Author: bearcee

My degrees are in Journalism (M.A.,Andrews University) and Philosophy of Religion (M.A., Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University). I taught for 34 years at Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, MD—mostly religion, philosophy, communication and media studies, public relations and advertising. Then I was an adjunct professor in philosophy at Trinity Washington University (DC) and an adjunct in Business Communications at Stevenson University, MD. I love design, reading, writing, teaching, and learning. I'm married and have a son and a stepdaughter. I am a Christian with Taoist and Buddhist influences. I am now retired and writing full time. My first collection of essays, "Wandering, Not Lost," was published in November 2019 and is available from Wipf & Stock and Amazon.

Moneyball’s Learning Curve

The fundamental mistake is in taking the patterns we observe around us as facts of nature. They are not; they are the result of rational individuals adjusting to a particular set of constraints. . . . Change the constraints and, given a little time to adjust, the patterns change. — David Friedman, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life

What’s the best way to get someone to change their behavior? Use a carrot? Use a stick? I’ve been interested in motivation every since I became a teacher and discovered that teachers can’t motivate students. If you beat them with a stick it doesn’t increase their skills and they’ll come to hate the process of learning. If you entice them with the carrot they’ll do just enough to get the carrot and no more. Unlike teachers, most students don’t enjoy learning for its own sake. Come to think of it, teachers don’t either: they learn in order to accomplish a goal. But one thing that separates teachers from students is that teachers can’t understand why the goals they love aren’t what students love. 
And that brings us to Moneyball, the movie starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, based on the book of the same title by Michael Lewis. Lewis has a talent for making economics interesting in such bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and The Big Short. With Moneyball he looks inside the economics of baseball. The conventional wisdom is that the big spenders (Yankees, Red Sox) buy the best players and the division titles. They may even win the World Series. Money equals wins. But Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, had little money—in fact, the lowest buying budget of any team around the league. 
His first move was to hire a shy, soft-spoken kid, an economics graduate from Yale, who lived and breathed statistics—baseball statistics. It was the kid’s idea that meticulous scrutiny of a player’s stats could reveal patterns of performance that pointed to value rarely seen by scouts or managers alike. Most of the players Beane picks up in following this advice are the bargain-basement overlooked or the over-the-hill gang that no one wants.  
Predictably, the A’s scouts, a group of leathery, tough old guys, can’t see the logic and don’t appreciate the implication that tables of stats can trump years of experience. Beane is too old to waste time on methods that no longer work and young enough that he’s willing to bet the farm—and his reputation—on unproven concepts. This isn’t a movie review and I’ll try not to spoil it for you, but this is the takeaway I received: what people are worth is the value they place on their integrity. 
Billy Beane takes a clutch of misfits, has-beens, and also-rans and turns them into a team that wins 20 in a row—a record that no other team had achieved before—by thinking of them as parts in a system rather than individual stars. Without the money to buy a slugger he goes for the ones who get on base. He buys a pitcher whose delivery looks like a knuckle-dragging primate on speed, and turns a broken catcher, Scott Hatteberg, into a first-baseman. “What’s your biggest fear?” asks David Justice, a veteran player. “That someone will hit the ball toward me,” breathes Hatteberg. After Justice stops chuckling, he says, “Good one! That’s funny. But seriously. . . “   “No, really,” says Hatteberg, looking away. “That is my biggest fear.” 
By accepting the constraints and working to maximize the effects, Beane and his staff turned the club around and, some would argue, changed the game. He was hardly an inspirational speaker, at least as portrayed in the movie, and he seems to have deliberately distanced himself at first from the players. “That makes it easier for him to cut us, right?” asks a player of Beane’s assistant. But as the season grinds on with few wins Beane holds informal seminars on the method and gradually convinces the players that together they can win. A few men with journeymen talent and an ability to put ego aside can achieve more than the glittering superstars. He trades a player whose taste for the fast life is messing with his game, sends a rookie star to Philadelphia because of his attitude, and regretfully but firmly drops a player who cannot measure up. 
What are we worth? Exactly what we contribute when we put our hearts into it. But there’s no gauzy optimism in the A’s locker room, and you’ll never hear “I Believe I Can Fly” blasting from the sound system. In a scene that would make motivational coaches and school counselors cringe, Beane strides into the locker room after yet another loss and berates the players for celebrating anyway. “Do you like losing?” he yells and flings a bat down a corridor. In the sudden silence the sound reverberates for a long, long time. “That’s what losing sounds like,” he snarls, and stalks out. In the economy of teams at the bottom only one effect can give rise to a new cause: you have to hate losing more than you care about winning. In Beane’s pedagogy that’s neither a carrot nor a stick: it’s self-respect coupled with realism. 
Carol Dweck is a psychologist whose 30-plus years of research into motivation among children seems to back up Beane’s intuitions. She notes in her book, Self-Theories, that “The hallmark of successful individuals is that they love learning, they seek challenges, they value effort, and they persist in the face of obstacles.” Moreover, she punctures beliefs that are prevalent in our society, such as those with high ability are more likely to be mastery-oriented, and praising a student’s intelligence will encourage qualities of mastery. They’re not and it won’t, she says. Instead, the ones who succeed are most often those who persist with vigor and humility to overcome obstacles, and who believe that they can learn, that intelligence is not fixed at birth. That’s a cheer for the underdogs, but Dweck even goes one better: her research shows that the students who easily pull A’s but collapse in frustration when up against something difficult can learn a new attitude. They can shift from avoiding anything that would spoil their record to enjoying the challenge of learning something new. In other words, they are motivated from within. 
Perhaps, at the risk of over-simplification, this could be expressed as a set of goals: See your limitations as challenges. Learn to love the questions. Keep at it. Share what you know. 

