the same president for not doing anything earlier in the crisis.
Now he stands up and says we have to do it.
Remember? He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Well, it makes no difference in the long run, I am afraid, whether one is a Democrat or Republican, right-wing or left-wing. There will always be a reason for wars. That's human nature.
Or maybe more to the point- it's human politics.
It doesn't matter whether it was Bill Clinton or Barack Obama; Bush 1 or Bush 2.
It's just presidents doing what presidents do.
I mentioned yesterday the talk by author Kent Nerburn from last week. He spent a little time talking about telling stories (of which he is a master!) He talked about once being told that philosophy was
stories with all the juice squeezed out.He went on to say that stories are essential to people and their self-identities. Which is why stories are neither fact nor fiction- they are far more important than that. Jesus' parables are perhaps the best examples in history of the truth of that. When asked many a question, Jesus would answer with a parable- a story- that was far more real and profound than simply a bunch of facts or expository sermon.
As the pastor was preaching about the Samaritan woman this morning she connected a bit of theology and action for me. It went simply like this:
The woman at the well first comes to meet Jesus as a man, a human being. Only as she talks to him and he enlightens her does she come to know him as the Savior.Not a great new insight, but an interesting connection for me. My response was simply:
No wonder so much of what we call evangelism doesn't work. We try to skip the first step.That first step is for people, including ourselves, to come to know Jesus as Jesus of Nazareth, one of us, and then to know him as Jesus the Christ. We often, instead, try to prove why we need a savior, why Jesus IS the savior, and what that means. Most of the time it is only after we get to know Jesus that we can come to know him as Christ.
Our local library had an author visit last Sunday from Minnesota's own Kent Nerburn. He was here to talk about his latest book, The Wolf at Twilight which I read a year ago.
It was an interesting afternoon as I got to hear some of the background of the story and how Nerburn wants to help walk with us non-Indians into a culture that would be important for us to understand. He has had his history of detractors that he, as a white man, can't speak for the Native Americans. He has wrestled with how to portray himself in his books in a way that can be helpful.
I think he has done an excellent job. He can, I believe, help us in the midst of our own white naivete to open more fully to the spirit of the land that was here long before us. The Indians certainly were in touch with that and can be a guide if we will be open.
March 25- 63rd Academy Awards.
Best Picture: Dances With Wolves
Actor: Jeremy Irons – Reversal of Fortune
Actress: Kathy Bates – Misery
Supporting Actor: Joe Pesci – Goodfellas
Supporting Actress: Whoopi Goldberg – Ghost
Take the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. Why it was only a week ago that it was the top story. News programs, news channels, news junkies all tried to outdo each other in making sure we knew what was going on. Why, it even knocked Charlie Sheen off the top of the news.
Then, alas, along comes the Libyan air strikes, led by France and the US. Suddenly war is big news.
Sure, within a few weeks the newsmen will return to Japan to sum up how things have been going. For a short period the Japanese catastrophes will be back in our consciousness.
Depending, of course, if some other BIG story comes along and has to push it back.
We have become insatiable. Or perhaps the news channels have. I used to be a news junkie. I never wanted to miss Huntley-Brinkley (that was NBC many years ago), Walter Cronkite or the latest issues of Newsweek or Time. I devoured them, filling up on news across the board.
Today I skim the Yahoo! News site a couple times a day, see NBC Nightly News a couple times a week and sometimes look past the first page of the local newspaper. I catch The Daily Show when I can. I never watch CNN, MSNBC or Fox.
Am I well-informed? Not in the least. I am overloaded and tired of the BIG story of the week, day, or hour. I don't know whether we are better off for it all or not. Ignorance about the world is NOT bliss, but I'm not sure a steady diet of hype and over-the-top ADHD reporting is healthy either.
Yes, the BIG stories are often BIG. I just need to mention Egypt, Japan and Libya to illustrate that point. But I am afraid we are losing our sense of perspective.
I was sitting in my computer room/study the other evening and my glance headed toward one of the bookshelves. Probably because I have become more aware of aging recently for a number of reasons, I looked at the shelves and realized that there's a lot of my life history up there. Not so much as a biography but as the things that have inspired and guided me at different times and places.
First, up in the left-hand corner a small collection of Sierra Club books:
In Wildness is the Preservation of the World
The Place No One Knew
Grand Canyon of the Living Colorado
Navajo Wildlands
Gentle Wilderness and the classic
On the Loose.
It was through these books that my wilderness life was piqued, planted, and fertilized. My ecological awareness and commitment to nature and the awesome power of wilderness came alive thanks to these remarkable collections of writing and photography, two of my loves since I was young.
On the same shelf, deepening that awareness are a number of field guides for trees, birds, flowers, and weather. Loren Eiseley, most famous for the Star Thrower story, but also a brilliant naturalist essayist, and Steve Van Matre's Acclimatizing books round out the top of my life.
