Constructive Faith

Years ago, while I was still adding to the thousands of comic books in my collection, DC decided to re-boot the Batman series after a year-long narrative arc called “No Man’s Land,” Gotham recovering after a devastating earthquake. They brought in new writers, even started a new title, called Gotham Knights, that focused on the inter-relationships between Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, the original Robin who had gone on to be a hero called Nightwing, Tim Drake, the third Robin, the second having met a gruesome death at the hands of the Joker, Barbara Gordon, former Batgirl and, since being paralyze,d a cyber-hero called Oracle, and a host of other minor characters. In the series’ first issue, the first major Batman work written by a woman, Batman is investigating the murder of parents who left behind a young son, so similar to Batman’s own origin story. The other characters wonder why he can’t see what they see, that the boy was not the traumatized orphan Bruce Wayne once was, but was in fact the killer.

It is the sort of gritty realism that took hold in the Batman family of comics in the 1980s. In fact, many comic books took on a gritty realism. They even tried it with the Superman series, but it just wouldn’t stick, for like a bar of soap dropped into a puddle, Superman is self-cleaning, the ultimate Boy Scout goody-two-shoes. Which is okay. Sometimes we need that sense of unblemished good, hope and purity in a time when everything feels a little too real, even if that unblemished good is in the form of a resident alien from Krypton. Continue reading “Amundsen: February 12, 2017”

After last week’s sermon, in which I spoke about beer, one worshipper wondered if I might have pushed an alcoholic off of the wagon. Were I only that influential! While I did mention that I enjoy beer, I don’t think my descriptions were particularly florid… Madison Avenue I’m not. The point was that four simple ingredients produce a transformation and a tremendous variety of flavors, much in the same way that our faith, which is simple according to both the prophet Micah and Jesus, has the capacity to transform lives, comes in many variations.

Then I got home and opened my Sunday New York Times, where on page 22 of the Magazine I found an article extolling the virtues of Pedialyte. It was not, however, by a parent who had used the product to treat a child with an illness. Instead, it was by a man who describes purchasing a supply of Pedialyte before a night of heavy drinking. Now there, I thought, is a real alcoholic, someone who knows that a product designed for sick children is also effective for hangovers. Fortunately, he also describes using the product after sessions of hot yoga, and catalogs the effects of excess, so not exactly a ringing endorsement of boozing it up. And just wait… the author is still under 40. Try that nonsense when you are 50 and you pay for a week. Continue reading “Pedialyte: February 5, 2017”

I sometimes say, in jest of course, that I need coffee to get me started and beer to slow me down. In truth, while there is at least one cup of coffee every morning, usually two, the single evening drink might well be wine, or might be skipped entirely. Still, I love good coffee and good beer. And just as one man was responsible for America’s contemporary coffee culture, one man was responsible for today’s beer culture. His name was Bert Grant, a Scot, who opened the first independent brewery since Prohibition in Yakima, Washington in 1982.

Since then, the beer world has changed. You can still find beer that is mass-produced, watery and flavorless, but you can also find hundreds of other choices, beers in every traditional style and even a few completely new styles, though Cave Creek Chili Beer, with a whole chili pepper in every bottle, is a stretch even for me. Continue reading “Reinheitsgebot: January 29, 2017”

Last week, as we celebrated Brother Martin, we were reminded to be gentle as doves and as wise as serpents. It is true that doves are not the brightest bird at the feeder, but I think the expression gives far too much credit to serpents. While deadly, snakes aren’t that smart.

Take, for example, the classic battle between the cobra and the mongoose, fictionalized and anthropomorphized in Rudyard Kipling’s colonialist classic story collection “The Jungle Book.” In the story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” he tells of a pet mongoose protecting his family, white and British, of course. The story first came to my attention when I was twelve, in a cartoon adaptation done by Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame. Like many experiences of our childhoods, it stuck, and I’ve always noticed when something about mongooses, and that is the correct plural, appears in the Science Times or on a nature program I am watching. Continue reading “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi: January 22, 2017”

I am sure folks referred to coffee as mud long before I thought about it, but it was in the Big Apple that I first encountered the MUD truck. You can find coffee on almost any street corner in Manhattan, not to mention the ubiquitous coffee shops, in one spot, two Starbucks within sight of each other, and countless diners and delis, though this last group is being driven out as developers rush to build investment properties for Russian, Chinese and American kleptocrats.

The MUD truck, orange with a stylish design and logo, bills itself as gourmet street coffee. We tend to blame the Pacific Northwest and Seattle in particular for coffee culture, the $5 cup of coffee and the strange notion that the quality of the beans and the degree of the roast matters, for bringing a European sensibility to US coffee drinkers, but it really all comes down to one man, a Dutch-American named Alfred Peet who died in 2007. Peet was the son of a Dutch coffee roaster, had apprenticed with a coffee and tea company, and when he immigrated to the US, he found the swill served during the post-World War II years undrinkable. He finally had the assets to open his own shop in that commie-pinko haven of Berkeley, California in 1966. The rest is history. Continue reading “Cup o’ Mud: January 15, 2017”

It is our human tendency to reconfigure facts where needed to match what we have already decided to believe. Take, for example, the case of the Tel Dan Stele. Tel means “hill,” Dan is place in modern Israel, and a stele is an ancient inscribed stone, a monument or marker.