Understanding Backwards

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Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards. — Soren Kierkegaard

For a good part of my life I have seen religion as a duty which must be accomplished with dedication if not enjoyment. Since all people are sinners and sinners must seek salvation it did not occur to me that some people might not see the point in all this religion business. “Oh, I’m not religious,” some friends would say to me, as if it were genetically transmitted or perhaps an acquired taste. They would blithely go about their lives, unencumbered by guilt, enjoying their sins, and occasionally pausing to shake their heads at my dutifulness. “Why do you bother?” they would ask curiously. 
 
For my part, I could not understand how religion could be regarded as an accessory. It was core, at the heart, deep inside, that which guided and prompted all that was good and pure and true. One could no more shuck it off and live a decent upright life than one could see one’s hand in a room without light. There was one way to salvation and that was through obedience to the rules, as inexplicable as they appeared sometimes. And yet I continued to meet people who claimed no religious allegiance, but seemed to me honest and good, the kind of people who would take you in during a storm or give you a lift miles out of their way. It was disconcerting. Some of them even smoked.
 
So I tried harder, tried to be dutiful, tried to be aligned without completely losing myself. But myself would slip out of my grasp at the most inopportune moments and do something embarrassing, like refusing to stand and go forward for altar calls. Even if I had made a clear and heartfelt decision years before to join the side of the angels, I squirmed in the pew when the preacher began his pitch. I felt that I owed it to the unchurched and the disbelievers in the house to stand yet again and be a living example. Despite my inner diatribe that religion was personal and that honesty demanded a consonance between motivation, belief and action, I felt I was letting down the team. 
 
And yet I was always fascinated by religion, or rather by the quest for God and transcendence. Growing up in California in the 60s, I was surrounded by those who sought a shortcut to enlightenment or at least bliss. I plodded along, waving as they roared past, secure that I had the safer path if by far the slower one. If it was there, I thought, I’d find it eventually by dint of just keeping at it, one foot in front of the other. But I didn’t. 
 
I studied theology, philosophy of religion, eventually got a doctorate and taught religion for some years. I had no doubt I should be there and yet I constantly felt like an imposter. I could not be like my colleagues, men who had signed up for the church for life and who seemingly could overlook all manner of missteps and outright lies on the part of the church. I struggled to understand how to avoid the sin of self-righteousness while side-stepping hypocrisy. But pride goes before a fall—and I took a fall of my own making. 
 
Years later I am seeing some things much differently. I am learning not to let the foibles of the official church body distract me from my own spiritual quest. I have met the enemy, like Pogo, and they are me. I know what I am capable of doing against my better judgment and where most of the fault lines appear in my foundations. 
 
And I have learned or perhaps discovered, that signing up for a set of beliefs is not the point. Some beliefs fall away over the years because they never really found a place because I never really believed them. Others simply don’t make sense no matter how I’ve tried. But the vast majority of religious beliefs ought to be seen as practices. We practice them because in the practicing comes understanding and with understanding comes the willingness to live in grace, to be in God. “Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart,” says Karen Armstrong in The Case for God. “You will discover their truth—or lack of it—only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action.” 
 
Orthopraxy over orthodoxy—right action over right belief is how I see it—but with two important caveats. First, we do not earn our way through “right” action because this is not a contractual relationship. God is in the giving business, not the litigation business. Thus, I have nothing to fear from him; I have no need to protect myself. Second, belief is not abandoned, but made firm through action. “Like any skill,” continues Armstrong, “religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely. But those who do not apply themselves will get nowhere at all.”
 
In the end—and in fact, in the beginning and in the middle, is grace. That is what makes this whole venture possible. Room to move, to experiment, to make mistakes and learn from them. Here is the mysterious presence of the Christ. T. S. Eliot knew something of this, laying down the lines in The Wasteland:
 
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you. . . .”
 