Right below them are books about the two wilderness areas that have most personally impacted me-
And I have just "discovered" Anat Cohen, a remarkable young jazz clarinetist. In spite of some of the great jazz clarinetists of the past, (Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Eddie Daniels, etc.) the clarinet has faded away in recent years in jazz. That's too bad. Here's hoping Cohen can reverse that.
A video with Paquito Rivera:
I apologize. I got ahead of myself. I didn't miss the beginning of spring- I put it a whole day ahead of itself. For some reason I thought yesterday was the day. So it goes. It is spring!
I have just finished one of those books that is not common or everyday. It is the work of a remarkable storyteller who has a story that sinks deep into the soul. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. It is a book of spirit and the longings of the human heart. It is a story about a boy and his dogs, but to stop there is to say that A Tale of Two Cities is about a seamstress. It is a study of how we live and what drives us to incredible heights or devastating depths.
As Wikipedia sums it up,
the novel is a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet in rural Wisconsin. The titular character is a mute boy who, after his father is killed, runs away from but then returns to his usurped home, hoping to prove his suspicions that his uncle murdered his father.In the midst of that seemingly innocuous summation is some of the best writing and descriptive passages written in years. On the edge of the Chequamegon National Forest in northern Wisconsin, it is filled with the magical realism of other cultures, but which anyone from that type of geography knows is possible in those kinds of ancient woodlands. Land and people, weather and animals all blend together in a rich interaction. When that happens, life is changed. When that it ignored or disturbed by human intervention or evil, the results are far from what we would want them to be.
I am almost 45 minutes late as I write this. Spring began and I was busy doing other things. Just like so much of life, we miss so much when we are going about our everyday business.
But at least I caught it before it was gone.
So, finally, Saturday evening, March 20, 2011
Spring has begun.
And down there in Chichen Itza, the serpent appeared.
Cool.
You can't celebrate contemporary Irish music without the Pogues. And yes, you can celebrate St. Patrick's Day without drinking. Just let the music pull you forward!
If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
Where the ANGELS WON'T RECEIVE ME
Let me go, boys
Let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry
Perhaps one of the most famous of Irish hymns, here is Be Thou My Vision as performed by the incomparable Van Morrison. As we put Christ back in St. Patrick's Day, we remember that there is much to celebrate in many cultures and their own versions of faith.
The headline on Christian Science Monitor today said it quite clearly:
Japan nuclear crisis eclipses Three Mile Island, nears 'Chernobyl league'
The accident at the plant occurred 12 days after the release of the movie The China Syndrome, which featured Jane Fonda as a news anchor at a California television station. In the film, a major nuclear plant failure almost happens while Fonda's character and her cameraman (Michael Douglas) are at a plant producing a series on nuclear power. She proceeds to raise awareness of how unsafe the plant is. Coincidentally, there is a scene in which Fonda's character speaks with a nuclear safety expert, who says that a meltdown could render an area "the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable."
These are real questions, from real news people (I think) to other real people in the midst of the Japan disaster. I can't believe they asked them:
Reporter speaking to the family member of a missing American in Japan. The family member had just said they spoke to the person the day before the quake but hasn't heard a word since. So the reporter in the studio asks, in all seriousness:
And what did they say to you when you talked?One reporter in a US studio to another reporter on the ground in NE Japan, site of some of the worst devastation.Remember that there has never been an earthquake of this magnitude in Japan, EVER!
Have you ever seen anything like this?No, I will not let these reporters off the hook. They are professionals and these questions took place well after the initial shock of the disaster. They were not asking these in a tense, stressed out or hurried deadline moment. They asked these questions in serious deliberateness.
Made a trip to Wisconsin for a friend's 60th. It was sunny and warm with little snow on the ground. Temps were in the upper 30s. And I saw my first robin of the season.
Spring is springing!
Oh.. and the Twins opening day is less than 3 weeks away.
The power of the earth was shown again in yesterday's earthquake/tsunami in Japan. I watched the videos with a sense of incredible disbelief. How quickly life changes in times like that.
I know none of this is a surprise or particularly profound. But I was struck by one of the headline questions on an article:
Could the Quake Have Been Predicted?We humans naturally hate unpredictability. If we can only dig deep enough, think the right way, find enough information, nothing should be beyond our ability to predict. There must have been, we believe, enough warning signs that this was going to happen that we could have predicted it if we had enough information and knew where to look.
Hearings on the radicalization of Muslim Americans
Thus reads the headline yesterday:
Gingrich: Love of country contributed to affairI will withhold my deepest opinions, but why doesn't this make any sense? Why does this sound like pious excuse making, rationalizing and denial?
It amazes me that we are in the midst of an argument and divide that sounds like it could have been out of the last Century- and not the 1990s. It could have been in the first few decades as workers began to see that they were not well represented in negotiating with their bosses. It could have been in the 50s and 60s when, finally, some places like steel mills began to give their workers the right to strike and negotiate- form a union.
But it is 2011, for God's sake. We are supposed to be more compassionate, more civilized, a long way from the union wars of 100 years ago. All of a sudden (or maybe not all that suddenly) unions are again the enemy and public workers are becoming the scapegoats of a recession. They are about to be punished in many places because they have jobs- jobs which are important and even essential to our continued growth and well-being as a nation.
