Be Not Idle

Image via Wikipedia

Unpacking my office is slow, difficult work. Because I had to pack quickly, the boxes look as if they were packed by a burglar who couldn’t decide what was valuable and what wasn’t.   Added to that, I’ve returned to work and, during off-hours, take work-related classes.  Unpacking and reconnecting my home PC took a few days (including figuring out that the outlet had been hung upside-down on the wall and fixing it!)

This past week, I felt particularly time-crunched.  It manifested in a near-constant anxiety that I should be doing something else.  Not to mention losing track of what I was doing – as evidenced by disjointed blog drafts that I abandoned and  forgotten laundry growing mold in the washing machine!

I made a To Do list and scheduled my time around it, but the list is ever-growing.  The feeling of anxiety pops up as constantly as in my third-favorite Mel Brooks film, without the comedy (but more musical numbers).

During my latest dive into the boxes, I found a file of “read later.” A few years ago, an acquaintance working as a life coach gave me free advice: making a file for non-urgent e-mails and articles.  Unfortunately, I picked up that habit without doing the second step: read the articles!  I quickly sorted through the file, tossing most of it in the recycling bin.

A caption caught my eye: The Holy “Now”.  It was a commentary on contemplative prayer. I pinned it to the bulletin board and later (much later) found the source.

…(T)here is only the Now. By the time you make it to tomorrow, it will be today again.  It will be Now. God lives in the Now – in what theologians call the Fullness of Time.  – Bud McFarlane

My tai chi teacher used to exhort us, “Focus on Now.”  Strangely enough, it wasn’t as difficult to “part the horse’s mane” or move as it was to stop my attention from wandering off into the distance – either on a past problem or a future plan.  Eventually I began to concentrate only on what I was doing and, as a result, improved both my stance and felt relaxed by the end of the class.

So this week I will endeavor to live now.

Related articles

• Me? Enjoy praying? My post-Yom Kippur thoughts (deena.co)
• Prayer, gratitude and self care (spiritualseekers.wordpress.com)
• Contemplation & Reformation (markingtime4now.wordpress.com)

This past summer, I planned my last major renovation: replacing the flooring. My initial schedule was August, but my “crew” – members of my family – moved the project to July. As a result, I frantically packed the content of three rooms into boxes and stripped their flooring. First I used a drawknife to cut the carpet and padding into manageable sections. Then I tore up the sections, bagged them, and took them to the curb. With a hammer and pry-bar, I removed the tackstrips holding the edges of the carpet and pad. Finally I vacuumed the debris, including cigarette butts that the builders hadn’t bothered to sweep up before laying the padding.

The entire process – packing and stripping – took just a few days.

However, laying the flooring took three people approximately 30 hours. Putting the rooms back together – bedframes, book shelves, file cabinets, etc. – has taken considerably longer.

Tearing down is easier than building up.

This is the problem facing the Occupy Wall Street protests which, despite their strong showing and media attention, aren’t taken quite seriously. There seemed no unified plan for changes and a new system.  (Others have pointed out the contradictions between message and delivery – such as protesters with iPhones calling for an end to corporations.  That’s not my point.) I only wish to point out that an empty space from a demolition will be filled, and it’s better that there be a building plan rather than letting the void be filled with weeds and debris. Continue Reading »

This past week I began an employer-sponsored course on using various emerging technologies. Various institutions have suggested “establishing an online presence,” and this course touts the same. I found it amusing that several of my more tech-savvy colleagues don’t have websites; their page linked to our institutional website is a first.

Then, of course, I remembered my own site. It was a bit like remembering a cottage – a peculiar “How could I forget about THAT?” feeling and then a rush to see what state it was in.

The normal traffic is gone, of course. I don’t know if my regular readers will return. I understand if they don’t. I even thought of deleting it – not unlike razing an abandoned cottage – but ultimately decided against it.

Life afk (away from keyboard) has been full and rich with experience. I traveled to new places and visited old haunts with friends. With the help of family, I did the last major renovation to my home. But here I can reflect and get feedback from people far removed from my life and circumstances. And that is valuable experience, too.

I returned yesterday from Paris on a red-eye flight. The vacation did me good, I think. After the hustle-and-bustle that is Paris in the height of tourist season, it’s wonderful to sleep with the windows open and hear only crickets and the occasional brush of an insect against the screen.

