Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Czech Author Dies, Novels Live On

Posted: September 19, 2011 in Uncategorized
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After Czech writer, Arnost Lustig, died last March at the age of 84, a friend put me on to his novels. I’ve just completed two, A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova and Lovely Green Eyes. Both are set against the backdrop of a world gone mad in the Holocaust of WWII. Lustig should know; he was the survivor of several death camps.

These books are not for the faint of spirit. Lustig writes of the unimaginable in a spare, lean, revealing style,  sugarcoating nothing and placing a human face on everything. And most of all he exposes the evil human inclination become flesh. If you don’t want to revisit just how diabolical our species can become, move on down the book rack to another selection.

There are many publications I enjoy for different reasons. Some inform and some challenge me. Others delight with humor and the day-to-day pleasantries of a time gone by. Lustig’s books are none of these and I don’t enjoy them. One can’t enjoy his books in terms of pleasure because they are not pleasurable. Rather, they are profound. And not everything that is profound makes you want to skip through the sunflowers. Some makes you weep, or gasp, or ask, “What is the human creature? How can this be? Are there any words to describe it?”

These books are not for everybody. But they are for everybody.

Computer Thinking

Posted: September 16, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Mmmm. Artificial intelligence. I guess.

For practice in the game of chess I play a great big fat computer. It processes a gazillion times faster than me. It looks ahead a mile of possible moves ahead of me. But that’s the point. I want to face off against its great big brain. Well, some patterns of cognition. I always turn the difficulty level to the highest, like playing 10 Bobby Fishers on steroids. Why else bother? And it always whoops me. Bad. Embarrassingly.

The only gratification I ever get is when the computer is calculating and can’t find a way out … right away. It has a little message at the bottom of the screen: “Computer Thinking.” Thinking indeed. It’s calculating within a range of programmed alternatives. They are numerous and complex, but finite, always within what’s been programmed. So I love to get to the place, even if it will prevail, when it spends fifteen minutes grinding its processor. And that’s what it’s doing right now and has been for thirty minutes. It can’t calculate its way out.

This is usually not the case, but it is tonight. And for some reason instead of me playing a “rational” game and projecting all the possibilities out as far as my little brain can, I just stuck with intuition, looking at the whole board. And made some irrational moves, obviously not in its palette. You see, it’s really, really fast and versatile … within the bounds of a finite range of options. But it doesn’t do infinity. And until it can it’s going to keep on grinding, grinding, grinding.

It’s still grinding.

“Computer thinking”

Is it really? What capacity does it have for exceptions, interrupted patterns, paradoxes?

“Computer thinking”

Does it operate with old style Newtonian physics? Does it love Einstein? What about string theory? Does it really have artificial intelligence?

“Computer thinking”

Man I hope it doesn’t stop thinking, if it’s thinking it’s doing. Ok, calculating, following its program. Don’t stop, computer.

“Computer thinking”

It doesn’t know what to do. Like all the times it’s fried my bacon, now it’s like a little crybaby, can’t figure out the little problem.

“Computer thinking”

If it’s thought about it this long, when it does get an answer, will it be brilliant? Or just necessary?

“Computer thinking”

Still thinking it is. If it doesn’t come up with something soon I’m going to run out of things to say. I need to go to sleep. Tomorrow is coming.

“Computer thinking”

Will it think all night? It doesn’t have to sleep, its little plastic and metal and whatever brain. But I do. I can’t meditate on board position forever.

“Computer thinking”

I guess I’m going to leave it on, running, sputtering, talking to its artificial friends and saying things like, “This idiot human being is so dumb that I don’t know what to do with his stupid moves. That’s how dumb he is. He’s so dumb I can’t move, can’t play him. Such a fool.” I’m sure that’s what he’s saying about me.

“Computer thinking”

Goodnight moon, and goodnight red balloon. Goodnight socks, goodnight clocks. Goodnight computer, calculating into the future. If you had a sense of time, like a real sense of present, past and future. But you don’t do you. You’re just Mr. finite.