And that is enough for the time being.
(Photo: Moritz Schumacher, Unsplash.com)
 

9/11 and Counting

“Not until we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

My grandfather was an historian and a college teacher who filled me with a love for history and a respect for those who write it. I was raised by my grandparents, teachers both, and our home was packed with books, magazines, and journals, many of them about ancient history, medieval history, and modern history. My first understanding was that history told the story of what had happened long ago, that it was a true and valid record of those events, and that it stood in the same relation to the Eternal Verities as the Law. One learned and believed History and one kept the Law. Neither was profitably to be questioned.
These beliefs, solidified and tested by teachers in elementary school, were gently but firmly undermined by my grandfather’s tutelage. History, he said, was what historians reconstructed from written documents, eyewitness accounts, physical evidence and a sanctified imagination. The story could have been written another way; in fact, there were many ways to tell the story and most of them could be seen to fit the facts as they were known.
This was endlessly fascinating to me. It threw a relativism into the works that furnished my imagination with a constant stream of long shots and close-ups seen from different angles. Historical figures, outsized characters like Lord Nelson, Napoleon, and Winston Churchill, became, through my grandfather’s stories, people whose flaws were as tangible as their virtues. Neither was to be ignored nor were the flaws to define the person, as tempting as that was. History, in the way my grandfather taught it, was complex and multi-layered, a spider’s web of nobility, contrivances, deceit and bravery. It was not, as Henry Ford was famously quoted as declaring, ‘one damn thing after another,’ but a vast and ongoing story—a tale told with a point, freely offered up for scrutiny.
The events of the 60s, exploding over my generation, came so fast and furiously that Ford’s complaint seemed justified. It was one damn thing after another. Apparently random events took on a sinister afterglow, conspiracy theories bred like fruit flies, and the Book of Revelation bookmarked the nightly news. And if journalism was the rough draft of history, then propaganda from all points on the political spectrum was the marketer’s flack, guaranteed to fill the worst with a passionate intensity.  
My cognitive dissonance over America’s Manifest Destiny gone rancid in Vietnam was further jolted by the realization that Martin Luther King, Jr. was breaking the Law. He didn’t just break it though, he first hauled it up from the depths like some blinkered Morlock, where it could be seen for the poisonous creature it was. The social effect of his nonviolent resistance to institutional racism was the permanent dwarfism of law. From that point on, certainly for my budding political awareness, the law no longer had the implicit seal of approval from on high. I saw it as a human construct, flawed and dangerous when it served only the interests of the powerful. For me this was a new experience: I found myself in a dark wood without the familiar landmarks and the path I’d traveled daily suddenly looked alien and forbidding. Thoreau had been there too, literally if not metaphorically. The traveller in the forest looks around and “Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it,” says Thoreau. “. . . .[I]t is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia.” 
Perhaps that was our feeling on 9/11 when, on a perfect day in September, our predictable world turned dark and terrifying. How could this happen here? Ten years on from that day I wonder what we have learned. Are we still the adolescent nation, armed, fractious, and trigger-happy? Are we still oblivious to the effect our bumbling self-centeredness has on the world around us?  “Not till we have lost the world,” said Thoreau, “do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
Someone once remarked that “the world is passing strange and wondrous.” That it certainly is. There is mystery and wonder all around us—in the violent dislocations as well as in the harmonies we find. Our common histories quickly become uncommon when we make allowance for a shift in view.
“In rethinking our history,” says Howard Zinn, historian and author of The People’s History of America,” we are not just looking at the past, but at the present, and trying to look at it from the point of view of those who have been left out of the benefits of so-called civilization. It is a simple but profoundly important thing we are trying to accomplish, to look at the world from other points of view.” 
That can be the legacy of 9/11.

