A Real Man

The lovely Carol pointed out an opportunity to serve the Irish Dance community that the younger teen is involved with. Some pedestal²s, or maybe podium¹s were needed for an upcoming feis^(b), or competition, for the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place winners to stand on after the big event -- you know, like the gold/silver/bronze medal winners at the Olympics. Building something like this sounded less onerous than, say, stage construction or something else that I might get dragged into.

Turns out that another guy, the Real Man of this story, was also interested in building. To avoid embarrassing him, I'll call him "Charlie". I went over to his house and discovered a truly enviable workshop area. No computers were in evidence, but there was an air-hose, pneumatic tools, a table saw (not a gigantic one, but it was a lot bigger than mine), radial arm saw, a rolling toolkit that looked like it could've come out of an auto repair shop -- it was organized too, drawers labeled with their contents, clamps overhead, sawhorses, lots of room....

But why do I call Charlie a Real Man? It's not the tool collection or the workshop or his extensive knowledge of those tools (or of automobile engines either); it's that he was secure enough in his self-concept to quit working in construction to be a stay-at-home dad for his then elementary school girls. He told me about the calculation they did: with two parents working outside the home, you spend a lot more on take-out, housekeeper, gardener, handyman, etc., not to mention day care, and they figured out maybe 8 years ago that the net financial effect of his working was just a few thousands. And the kids would be raised by... someone else. Or a string of "someone else"s.

He told me without shame or embarrassment that his wife made about 4 times his salary, so the question of "who quits their job?" was a no-brainer.

How many guys, say out of 100, would be secure enough to say, "Yeah, I was making about 25% of my wife's salary, so I was the one to quit working outside the home"? We all know that a man's value is what he is on the inside, not how much money he makes or what his job is in the commercial world. But how many of us could, in similar circumstances, say, "Yep, we want the kids to have a parent at home, and since you make 4x as much as I do, then other things being equal, I'll be Mr. Mom" -- and actually carry it out?

And having decided, how many of us would tell a near-stranger (I had never met Charlie before yesterday) that "I was making only about 25% of what she was" without a trace of embarrassment?

Now that's a real man.

Atheism = Wishful Thinking?

I was annoyed the other night when I turned on the radio and heard Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," dissing religion. This guy said that the universe doesn't owe us meaning. So far so good. Then he caricatured religious belief as the product of wishful thinking.

Now I used to believe this same dumb thing, back when I was young and foolish and hypocritical.

Yes, hypocritical. Why didn't I believe there was a God back then? Because I didn't want to think there was someone who had the right to tell me what to do, to judge my actions, to determine my eternal destiny. I wanted to think myself the master of my own fate, with the right to do as I pleased without regard for what God said about it.

Dawkins says there's insufficient evidence to believe in whatever it is he doesn't believe in. This I also recognize as a crock that I trotted out, back when I was young and foolish and hypocritical. We all decide what to believe in, and then interpret our experiences in light of those beliefs.

Let me channel someone I used to know who decided some decades ago to smoke cigarettes. What about the health risks? Cancer, shmancer, he said. Look, the chance of dying from cancer as a nonsmoker is very low, say 1% or something. If you smoke as much as I do, it's still very low -- yes, it's higher, but it's still just 2% or something. Whether you smoke or not, you could still get hit by a truck, or your house might collapse on you in an earthquake (this conversation took place shortly after the 阪神大震災 -- the Hanshin dai-shinsai or "great Kobe earthquake", where several hundred were killed by the earthquake and several thousands more by government incompetence).

This guy lived in Japan but he could just as well have been living in the southeastern US and reading literature from The Tobacco Institute, back when they were still claiming that smoking didn't kill you.

Or think the automobile industry and auto safety in the 1960s, or global warming in our day.

When I was very young and very foolish, I decided that there was no God (see Psalm 14:1). For some time thereafter, I denied anything that pointed toward the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Anything that would tend to point away from God's existence I of course latched onto.

Fortunately, I got lucky and had a (pardon me please for using this phrase) paradigm shift, when the evidence in favor of God's intervention in the world became to me overwhelming. It did for Morison (Who Moved the Stone) too, and for McDowell (Evidence that Demands a Verdict) and Strobel (The Case for Christ).