I haven’t posted in a very long time not only because of the vacation but also because of a series of events that consumed my free time. Most notable is the falling of one of my maples. Lightning struck it during one extraordinary gale. I say “extraordinary” because the wind came from the north, which almost never happens, and therefore changed the trajectory of the falling tree. It should have crashed down on my bedroom (where I lay sleeping) and taken most of the lines with it. Instead, it missed the lines and fell sideways into the yard. A branch cracked the bedroom window and broke the screen, but the brunt of the damage fell (literally) on the deck and gutters. The remaining section of the tree balanced precariously on the splintered section of trunk that remained, and I had some trouble finding an arborist who felt confident of taking the tree down without it falling into the electrical lines.

And in answer to the inevitable question: Yes, I find it ironic that after all the care I took to remove unhealthy trees, the largest and most beautiful of the shade trees has given me the most trouble. Still, I consider it a blessing that the damage was minimal.

And it may have been better that it went as it did. While I was gone, a storm went through the area and took down not only a great many neighborhood trees but also brought powerlines crashing down on the dike, which trapped people for a couple days in their homes.

Image via Wikipedia

…or, another installment in the not-so-epic adventure that is My Life as a Klutz.  While young men’s fancies turn to thoughts of love, spring brings out a different pensive state for the neighborhood.

We turn to thoughts of trees and flowers.

On Good Friday, after visiting my folk, I borrowed a tree-trimmer from my brother. It’s a long pole** with a built-in extension that allows one to cut tree branches from the ground. It has a single-blade attachment, but my preference is for a hook that wraps the branch while a rope-controlled pulley that flips a blade to slice it.  The beauty of this device is that it doesn’t involve climbing ladders or into trees.

Until I use it.

In my back garden is a swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor). Unlike its  maple neighbors, its lower branches grow downward instead of out and up.  Every year I trim this pyramid of its deadwood and roof-smacking lower limbs.

The trimmer worked well until I tried to take down a branch jutting out between the end of the driveway and the shed.  I’ve spared this limb for three years because I  like the look of a single, shapely arm reaching across space.  However,  my visitors, especially certain aged relatives, object to ducking (to say nothing of receiving a face-smacking).

I really should curb my sense of aesthetics.

Halfway through the slice, I realized the branch was bending under the blade.  Worse, the blade stuck. From the ground, I couldn’t possibly get it loose. Finally, I pulled out a free-standing ladder.

Being an old hand at klutz-proofing, I made sure that the legs stood on level ground, nowhere near the lumpy areas where tree roots have heaved the earth.  I also avoided the patches where the ground regularly collapses into spaces made by chipmunk tunnels and rotting roots of a long-gone maple. I also stopped half-way up the ladder, not chancing the higher steps.  I slung my left arm over the branch to hold it steady while I used my right to wrest the blade free.

Success!

The pole fell and I grabbed for it. At the same time, the bough sprang upward without its encumbering weight.  The limb caught me in the armpit, lifting me off the ladder. Because I was leaning over, I couldn’t manage to get a grip.

So I dropped.

Luckily I missed the ladder on the way down (Lord knows what injury would have resulted) and fell into a soft muddy section of lawn.  End result: Oak 1, Me 0.

**Thankfully, I have no episode to relate of klutziness involving the transportation of a long, bladed pole in my little car.

Related articles

• The Angel Oak – 1500 years and counting

Image via Wikipedia

Forget Frost’s poem about fences. It’s making decisions on trees that makes or breaks harmony with one’s neighbor.

Wednesday at the nearby café, a man asked me about who to contact regarding a cottonwood (a type of aspen) growing on the other side of his fence. It’s on the school property and has dropped limbs onto his property. Four years ago, he was not concerned, but cottonwoods increase girth and height quickly. Last spring’s high winds of winter dropped a limb through his skylight and another bounced off the roof and punctured the aluminum siding, leaving a hole the size of his fist. Now he’s afraid of the next gale dropping a car-sized limb into his bedroom.

Like many people in this area, he expressed regret that his request means cutting down a tree.