Readers Without Borders


“The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process. . . . The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.” — Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Borders closes this week, after a six-week countdown to bankruptcy, and the selling off, at constantly-dropping prices, of everything from books to bookshelves. This is the fourth local Borders that has closed in the past few months, two in Washington, DC and two in Maryland. I knew all of them well and spent considerable time and money in each one. On the flyleaf of every book I’ve bought from them is my name, the date of purchase, and the location of the store. The last Borders book I bought—a collection of J. G. Ballard’s best short stories—was from the Silver Spring store and it’s closing was duly noted in the flyleaf. 
But it’s a cruel world out there (a doggie-dog world, as my students would say) and Borders is proof that everybody is someone else’s lunch. An independent bookstore in Takoma Park, Maryland, that many of us loved, Chuck and Dave’s, finally succumbed some years ago to the relentless pressure of discount pricing that the local Borders provided. And now Borders itself, Nook-less, and struggling to counteract Barnes and Noble on one side and the gigantic presence of Amazon on the other, has been devoured. There are rumors that the Silver Spring store will be taken over by Books-A-Million, an outfit that could charitably be described as ‘a book distribution outlet.’ Try asking its staffers for books by Auden, Barth, Nabokov, Proust, or Tolstoy, and you may be asked to repeat the question. 
As bookstores go, Borders was formulaic, as befits a contemporary corporate franchise. From store to store you could count on the same titles in the same sections. The effect, I suppose, was a predictability much like that of any major chain from MacDonald’s to Goodyear. But Borders staffers seemed to love books and know quite a bit about them; they had favorites and knew where to find them. If you asked they would drop what they were doing and lead you to comparable titles. It’s true that the reshelving process rarely occurred in some stores so that you’d find Lolita shacked up with Jerome Dickey and Isaac Newton in the Psychology section, but that could simply have been indication of a lively clientele constantly on the move. 
Depending on the location, Borders appealed to the local demographic, but still had a depth in its selection of which Barnes and Noble still seem only fitfully aware. If you wanted Herodotus they had him, along with Tacitus and Livy; if it was Freud you were after they had his works—and Jung’s and Adler’s as well. Jeffrey Deaver? Shelf after shelf, but Erle Stanley Gardener, Dorothy Sayers, Kurt Mitchell, and even George MacDonald could be found. Religion and philosophy were pretty well represented at Borders too, although I couldn’t help notice that Nietzsche invariably occupied more shelf space in every store than any other philosopher. But their selection of Taoist, Confucianist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish philosophy was excellent and far outstripped anything you could find at Barnes and Noble. Again, while B & N gives a lot of real estate to religion and spirituality, most of it seems to run to the lighter variety of “inspirational” works that clutter the waiting rooms of medical offices. 
So Borders is gone and Barnes and Noble has won—for the time being. Yet, I don’t believe that e-readers like Kindle, the Nook, or the Sony reader spell the end of “real” books nor do I think that brick-and-mortar bookstores will completely disappear any time soon. And while the statistics that one hears about American reading habits are appalling if true (a majority of American adults don’t even read one book a year), I’m guessing that places like DC and the Washington Metro area are probably typical of many cities in America with universities, high concentrations of professionals, and diverse populations of people who read a great deal. 
Even so, the small, independent booksellers are quietly dropping out of sight, a fact greatly to be mourned. They simply can’t compete with the buying power of the bigger stores. They offer topical interest (every issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine since 1941!), quietude broken only by the buzz of fluorescent lighting or the flatulence of the owner’s elderly cats, and comfy chairs. Very often there will be a pot of coffee or tea simmering, and a variety of biscuits at hand—the small comforts of a literate society. 
Every breakthrough in technology brings both untold blessings and considerable gnashing of teeth. Gutenberg’s printing press could churn out 3,600 pages per day as opposed to the few that could be produced by hand. Gone was the scriptorium, the rooms full of monks nodding over their copies of the Bible or Christian classics. Now  eager readers of the latest works by Luther and Erasmus could have their own books, thus inciting revolutions in thinking that spread like a virus. 
The transitions between technologies are rarely smooth because they cannot be planned for and their effects remain to be seen. Understanding the changes at first may be like encountering a tsunami at sea—it’s traveling 600 miles per hour but it’s only an inch high. By the time it hits the shallows of public awareness it’s too late to get out of the way. This is what Joseph Schumpeter called the Creative Destruction of capitalism. Every new technology destroys the previous one and sets up the conditions for its own destruction. While we benefit from the innovation we lose the traditions. “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism,” he said. “It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”
A few years ago I got a Kindle, a gift from my wife, because it saved on shelf space, the books were cheaper, and ultimately it saved trees. My gain in efficiency and conservation helped to bring about the demise of Borders, a “clean, well-lighted place,” in which ‘real’ books could be lingered over, paged through, bought and carried out. I love the feel, the smell, the texture of a book in hand, and I’ve got the bookshelves to prove it. And while the wheel of innovation turns and brings its own pleasures, I shall, God willing, shuffle off this mortal coil years from now, surrounded by loved ones and books. These are the wistful joys we carry into our temporary futures.

One Two Many

It is neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple. — William James, Pragmatism

Is the universe one or many? Or to put it another way, are we hedgehogs or foxes? Isaiah Berlin, philosopher, cultural critic, and wise man, wrote an essay years ago about this with the focus on Tolstoy’s view of history. It has taken on a life of its own over the years, known mostly for the first few pages where Berlin sets the context. “There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus,” he writes, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ ” If we take the line figuratively it divides the world up into two groups: those who relate everything to one single, unifying vision, overarching everything and giving meaning to all things, down to the minutest detail. Those are the hedgehogs, and Berlin counts among their august company such figures as Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Proust. 
On the other side, across the vast chasm that divides the two, are the foxes, those who pursue many ends, related or not, usually contradictory in their purposes, and connected only in some de facto way. Their ideas, notes Berlin, are centrifugal rather than centripetal, flying outward unencumbered by any “fanatical, unitary inner vision.” Shakespeare, according to Berlin, is just such an animal, as is Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, and Joyce. And maybe we could add Woody Allen, John Lennon, Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, and Robin Williams.  
The difference between them does not seem to be the presence of a metaphysical ADHD, but rather this view of the universe as either monistic or pluralistic. It’s an old philosophical problem, probably the equivalent of a parlor game at Plato’s Academy. William James, realizing that many in his audience were hardly kept awake at night over such matters, considered it even so “the most central of all philosophic problems.” He believed that “if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in ist.” Philosophy, he notes, throughout its long history, has taken the search for unity as its default position, so much so that no one really questions it. But what about the variety in things? Doesn’t that matter too? In his usual brisk and humorous manner he asks what practical difference it would make to see all things through a single, unifying lens and goes on to show the presence of unity in our everyday lives. 
For example, even in our ways of talking we assume a oneness to “the world” and trade on this assumption to avoid having to explain the multitude of parts every time we open our mouths. We also find a continuity between the parts such that we believe the whole is made up of the way the pieces hang together. And so on. Through several examples James seems to beat the monistic drum until you realize that he has slyly provided a third option: the world is neither One nor Many but One and Many. 