But until the evidence reaches that point, we humans tend to put new evidence into our existing mental maps (and toss what doesn't fit); we are therefore willfully blind, to a point.

I did this as a young, foolish atheist, and I think Dawkins is doing it as an old, foolish atheist. Like all the rest of us, he believes things partly because he wants to. Like all the rest of us, he screens new information through the filters of his existing beliefs and prejudices and opinions and positions.

I hope he comes to recognize some day that he has been foolish and hypocritical. Let us pray that the spirit of God will get this man's attention, and that out of his great mercy, God will get his attention and turn him from his folly. Because the god of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not....

hooray for PG&E

So the lovely Carol and I were sort of half-asleep this morning, and about 6:30 or so I heard the furnace sort of stutter and stop. I rolled my eyes "up" to look at the clock on the headboard -- dark. "Shucks," I said.

Pulling out a flashlight, I looked up "Pacific Gas & Electric" in the white pages. I called the 800- number, and got an automated voicemail thingie that actually worked. What kind of outage, it wanted to know? "Electric," I said. Complete or partial? "Complete." A few questions later, we were done. The nice lady's voice told me what she thought my address was, and I confirmed it.

Brought in the camp stove to make coffee, tea, and pancakes. The lovely Carol showed me a better way to beat the egg-whites. Pancakes turned out fine. Then we went to church.

I came back a few hours later and the electricity was back on. One of our computers automagically comes back on when power is restored. It said: "12:17pm up 1:52 ..." So power was out for a little less than four hours.

Where else in the world, when the power goes out, can you call a toll-free number, have your report taken by an automatic system that knows where you're calling from, and have power restored in less than four hours -- with the full expectation that it'll be weeks or months before the next time? Though we sometimes complain about things, we really are living in a time of astonishing convenience.

Update: late in the afternoon, lights flickered and went off, then back on... several times. The lovely Carol suggested that we leave the computers off (fsck, anyone?) until the power stabilized. It's now been a few hours since then. So hopefully this'll stick.

Charlie Bartlett, Fred Rogers

You can read summaries/reviews at imdb, yahoo and rotten tomoatoes. I don't think the sexual encounter was really necessary, though it did add to the moral ambiguity/ambivalence of Charlie's character.

The film had some shortcomings, but the title character was truly likable if flawed. He befriended the social outcasts; he was generous and helpful. There was a poignant moment when Kat Dennings says something about being ditched by one parent and watching the other lose his mind -- leading to a not-very-good prognosis for their offspring. You can see Anton Yelchin’s character (Charlie) identifying with her.

I think what's appealing about this character is that he has the desire to help others. It's not entirely unselfish, but whose desires are?

Recently NPR aired an excerpt from Fred Rogers’s goodbye speech. I'm not sure if it was his last television appearance, but I found it on youtube, and wrote down what he said:

You know it happens so often, I walk down the street, and someone 20 or 30 or 40 years old will come up to me and say, "You are Mr. Rogers, aren't you?" And then they tell me about growing up with the neighborhood, and how they're passing on to the children they know what they found to be important in our television work, like expressing their feelings through music and art and dance and sports and drama and computers and writing, and... and invariably we end our little time together with a hug. I'm just so proud of all of you who have grown up with us. And I know how tough it is some days to look with hope and confidence on the months and years ahead. But I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger: I like you just the way you are. And what's more, I'm so grateful to you for helping the children in your life to know that you'll do everything you can to keep them safe and to help them express their feelings in ways that will bring healing in many different neighborhoods. It's such a good feeling to know that we're lifelong friends.

Charlie Bartlett wanted to help those kids because of goodness in his heart, but also to a large extent because he wanted to be liked. "What's more important than that?" he asked the adults in his life. His mother couldn't answer. The principal, though, did: "What you do with that popularity," he said, was more important than just being popular....

Fred Rogers, on the other hand -- if you look at some other video clips there on youtube, or watch some of his shows -- Mr. Rogers was the genuine article.

I remember that he was on Prairie Home Companion once, and Garrison Keillor was plainly in awe of him -- or at least in deep respect. He could hardly believe it, he said, sharing the stage with Mr. Rogers. Keillor is a great entertainer -- we saw him a few months ago at the Marin Center -- he is absolutely brilliant in person.