Unlike the caricature of “tree-huggers”, members of this community appreciate that it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition when it comes to weighing a tree’s value against its interference with human activity. Trees are cleared to build houses, but not all. Trees shade us, shelter us from the wind, give the birds and squirrels (and bees and wasps) a place to live.  Existing trees are left to grow as they will, with the understanding that those removed will be those that don’t thrive or that undermine the house. Continue Reading »

If you desire humility, God can definitely provide you with more than adequate opportunities to be humbled. Maybe you will have something which you love to do taken away from you. (…) For those desiring the true, the good, and the beautiful, our God is the God of satisfaction. Our God is the God of sanctification. He will give you what you are seeking—and more.

- April Yeager, “How Much More?” in the Catholic Phoenix

Related articles

• Humility (charlesbonaventure.wordpress.com)
• How Much More? (The complete column in catholicphoenix.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Illiteracy was widespread 150 years ago.  Yet, those who were    literate, even with just a fourth grade education, had such a facility with words that this blogger is put to shame. - Pat Archbold, The Dumbing Down of Everything at the National Catholic Register.

Mr. Archbold decries “literacy without anything to say”, but the simple fact is that we adults do not care to read or write, so children do not see literacy as terribly important. As a culture, we prefer films to the books they’re based on.  We embrace short missives to thoughtful essays and letters.

We needn’t go back 150 years in time to find a well-read culture, but recent decades have brought a sharp decline. Take poetry, for instance.  In the not-to-distant past, adults could quote lines of poetry from memory. Now  we quote lyrics – much of it hackneyed rhymes or crude euphemisms.

In the past, adults could name several living poets. Now the best-known poets are dead ones – with the exception of a live specimen trotted out for the latest presidential inauguration. Poetry is the smallest section of any bookstore, shelves with a preponderance of anthologies of long-dead poets popular in the past.

This cultural free-fall cannot be laid at the feet of teachers in public or private schools.  School is not enough to instill old-fashioned literacy in a child.  If parents and peers don’t value reading and writing, then they are another unnecessary, boring skill that schools force on students but doesn’t apply “in the real world”.

(According to a poll of available sophomores, other unnecessary skills include doing basic math and knowing history. “That’s why there are calculators!” they often said. And not just electronic calculators. Movie directors, politicians, and various activists will be only too happy to calculate what the common citizen needs to know.)

Although Mr. Archbold focuses on writing, I find it far more sad that people rebel against reading anything difficult. It’s not just Shakespeare; the Bible has been re-translated into modern language because people don’t “get” the old-fashioned and beautiful.  So what’s wrong with that?

I’m not a King James-only purist (especially since most KJV advocates have dumped the so-called apocryphal books like Tobit and Wisdom). However, a low-literacy culture with “dumbed down” texts loses not just  poetic language, in-depth news coverage, and thoughtful personal correspondence.  It loses its ability to understand divine correspondence.

To see a fitting example, read the beginning of Psalm 1 from the Contemporary English translation of the Bible, courtesy of Bible Gateway:

1. God blesses those people
who refuse evil advice and won’t follow sinners
or join in sneering at God.
² Instead, the Law of the LORD,
makes them happy,
and they think about it day and night.

Compare that with the Douay-Rheims 1899 version:

¹ Blessed is the man
who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor stood in the way of sinners,
nor sat in the chair of pestilence.
² But his will is in the law of the Lord,
and on His law he shall meditate day and night.

Other than the change of  “stood in the way” from meaning “walked in the road” to “interfered with”,  that language is clear and deep.  It’s unfortunate that the contemporary version shows that, capital letters not withstanding, the Law of the LORD is about feeling happy. (The NIV versions have the person “delight” in the law of the Lord.)

So what can be done to improve literacy and writing? Continue Reading »

Margaret Cabaniss at Inside Catholic had two posts this last week about advocates of sparing society from “useless” people. The first involved New Hampshire Republican lawmaker Martin Harty and the second real ethicist Prof. Julian Savulescu at Oxford University. (“Real” means, of course, drawing a salary from a public institution.)

Mr. Harty, 91, resigned rather than clarify his position: Did he think that all voters with addictions and/or disabilities should die, or just the ones who didn’t vote for him?  After his resignation, people wondered whether his views were a sign of dementia or rightwing-nuttery. (I, for one, suspect the answer lies in his native state of New Hampshire.)