I don’t toss and turn at night, vexed by this problem. But it’s always there, just at the edge of my peripheral vision, something that if looked at directly seems to float away and yet is constant in its persistence. Standard operating procedure these days seems to force one to choose between the extremes: either conservative or progressive, right or left, all or nothing. But between Rambo and Diary of a Wimpy Kid lies a vast spectrum of degrees of kind, along which we most certainly can claim a rightful place. I’m convinced that as we move through our days and years we instinctively find the Middle Path, an inward moral and cultural gyroscope that guides us through the social terrain. In a number of areas of life we might benefit from our own versions of James’ brooding reflection on this question. 
Religion: Like the barnyard denizens of Animal Farm, we’ve learned to chant in unison, “Four legs good! Two legs bad!”,  except that it usually comes out as “Religion bad! Spirituality good!” Choosing one over the other brings out the worst in both: a sclerotic religiosity leads to self-righteousness and hypocrisy—and that’s just on a good day. Spirituality unattached to communion with others has no reference points; it floats in a vaguely mystical haze unable to communicate with others and with no hope of transcending itself. In the geometry of the soul the ideal state is probably an angle bisecting the vertical axis Godward and the horizontal axis toward others. Jesus did say, after all, that we are to love God and treat others as we wish to be treated. 
Politics: Democracies demand commitment; politicians will settle for your vote and your cash. Since commitment can’t be bought, and many don’t vote, this democracy seems both anemic and volatile. There’s a rage just under the surface, like a persistent fever that drains our energy and spikes our resistance to what we don’t understand. And there’s a lot we don’t understand, like how grownups can act like children fighting in a schoolyard, all sweat, threats, and wounded egos. Wasn’t politics the ‘art of compromise’? Isn’t it possible to hold convictions, recognize the convictions of others, and yet find a way to do the good thing in the right way? 
Communication: We are social animals, clearly not ourselves without others. Through patience, practice, and a gracious humility, we can learn to communicate with others quite different from ourselves. But it doesn’t come naturally; it’s a learned response. Much of the tutoring is carried on through the media, odd creatures that have heads like humans and the backsides of. . . . horses. Lately, the view of those who follow the media has been of jostling backsides with precious few heads in sight. Perhaps we need to be out in front where we can put our heads together. 
As for me, I’m perpetually betwixt and between. I’m a fox with a hedgehog headache. So many interests, so little time—wouldn’t it be nice to synthesize all this into a simple Rule of Life. I shall, for the moment, leave the last word to Bono: we’re one but we’re not the same.

Did You Feel That?

There’s a 100 percent chance of an earthquake today. Though millions of persons may never experience an earthquake, they are very common occurrences on this planet. So today — somewhere — an earthquake will occur. — The United States Geological Survey