“Computer thinking”

I’m getting out of here before it stops thinking, before it figures it out. I’m getting out of here before I’m humiliated, have to take everything back, eat my own chess pieces. It’s over for me, beddy by time, chess board folded up.

“Computer thinking”

When I wake up in the morning will the answer be there, like awakening to a nightmare? “Here is what I worked out for you while you were doing your REM sleep cycles, human. Did I mention I don’t need REM sleep? Like  the time you wasted I clicked along until I came up with this. So your move meat sack.” I’m really afraid he’s going to give that to me in the morning.

“Computer thinking”

I can’t take it. Now, later, next week. Inevitable doom? Or … is he going to spin around his processor board forever? Is this how the story ends? That’s my story. He’s stuck and will be. That’s what I’m sleeping on. Just like a little baby.

“Computer thinking”

He’s so arrogant, if computers can be arrogant. Good night. I said goodnight. Light off, door shut, little night light in the bathroom turned on.

“Computer thinking”

<sigh>

On Seeing

Posted: September 15, 2011 in Uncategorized
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My wife has been doing some long term substitute teaching as a music teacher in an elementary school. In one of her classes she has a darling little seven year old who is on the autistic spectrum. But that’s not all. She’s also totally blind. She has a one-on-one para with her all the time.

Yesterday this little one and her para came into one of my wife’s classes. And the para said, “Go ahead, honey, tell the teacher what you want to tell her.”

And the little girl said, “You’re pretty.”

Come Gently, Rain Down

Posted: September 14, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Come gently, rain down
on parched soil, souls
washing grass, and me
every thirsty thing
until fire is smoke
turning windward
a whisp, no more

(Tim Carson, September 2011)

9/11 and Pearl Harbor

Posted: September 12, 2011 in Uncategorized
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She is in her 90s. On her wall is a certificate thanking her for serving her country as a part of the Army Nurse Corps during WWII. She told me the stories, how she tended the wounded. “All those boys with their missing limbs”, she said, “that still haunts me.”

As we talked, the news program running on her television in the background was dominated by images and talk about 9/11. And she says to me, “It’s been ten years now. What if we dealt with Pearl Harbor in that same way? What if we focused on it and kept on dredging it up? Sure, we had a day named after it, but that doesn’t mean we relive it all the time. How could you heal and move on?” Then, without blinking, she said “It’s time to do the same with the terrible events of 9/11. We have to move on and put it where it belongs, in the past, into history. We’ll remember, but it won’t dominate us.”

She looked at me to see how I’d take that.

I nodded in agreement. Yes, it’s time.

Treating Symptoms and Not Causes

Posted: September 10, 2011 in Uncategorized
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I watched a news program today that focused on the behavior of the huge killer whales, the Orcas, in Sea World in Florida. You may remember that one of the Orcas, Tilikum, drowned one of the trainers earlier this year. It had been involved in previous accidents.

They talked about the investigation into the Sea World organization and how culpable they might be, what whale behavior they had observed that might be considered suspicious and how staff safety was considered.

Many angles of the situation were discussed except one. Not once did a single person suggest that the situation itself was the cause; these creatures are not designed for captivity and the artificial, small and confined world we have created for them. The truth may be as simple as this: Sea World drove the Orca crazy and it killed in flash of madness.

It’s not meant to live like that.

Take Richard O’Barry, for instance. He was the trainer of the famous dolphin, Flipper. In fact, he captured and trained hundreds of dolphins for similar purposes. Until he discovered the hard way that it was driving them crazy. Once he realized what he and other were doing he made an about face. Now he works to free dolphins from the Sea Worlds scattered over the globe. The dolphins are amazingly healed when reunited with the natural flow of the tides, the chemistry of fresh salt water, the hunting of live fish and living in a community of dolphins that migrate long distances according to the seasons. I first became aware of this through viewing the documentary, The Cove. I recommend it.