People with addictions or disabilities can cost society in terms of money, lost productivity, etc. However, I can’t imagine the United States replacing counseling services and rehabilitation centers with assisted-suicide facilities. Even the shadiest politician has never devised a plan for the DEA to intercept drug shipments and lace them with poison as a way to end the War on Drugs. Most people understand that mass killings doesn’t create a better society; it makes a scarred and scared society.

However, in another respect, Mr. Harty followed in the footsteps of real ethicists: Their theories don’t seem to connect to the ethical (and practical) problems arising from their application.

Australian Dr. Savulescu has a degree in philosophy but not in medicine.  He states that there is a “moral obligation” to use only intelligent embryos in in vitro fertlization (IVF), but he’s a fuzzy on specifics. How does one determine IQ at the time of IVF?  According to geneticists quoted in the article, genetic tests are both impractical and inconclusive.

Even if such testing were feasible and applicable, what are the ethics of selecting a particular trait like intelligence to the exclusion of other factors? A man’s genetics may make him physically handsome but his personality traits render him repulsive.  I’ve met many highly intelligent people who have addictions, autism, or compulsive disorders who find life in normal society difficult, if not impossible. Continue Reading »

Image via Wikipedia

Early in May, I came across an environmental theologist (or some such strange creature) and self-identified Christian who didn’t believe in Hell. I have since forgotten her name, but at the time I sent her the following comment:

I have a question for you. Do all serial killers go to Heaven? You find it unbelievable that a loving God could allow the existence of Hell. I find it incomprehensible that a loving God could be as unjust as to allow an unrepentent child-murderer to spend eternity with his victims. Nor can I wrap my mind around a segregated Heaven in which those who rejected God’s love in life somehow get a separate-but-equal eternal benefit of God’s love.

My comment never appeared on the site, so I attempted to e-mail her the same. Hoping for a better explanation of her (non)belief, I even started a draft of a blogpost in anticipation of her reply.

Obviously, I received no response from her.

However, I did receive other responses. One came in the line of a character in Dean Koontz‘s One Door Away from Heaven.  She said she believed that Hell was as necessary as a toilet.  Although the explanation was no  cruder than that, it struck me that no one wants to consider that some human beings may just be human feces. We want to believe that everyone is good, even if we see otherwise.

Then I read these lines in the essay The Center by the late German essayist J. Heinrich Arnold:

There is something in modern thinking which rebels against the Atonement. Perhaps our idea of an all-loving God keeps us from wanting to face judgment. We think that love and forgiveness is all that is needed, yet that is not the whole Gospel – it makes God too human. Christ’s love is not the soft love of human emotion, but a burning fire that cleanses and sears.

If people are rejecting the idea of atonement for sins, no wonder they are uncomfortable with the idea of Hell! The idea of God as a loving parent is distorted, too, because we’re used to indulgent parents who continue to advocate on behalf of their children long after it’s appropriate to do so.**

While I was still mulling over this, I happened to read Jen Ambrose‘s comments about Western vs. Chinese parenting. Included were photographs of her copy of Di Zi Gui, translated to English as Standards for Being a Good Student and Child, from the Analects of Confucius. This footnote jumped at me from a photo:

In ancient China, when a child did not obey the parents, the parents were allowed to discipline the child. If the child refused to be disciplined, the parents had the right to ask the authorities to have the child executed.

Yikes! And yet, we know of modern parents who have turned their children into the authorities for crimes that could garner the death sentence.  We don’t ask why a parent would do that. We understand that love does not override justice, and mercy is for the repentant who faces justice.

**NOTE: In the United States, the term “helicopter parents” describes parents who keep hovering over their students, often contacting professors about low scores or bosses about work-related issues. In my region, they’ve been called “curling parents.” In the Canadian game of curling, a rock (the child) is slid across the ice and sweepers (the parents) use brooms to lessen any obstacle to the rock’s progress. God is neither a helicopter nor a sweeper!

Related articles

• Why Hell Is Integral to the Gospel. (greatriversofhope.wordpress.com)
• Facebook Answers: Who’s Afraid of Hell? (eyes2cross.wordpress.com)
• Why the doctrine of Hell is essential to our Christian life and Ministry (reachingyouth.wordpress.com)