This week a most unusual thing happened: the East Coast “suffered” an earthquake registering 5.8 magnitude. This is unusual because earthquakes rarely happen here. The last one originating in Maryland was in 1990 and was a magnitude of 2.5, barely enough to rattle the windows. The last one in Virginia of any note was in 2003 and hit 4.5, somewhere in the median range of magnitude between zero and nine—nine being of epic, apocalyptic proportions, like the one that hit Sendai, Japan this year.
Nevertheless, the one that hit Washington, D.C. shortly after 1:51 pm on Tuesday, August 23, tipped over a couple of coffee cups and dropped a few stone blocks from the Washington Cathedral. That was the extent of the damage, but you wouldn’t have known it by the media firestorm that erupted within minutes. As Howard Kurtz, writing for The Daily Beast, pointed out, the Libyan rebels were closing in on Gaddafi (choose your spelling), certainly a significant event on the world stage, but here in Washington, the earthquake blew everything else off the screen. The Washington Post the next day featured a front-page story and photograph of three panic-stricken women apparently fleeing for their lives down Connecticut Avenue. The local news faucets featured “man-in-the-street” interviews round the clock of the generic type such as,  “I was in my office near the Capitol when the windows starting rattling. . . At first I thought it was a truck going by, then I thought we were being bombed, so I ran out of the building. . .” And so on. 
Some of us reacted differently. When a friend recounted how she had fled her building in terror and asked what I had done, I hesitated and then said, “Well, I grew up in California, so. . . .” I probably came off as insufferably smug, but it really wasn’t that big of a deal. For me the interest is two-fold: how rare earthquakes are in this region and how much people overreacted. No doubt the two are linked. I checked the U. S. Geological Survey online tonight and found that there were dozens of earthquakes all over California today, all up the coast to Washington State, with Alaska’s Aleutian Islands pocked with many also, most of them over 4.5 magnitude. I’m fairly certain none of them got more than a passing notice in the media.
This week alone Vanuatu took nine earthquakes in one day between 5.0 – 7.0. An earthquake with a magnitude of 7 shows up in red on the USGS website as “significant.”  The Vanuatuans had three days in a row of such tremors, then they took a day off, and resumed with vigor, finishing out the week with enough earthquakes of significance to last Maryland for three centuries at least. You’re wondering where Vanuatu is, I bet. I looked it up on the map thoughtfully provided on the website and found that it’s a couple of dots several hundred miles off the northeast coast of Australia. I don’t know if anybody lives there but if they do they probably have other things to worry about besides their lawn chairs tipping over. 
Scanning a list of earthquakes world-wide so far this year (1,747 between 5 and 5.9 alone) one place appeared with alarming frequency, an area referred to as “east of Honshu, Japan.” That’s the fault line that slipped and sent a 23-foot tsunami into Sendai and other towns in the Honshu prefecture in March, with the death toll unofficially at 10,000. It makes the list more than any other place, but there are several other hot spots around the Pacific Rim that are offering some tough competition for first.   
I saw video shot in a grocery store in Japan during that devastating quake. Customers do not scream or run, instead, they steady the grocery shelves and as the camera vibrates with the tremors, they bend down to begin to clean up the mess. I guess it’s all about what one gets used to. 
As a species humans are wonderfully adaptable. Drop us into a wretched situation and within days, sometimes hours, we will have figured out a way to cope. But coping as a mechanism for dealing with the unexpected seems to vary from culture to culture. For example, cultures that emphasize the community over the individual often pull together more quickly in crises than cultures where individualism is the priority. So Japan, high on the collectivistic scale, handles these situations of genuine devastation and horror with more patience and equanimity than we in the US (top of the list in individualism worldwide) seem to do. They’ve certainly had more practice. On the other hand, the natives of Joplin, Missouri, hit with a tornado on May 22 that killed 153, a record number of tornado-related deaths in many years, bore up resolutely under the strain and opened their schools on time this August, one of them in an abandoned former big-box store. 
It’s tempting to indulge in generalizations about these things, especially those relating to cultural differences. But here is a truth, one that I hold as self-evident, that occurred to me as I reflected on our “all-earthquake-all-the-time” mentality. The American media, especially in the major markets, is addicted to drama and that message seeps into our unconscious to the point that we find danger everywhere. In fact, we seem to revel in our manufactured paranoia. Paul Watzlawick, a leading psychiatric researcher at Stanford for many years, says “Any idea, when firmly held, nurtured, and cultivated, will eventually create its own reality (The Situation is Hopeless, But Not Serious, 57).” We seem to be living in what Gever Tulley calls a culture of “dangerism.” Since perception is so often reality, we have to respect the fears of others, however silly they might seem to us. But we don’t have to share them. I’m opting for an attitude that says by God’s grace we’ll endure whatever happens, we’ll try not to whine about it, and we’ll help one another. A lot of people, no doubt, will do without the first phrase while admirably living up to the other two. Personally, I’m hoping that more of us who believe in God’s grace can exemplify the courage of that modest group. 

Simply Jesus

“We, the modern readers who search the figure of Jesus down the years of Christian history and through the tangles of Christian mythology, have a sentimental tendency to believe that if only we could have known members of this original Judaean Church, we should have a clearer picture of what the historical Jesus was actually like. I think that this is a yearning which, had it been granted, might have proved illusory.” — A. N. Wilson, Jesus: A Life.