But Fred Rogers is one of my heroes. Keillor is by comparison just an entertainer, and Charlie Bartlett just an okay movie.

An unsuccessful cover-up

Today's New Testament reading starts on Easter morning. The previous Friday, Joseph of Arimathea had placed Jesus's body in a tomb and rolled a big stone in front of the entrance (Matthew 27:58-60). Sunday morning, two women...

...went to look at the tomb.

There was a violent earthquake, for an angle of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

Matthew 28:1-4

I certainly can't blame the guards, as I'm sure they had never encountered anything like this before.

The angel gives the women some information and instructions, and they also meet Jesus himself. But I want to focus on what happens next with the guards.

[S]ome of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened.

At this point in the story, a part of me hopes that the chief priests will slap their foreheads and cry out, "Holy smokes, guys, we've been wrong about this guy! He really was who he said he was! We'd better pray and ask God what to do!" (These guys are supposed to be priests of God for crying out loud!) Alas...

When the chief priests had met with the elders... they gave the soldiers... money, telling them, "You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble."

from Matthew 28:11-14 (inset added)

The guards really did have something to worry about, as they would normally have been executed (see Acts 12:18-19 for example). But these chief priests and elders -- what were they thinking?

Whatever it was, I'm quite certain they didn't turn from earnest intercessors into God-deniers, from seekers of truth to purveyors of lies, overnight. They didn't, in other words, wake up one morning and say, "Yeah, I've had a career of representing people to God, but I'm going to chuck it all today and instead become a political shark, without changing my clothes."

No, they took little steps away from integrity toward compromise, away from the rarified air of the priestly calling and toward the comfort of status, prestige, power.

Most of us don't have the ability to go around corrupting government officials, but we certainly can corrupt ourselves. How often have you or I excused our own self-pitying thoughts or self-indulgent actions? How long has it been since the last time we spoke an unkind word or slighted someone we thought beneath ourselves?

So let us beware -- it's all too easy to wake up one morning, see a stranger in the mirror, and wonder how we got that way. A day at a time, a small step at a time -- that's how. As the Apostle Paul wrote: "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 7:24-25)

The other bit of good news is that if we seek him, we'll find him (as the Lord promised the Israelites in Jeremiah 29) and that he will forgive (Isaiah 55:5-8) and clean us up (1 John 1:9).

Which is good news!
posted 2008-12-20

What are we doing here? What should we do, and why?

The lovely Carol was talking about a small group she's involved with, and some decisions that have to be made--how to handle this and that kind of situation, that sort of thing.

I asked the question, "What is the purpose of the group?"

She told me that it was spiritual transformation. D'oh!

And that made me think about the class I'll be teaching soon. What to include, what to leave out, what sort of ground rules to set up, and so on?

I can easily list three different ways of deciding this sort of thing.

1. Tradition: "We've always done it like that."
   This could be done just through laziness (too lazy to think). But it can also be done based on the idea that "I'm not necessarily smarter than all my predecessors."
2. Reaction: "I always hated it when they did it like X, so I'll do the opposite."
   I can be grouchy, and I can be selfish, so I can sometimes feel like doing this. But it's not necessarily bad -- for example if something really has been done sub-optimally in the past, and it's good to change... this will work.
3. Popularity: "How do you guys want to do this?"
   There are many things about which the leader/teacher doesn't necessarily care, so why not? On the other hand, it might be a sign of insecurities....

The thing I didn't think of (well, one thing I didn't think of) was: "What is the best way to promote spiritual transformation for everyone here?"

That needs to be the principle guiding our thinking about meetings, classes, events, etc. Which was sorta implied by what I wrote before about church programs.

And that should guide the way I choose and present the content for my class as well.

→ PHB-ness

This little dialogue here shows how it's done. Let's listen in...

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

Branno

high-level manager

Trevize

middle manager

...

Trevize: So, is there anything else you want me to do about this?

Branno: You? Don't you have your people do this for you?

Trevize: Umm, does it really matter?

Branno: [after a brief pause] I guess not, since I'll take all the credit for it anyway.

---

NOTE: Names have been changed to protect the innocent the privacy of the individuals involved.