We must be a community. We must have public workers who can have dignity and acceptance. It doesn't matter whether they are teachers, who have been scapegoats for years, police and firefighters, snowplow drivers, or sanitation workers. We need them- and we need them to get a fair wage in a fair market. To deny them the right to have collective bargaining is to take a HUGE step into the past. It is a step into a country and community that was not, in any way, shape or form, anything like the "good, old days."
Let's not allow our nation to go backwards.
March 6 – After 19 years hosting the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite signs off for the last time.
but not quite. I remembered that I hadn't posted today. That would have broken a very long string of daily posts. So, to keep things going, here it is. It doesn't have much to say; no great wisdom or insight; just a blog post.
Which is pretty much what all the posts are, so I guess it counts for keeping the unbroken string going since mid-August 2005.
the people over at Playing for Change have been making a difference by bringing musicians together digitally from all over the world. Episode 40 in their work brings Bob Marley's Redemption Song to life.
Won't you help to sing
Another song of freedom
'Cause it's all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.
And for that I am grateful!
I haven't said anything before now about the ongoing world of Madison, WI, Governor Walker and the attempt to de-unionize public employees. (Crisis in Dairyland as the Daily Show calls it.) Then I saw this headline on CNN:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday warned 14 absent lawmakers trying to stall his controversial budget bill to return to the state Capitol immediately to vote on the measure, or layoff notices will be sent to 1,500 public employees before the weekend.Actually, I haven't talked about this because I don't know how to without getting angry. ALL the anti-education, anti-teacher prejudice that has been an undercurrent in our country is coming out in such a lop-sided mis-understanding.
It was just a little over a year ago that my wife and I spent a week in Mexico and had a number of things happen that I described at the time as things that "shook my soul." One of these was the awareness that I was not in as good a physical shape as I hoped I could be. It was around that time that I made a commitment to discipline myself. I would work out every workday morning before work.
Which for me was - and is - quite a commitment. I am not now- and never have been a morning person. To work out every morning would mean a slightly earlier bedtime and a much earlier out-of-the-building morning time. Much to my surprise and to most of those who know me, I have hardly missed a workout morning when I have to be up and out to work for over a year now. Nearly 13 months.
And I notice it. I did more biking last summer and added a duathlon at the end of the summer. I have been snowshoeing this winter. Last month in Alabama I rented a bike and cycled over 85 miles in 7 rides. I am so excited by this new me. I feel generally stronger, and have a sense of accomplishment at something that I have never been good at before.
Not that all is rosy. I have been absolutely unable to lose weight. With all this exercise I am today almost exactly the same weight I was 13 months ago. I have known that there are two things that lead to weight loss:
1. Move more.When I told a recovering friend about this, I then added,
2. Eat less.
Well, I have half of it.To which he replied with a perfect quote from the AA Big Book:
But half-measures availed us nothing!(Don't you just hate it when your friends know you as well as you do?)
A friend and fellow Moravian has this posted today on their Facebook page.
...the Moravian church is 554 years young today...Fighting fundamentalism since 1457. :)I just couldn't keep it secret.
For over five centuries the Moravian Church has proclaimed the gospel in all parts of the world. Its influence has far exceeded its numbers as it has cooperated with Christians on every continent and has been a visible part of the Body of Christ, the Church. Proud of its heritage and firm in its faith, the Moravian Church ministers to the needs of people wherever they are.
Moravian Seal, or Agnus Dei,
stained glass window in the Rights Chapel at
Trinity Moravian Church, Winston-Salem, NC (J. Jackman)
The name Moravian identifies the fact that this historic church had its origin in ancient Bohemia and Moravia in what is the present-day Czech Republic. In the mid-ninth century these countries converted to Christianity chiefly through the influence of two Greek Orthodox missionaries, Cyril and Methodius. They translated the Bible into the common language and introduced a national church ritual. In the centuries that followed, Bohemia and Moravia gradually fell under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Rome, but some of the Czech people protested.
The foremost of Czech reformers, John Hus (1369-1415) was a professor of philosophy and rector of the University in Prague. The Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, where Hus preached, became a rallying place for the Czech reformation. Gaining support from students and the common people, he led a protest movement against many practices of the Roman Catholic clergy and hierarchy. Hus was accused of heresy, underwent a long trial at the Council of Constance, and was burned at the stake on July 6, 1415.
ORGANIZED IN 1457
The reformation spirit did not die with Hus. The Moravian Church, or Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren), as it has been officially known since 1457, arose as followers of Hus gathered in the village of Kunvald, about 100 miles east of Prague, in eastern Bohemia, and organized the church. This was 60 years before Martin Luther began his reformation and 100 years before the establishment of the Anglican Church. By 1467 the Moravian Church had established its own ministry, and in the years that followed three orders of the ministry were defined: deacon, presbyter and bishop.
--Moravian.org
March 1 – President of the United States John F. Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps.