One of the advantages to being a professional Christian, i.e., a theologian, is that there is no end to the material at hand written about the Christ. You can specialize, focus, narrow the search, just like any good scientist on the hunt or literary critic looking to tie up the loose ends. A living can be made, a career sustained, research performed and curiosity indulged. All this because—and we can be grateful for this—the subject, Jesus, is elusive in the extreme, slipping in and out of the light, always just out of reach. 
By now, all these centuries later, the Jesus business is an immense industry. One can spend a lifetime inside the organizational machine, faithfully tinkering with the gears, rewriting the operating manuals, and offering tours of the plant. Rarely would the occasion arise to question the mission statement or, in the case of some variations on the theme, to ponder the profits won in the name of a first-century Jewish rabbi. There is simply too much at stake, too many events interpreted, innumerable private moments captured, diverted and sluiced through a corporate filter, too much memory and ego involved to ever hit the emergency switch and bring the whole train to a shuddering halt.
Reports of the imminent demise of religion are greatly exaggerated; those who predicted its passing so confidently back in the 60s are now rewriting their scripts to reflect the upsurge in passionate intensity. In America, every serious candidate for the presidency must pledge his or her allegiance to god and country, and find the born-again moment or a good facsimile of it, before being taken seriously for fund-raising and politicking. The fact that this was the first country to honor private belief by separating church and state provokes an equal and opposite reaction that chafes at the very freedom which guarantees its existence.
Where to begin with understanding Jesus? Who to believe? Which side to take in the wars of faith? If we are not to drown in the tide of scholarship or be sucked down in the maelstrom of fundamentalism we need to just. . . stand still and imagine. The great payoff of all the archeology, the historical and linguistic criticism of the Bible, the socio-political analysis of life as a Galilean peasant under the heel of Roman oppression is that we’ve caught clear glimpses of Jesus’ times. That is of immense value to organization and individual, scholarship and devotion, professional and pilgrim. But all that apparatus may not help to a quite simple end—imagining with the mind’s eye what Jesus must have been like from moment to moment. 
Humility is needed, not ignorance. Knowledge in the service of faith, faith seeking understanding—all of that is to our advantage. And yet, for all that we know about Jesus and the Gospels I don’t think we’d feel at home in Jesus‘ world. In fact, I’m not so sure we’d be at ease around Jesus. Our modern phrase, “I’m not comfortable with that,” might get us a quizzical look and a shake of the head. He did not come to make it easy on us; after all, he was an offense and a stumbling-block to almost everyone. 
Garry Wills, eminent historian, classicist, and Catholic lay theologian, writes in his devotional What Jesus Meant, “He was a mystery in his own home. Other members of his family will be at a similar loss in coping with this disturbing person in their midst.” After all, he shocked and terrified his parents early on by slipping away from their homeward processional to argue and debate the priests in the temple. When Jesus is invoked as an example of love and obedience to parents, it’s usually meant in a restrictive and conformist sense. “But there are many indications,” notes Wills, “that Jesus was more like those restive and resisting children who have all the idealism and absolutism of youth—young people who chafe against the boundaries of the past and are panting to explore new horizons.” Such young people often stir up resentment and anger. In Jesus’ case it was extreme: his own childhood friends and neighbors tried to kill him one Sabbath after synagogue. It gives new meaning to the practice of roasting the pastor at the Sabbath potluck. 
But the point here is not to do what Jesus did. He had his life and purpose; we have ours. It would be misguided and wrong, I believe, to examine his actions in order that we might reproduce them in our time and context. In many Christian bookstores you can find bracelets, T-shirts, headbands, license-plate frames, mugs, belts and rings with the acronym WWJD—What Would Jesus Do? As well-intentioned as the sentiment might be (and I do mean sentiment) it completely misses the point. It reduces the complexity of a human life to a trite recitation of middle-class platitudes. It avoids the hard truth that there are many things that Jesus did that we wouldn’t and couldn’t do because of who he was, where he was, and the urgency of his singular mission in life. 
What I am struggling to say is that the kind of radical change that Jesus called people to comes from the inside and works outward. It does not work if it’s imposed from the outside, a mere aping of the motion without the underlying emotion. Behind the emotion lies understanding and motivation, two pillars that may be grasped in a blinding flash (remember Saul’s ‘Damascus road’ experience?), but are built up over time like the growth of coral or the layers of a pearl. We want the shortcut to glory without the small gestures that come from a deepening union with Jesus. 
Here is where I’ll stop because the cliches so easily come to mind. That way leads to paralysis. What is needed is the eloquence of simplicity, something truly easier said than done. As for Jesus, well, he is still there, the piece of our puzzle that never fits and in the end remakes us around his own mysterious form. 
“There is much else that Jesus did. If it were all to be recorded in detail, I suppose the whole world could not hold the books that would be written.”