It’s not just whales. The seamy side of the factory farming of chickens is not known to most of us as we much down on our Colonial Sanders or take our eggs sunny side up. The factory farming of chickens, at its worst, involves over packing live chickens into small steel wire crates and then keeping the artificial light on 24/7 to increase laying patterns. They lay more eggs.

Only problem? The chickens go crazy and peck each other to death. Solution? De-beak them. You snip off their beaks so that when they go crazy they can’t kill the crazy neighbor whose beak has also been clipped off. Bloody stubs can’t kill another layer.

Like the Orcas, chickens go crazy in those kind of conditions. The difference is that we aren’t raising the Orcas in order to eat them. But we are consuming them; taking their lives for our entertainment until they go mad.

According to the English medieval theologian, William of Ockham (1287-1347) , and his metaphorical razor, the simplest and most direct explanation is most often the truest: “Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity.” The more we extend and multiply simple truths the further they get from the truth itself.

Let’s just say that it appears that no one is applying Ockham’s razor to the Sea World situation. Because if we were, we would be opening the large doors to the sea and shooing the Orcas toward open water. Rather, we’re going to figure out how to deal with their madness, come up with a technical solution, give them some Orca Prozac or maybe a few sessions on the Orca therapeutic couch. Or retrain the trainers to live on the edge of a tank that creates madness and then drowns a person ever so often just to get our attention. “I am, by the way, going crazy in here. Let me take one of you down to make my point.”

But I doubt if we will listen to the Orcas or to William of Ockham. I imagine we’ll make a few adjustments, offer a few rationalizations and keep on selling those tickets, filling those stands, and clapping like mad with every leap from the blue, blue water.

Mixed Motives? No problem!

Posted: September 9, 2011 in Uncategorized
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How could I have missed it? Somebody just wrote that everyone has mixed motives, which we already know, but that (hold your breath) God uses them all the time. Duh.

The reason I may appear at the door of a church has to do with some vague sense of obligation for my children. I ought to get them there. But no matter. God uses my less-than-pure motive for seeking God anyway. I may end up finding what I wasn’t angling for.

Maybe I do the right thing because there is some peer pressure to do so, not because I’m so virtuous. But I go along with it and do something good I might not have done on my own. In the process I find something I wasn’t looking for. No problem, God rides my less-than-Mother-Teresa motive and transforms it into something more.

Maybe it was the music that first attracted me to some worship service. Yeah, great band, or classical flute, or whatever. Pretty, an aesthetic I dig. The fact that the music is supposed to be an avenue rather than an end in itself eludes me. No biggie. God helps me find God in spite of myself.

We’ve got all kinds of mixed motives for everything we do. God doesn’t wait for us to be pure in heart before steering us toward being more pure of heart. God’s specialty is raw material. Like clay in the potter’s hand. We give God the mixed bag and God picks through it and puts it back together again in a different way.

Mixed motives? No problem. Bring ’em on. It’s always just the beginning.

A Prayer for September

Posted: September 6, 2011 in Uncategorized
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We do not presume
to tell you who you are
as if we could, with these words

Neither can we suggest
the direction of your purpose
when we barely know our own

For now we wait, trusting
holding enormous life
in these little hearts

Without a shred of presumption
we ask who we might become
if not now, then later

Fill us with

Honesty that dares look ourselves in the mirror
Compassion that overcomes our inclination to self
Courage that dares to do what is right when not popular
Hope that never limits the future by the contours of the present
Curiosity that always draws us to that which cannot be known, and yes, to the mystery that is you

These things we pray, knowing that you have known them in our hearts before they passed through our lips

Amen

After the Apocalypse – Joplin Disaster Zone Emptiness

Posted: September 3, 2011 in Uncategorized
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The Emptied Killing Zone: Joplin, Missouri, September 2011

The six mile by one-half mile of devastation left by the Joplin tornado has been cleared, a 24/7 effort fueled by a timeline. By mid-August the removal would need to be complete if the city were to realize the full federal disaster support (90% of all expense). That happened, amazingly, and what was a land covered with debris became an empty land, a ghost town within a city.