What is important about the particular stele found at Tel Dan during a dig 23 years ago was that it contained a reference to the “House of David,” which was a problem for the large number of scholars, many Jewish, who argued that King David was wholly fabricated, a national founding myth akin to that of Gilgamesh, or maybe Romulus and Remus. But here was this stone authenticated to the 9^th century BCE in which an unnamed king thought to be Hazael boasts of his victory over Omri, King of Israel, and his ally, the King of the House of David. Hard, as in stone hard, evidence from only a century or so after David’s reign, the oldest evidence we have of that early Iron Age king central to the Hebrew story and so central to the story of those who would follow Jesus. Continue reading “Tel Blue: January 8, 2017”

For the ancients, keeping track meant knowing the season and how it tied into essential life activities, when to plant and when to hunt. They also organized their ritual lives around this organic system of timekeeping, dates and hours, which worked, though irregularly, because one measure of time, the sun, is not in synch with the other measure, the moon. The latter is particularly an issue, as ancient religions set festivals to correspond to the constantly changing moon cycle. We see this in the movement of principles dates in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim calendars, though with moon worship now well behind us in the Christian tradition, our only changing feast is Easter, and we cling to that variation only because we wish to preserve the correspondence to the movable Jewish feast of Passover, one of the few ways we acknowledge that Jesus was an observant Hebrew reformer.

Technology, especially transportation technology that allowed for trade, drove the efforts to standardize timekeeping. The moving stars helped guide ships across the open ocean. Railroads needed timezones and accountants, alas, need fiscal years, and so the fairly random Western date for counting years has become the standard worldwide, though in truth this Christian dating itself, BC for before Christ and AD for Anno Domini, is off by three years, and most everyone who considers that era trips over the fact that, unlike in normal numbering, there is no zero. In truth, there are many New Years. The Jewish New Year, a lunar New Year, started on October 3rd. There is a Chinese New Year, also lunar, this year on January 28. Many churches think of themselves as operating on a school year, a time period that varies widely from region to region, before or after Labor Day which itself moves, but there is also the Liturgical New Year, the first Sunday in Advent when we switch to a new gospel and attempt to tell the story of our faith, though the arc of the story zigs and zags with feasts and other interruptions so that the narrative looks more like Sidney Crosby on a breakaway. Continue reading “Articulate: January 1, 2017”

Family Service

Waldorf education is pretty big here. Some folks swear by the Montessori method. Most of us swear at the corporate model of education, with endless rounds of standardized testing and resource draining charter schools all funneling profit to the super rich and their private equity funds. Me? I’m a fan of the Goop Method. It is among the less known education theories, and has only one principle. If you can get a child’s hands in goop, you can teach them almost anything.

It is my theory, and the testing has been less than rigorous, but experience has shown me that in a world that treats children like little cpu’s that need to be programmed, if you put a kids hands in something, mud, bread dough, plaster, it doesn’t matter, you open pathways in the brain, because it turns out that children aren’t brains on a stick, but little amazing learning animals that have hands and feet and everything, that learn with sound and color… Continue reading “Christmas Homilies 2016”

Many old southern families, and mine is among them, operate under the delusion that they are English nobility displaced and disconnected by the accidents of history, Downton Abbey on the down-low as it were, never mind that many of these families have been working class for generations, and 19^th century charlatans made a fortune convincing people they had long-lost titles, castles across the sea. Some things never change.

These Southern families long for a return to Tara, ignoring the fact that the entire colonial economic and social system was built on broken brown bodies, or worse, these Southerners celebrate their ancestor’s efforts to preserve the institution of slavery. All can whip out a family tree in an instant, as can I. Continue reading “Pax: December 18, 2016”

You may be one of those odd people who likes winter. Certainly for those who retired here from away, that would make sense. Personally, if I’m going to hurtle down the face of something at high speeds, I’d just as soon it be a wave, though I’ll admit there are slightly fewer sharks on the ski slopes. And go ahead and strap on those snowshoes and head off into the woods. Me? Not so much. Oh sure, I love the look of the fresh snowfall, the hushed quiet, but give it a couple of days until everything is gray, when there is a seven inch puddle sloshing over the top of your boots where there was only two inches of space. It seems to me that snow melt falls into the realm of the impossible quantum, defying the laws of space and time.

Now, I attended Divinity School in Massachusetts, and my last church was in New York, so I’ve learned to adjust, even to the dark and the mud, but I do not rejoice in winter. I get the need for fallow time, for dark time, for the changing seasons in creation and in our lives, and even if I didn’t get it, that whole spinning planet thing is going to happen anyway, so I might as well accept it, but I truly rejoice in late spring. Continue reading “Good Being: December 11, 2016”