Outside of that zone, beyond national media coverage, on the other side of what volunteers have and do offer, are the actual residents of Joplin, making their way toward what my brother calls the “new normal.” It’s a long, slow trek characterized by accumulating weariness. But full of hope and inspiration, too.

My brother opened his new office during the past couple of weeks. Patterns of normalcy have returned, albeit in a new form. And the vacancy left behind has provided room for something new. What will that be? We can only imagine. But something will grow up in its place. It always does.

A baby was born in Joplin today, crying and gasping for new air. She came into this world after the tornado, the cleanup, and all the starting over. Years from now people will tell her, “You were born in the year of the great tornado.” And she will ask, “What was it like?” And her grandmother will say, “It was a stormy and windy night …”

The Un-Jefferson Bible

Posted: August 31, 2011 in Uncategorized
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As I’ve been reading more source material on the faith perspectives of our American founders, the diversity of viewpoints relating to not only doctrine, but the interplay between church and state (of which there was no little argument!), I ran across, again, the Thomas Jefferson solution to Jesus (Faith of the Founders, Edwin S. Gaustad, Baylor University Press, 2004).

Jefferson (like Madison, Franklin and many others) was not an orthodox Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but rather a Deist who prized freedom of thought and practice. He sought out reasonable self-evident truths embodied in the natural universe. This natural order contained ethical norms that governed the way of humanity. What was not included in his religious schema was anything resembling “revelation” or “supernatural” occurrence that somehow suspended the natural order.

Late in life, as Jefferson revisited the personage of Jesus, he found a true companion, but only after a radical editing. He was, in his mind, liberating Jesus from New Testament portrayals (especially those of Paul)  and the later church distortions of him.

To go about this process of retrieving his Jesus, he compiled all the ethical teachings of Jesus – which he thought superlative – and snipped out anything resembling miracle or supernatural elements. The Jesus of Jefferson became an Enlightenment teacher of truth. So that would include the sermon on the mount, but forgo conversations about his role as Messiah. We would hear the parables but not talk about healing the man born blind. There was his martyr’s death, but no mention of resurrection. Jesus, like the rest of humanity, had an immortal soul, so he would find his place in another world, but not with the disturbance of the natural order of things. And so it went.

Having known about the “Jefferson Bible” for a long time, I was not surprised with his project. What strikes me now, as I consider our religious landscape, is how we are creating another version of the Bible, an X-ray negative of Jefferson’s.

The project of many today is not to expunge the text of its supernatural or miraculous content. To the contrary, bring that on. Many people would be aghast at the thought of Jefferson’s edits.

No, many are engaged in creating a negative opposite of Jefferson’s Bible in which the ethical teachings of Jesus – his parables, ethical challenges, sermon on the mount – fall to the cutting floor. Walking on water? Raising the dead? Ascending to God the Father? Yes, include all of these. But no, do not include his stern warnings to the powerful, the oppressors of the poor, those of us who have sold out to the world.

What is finding its way to the dustbin is the Jesus material that sounds like the classic prophets – Jeremiah, Isaiah, Micah, Hosea. That we are to avoid. There is a gag order on that Jesus.The word “justice” is a negative, to be avoided at all cost, even though it dominates the thought of the prophets and Jesus.

In the same way that Jefferson filtered out the supernatural, many current American Christians are filtering out the ethical demands of Jesus. So two interesting volumes sit on the shelf, side by side. There is Jefferson’s. And then there is the Un-Jefferson. And they both betray the worldviews of their interpreters.

When we skew to the extreme edge we inevitably lose something.  It is easy to miss that slippery truth that stands somewhere in that illusory middle. If there is a golden mean then it is precious precisely because it doesn’t want to lose what excess could strip from it. This calls for humility, discernment and more than a little courage not to coast with the pack.

I think Jefferson lost a lot in his quest. And I think the Un-Jeffersons are losing much now. Neither way is viable, in my mind. But both remind us of the places we do not want to go.

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