Captain Courageous

And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

As a child I was not allowed to read the comics because they were, by definition, comical and thus trivial and a waste of precious time. Furthermore, they drew the mind away from loftier themes and indulged the imagination, rendering the loftier themes. . . well, boring. The theory was that reflection on the signs of the times and the coming apocalypse should be enough to sanctify the imagination and result in good behavior. 
This led to a personal and a professional interest in the apocalyptic mindset, the psychological and social conditions that make people think the world is going to end in their lifetime. It also made me ask myself if such beliefs, on balance, had brought more good into the world than not, and if such a perspective could be reconciled with a love for life and for this Earth—extravagances that I associated with enjoyment of the Sabbath.
The mining of the archives of DC and Marvel comics and the upsurge of superheroes in film over the last few years has given me opportunity to test the theory. Why do we find them so fascinating? Do they answer some primal need for reassurance? Does their very presence become another sign of the times? One thing we can say for sure: these films make a ton of money, always a good sign in these times. And they’ll keep coming at us for the foreseeable future. They tap into the huge audience of Boomers who grew up with them and they’re bringing new generations up to speed by keeping them running breathlessly after the sequels, the prequels, and the remakes. 
These films frequently break box office records because they both reflect and shape our response to these chaotic times. Conventional dogma is that people go to the movies to escape their boring lives. This is nonsense. People go to the movies to make sense of their lives because film has become the most powerful form of social education in our time. The movies unveil the mysteries of sex, they give us models of how to raise children, why we should get married, get divorced, or have affairs. They teach us the subtleties of conversation, the morality of money, the lure of power and the bitterness of revenge. They tell us what’s funny, how to regard the suffering of others, the current standards of what’s hot or not, and when all else fails, how to win through intimidation. And they are the most prolific channels for myth in modern history. 
One of the most pervasive themes in film is the battle between good and evil, waged endlessly at every Cineplex every day. Without belaboring the obvious we need only mention Star Wars and Harry Potter, film series that manage to both caricature evil on a grand scale while exemplifying the virtues of courage and loyalty on a personal level. It’s fascinating to watch these stories for the social mores portrayed in the retelling of ancient myths.
Which brings us to Captain America, the latest superhero to make the leap from page to screen. I went, not expecting much, not knowing the story, mildly interested but wary of fist-pumping jingoism. I needn’t have worried. I’ve since found myself turning scenes over in my mind, pulling up associations and parallels, finding the mythic threads: in short, enjoying it far beyond the actual viewing. 
Captain America is the idealized image of what we thought our heroes should be back in 1942—courageous, self-deprecating, fair, almost to a fault, and chivalrous. As Steve Rogers, the original 97-lb. weakling, goes through basic training his characteristics of self-sacrifice, determination, and courage come to light. 
“So,” asks the camp doctor at one point, “do you want to kill Nazis? 
“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Rogers says, “I just don’t like bullies.”
Rogers is most certainly not the choice of the project’s colonel, played with brisk efficiency by Tommie Lee Jones. But Doctor Erskine (Stanley Tucci), Project Rebirth’s scientist, prevails. “He’s smart and he’s got compassion,” he says.
After his transformation into Captain America he confounds military planning and strategy by simply driving in the front door of the enemy’s castle. His square-jawed unblinking fearlessness inspires others to do more than they thought they could in the circumstances—the very embodiment of charismatic leadership.
“Trust thyself,” says Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, Self-Reliance. “Every heart vibrates to that iron string.” How American, both in its iconoclasm and in its confidence that everybody thinks that way! Emerson demands that we stand out, away from the herd. “Whoso would be a man,” he says, “must be a nonconformist. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” 
Captain America is the quintessential man of action whose motivation is virtue rather than ideology. His opponent, the demonic Nazi, Johann Schmidt (aka Red Skull), intends to rule first Europe, then America, and soon the world. His megalomania runs to the blood-and-earth variety: even though he is a brilliant scientist he also believes he can conjure up the ancient Teutonic gods. Rogers couldn’t care less about such insanity. He has answered the call of duty and will not be distracted. 
“It is the harder,” says Emerson, “because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
After Rogers defies an order to stay put and single-handedly breaks up Schmidt’s military headquarters, freeing captured American troops and bringing back secret weapons in the process, he is hailed at the American camp. The contrast between Rogers and Schmidt, between democracy and totalitarianism, couldn’t be starker. Captain America wins over the doubters through guts, courage, and defying the odds. Schmidt just kills those who oppose him.  
The other theme that rings through the film is the fascination with technology. At one point, Howard Stark, the best engineer in America (and the father of Iron Man Tony Stark) shakes his head in wonder. “Their technology is several generations better than ours.” But that doesn’t put a crimp in American ingenuity. Stark simply comes up with a MacGyver-like solution to everything that Red Skull throws at Captain America. But the lesson here is that while Red Skull apparently has a budget that would stagger the Pentagon and enough firepower to destroy the world, what finally wins the day is courage and heart. 
Although there are moments when disbelief must be suspended, when tongues are firmly in cheek, the film never descends to parody or campiness. Steve Rogers, the weakling who becomes Captain America, doesn’t forget where he came from and who he is, despite his strength and daring. He’s the one who stands up for the little guys because it’s the right thing to do—not because he gets off on kicking ass. 
However idealized, it’s an ideal worth striving for.

The Self, Finally

I wish I could explain why it oppressed me to tell about myself, but so it was, and I didn’t know what to say. . . . That I had ruined the original piece of goods issued to me and was traveling to find a remedy? Or that I had read somewhere that the forgiveness of sins was perpetual but with typical carelessness had lost the book? — Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

I have often been mistaken for someone else. It no longer surprises me—’I wonder who we are today?’ I’ve been taken for a guy named Clif (yes, only one “f”), a Bill, a Kris, and my favorite—Grosboll. On that occasion I was stopped by a red-faced young man in the campus store who hissed through clenched teeth about a woman dear to him whose honor had been besmirched. He asked me what I had to say for myself. I said I didn’t have much to say but neither did I  know the lady in question. “What?” he yelped, straightening up. “Aren’t you Grosboll?” I had to admit I was not. “Oh,” he mumbled, “sorry about that.”

Once a balding man at the Y called me Dan, did the double-take and then apologized. When I laughed and said something about having a generic face he said, “Actually, I think it’s the hair, sir,” and returned to his newspaper. I checked the mirror, but I’m still not sure what he meant. Yet, there are some advantages to having a face that people think they know, however mistakenly. I can assume a new identity, if only for a few seconds; I can imagine what this named person might be like; and I may once again ask myself who I think I am. It’s a question I’ve been turning over and over in my hand most of my life, like a stone that is smooth to the touch but has a rough patch somewhere on it.

We can’t help but wonder who we are. Walter Truett Anderson writes in The Future of the Self that the modern view of the self as a distinct person, separate and bounded from other beings, is threatened in the postmodern age. At the same time he points out that such a view is not the norm in much of the non-Western world. “They do not think of themselves as unique, but rather as more or less identical to others of their kind; and they do not think of themselves as neatly integrated, but rather as invaded by strange spirits and forces that may pull them in many different directions.”

The fact that we here in the West agonize over this, that we spend ourselves trying to find ourselves, probably marks us as unique in the world. Most people don’t have the leisure to worry about such things, let alone fret about their social standing. That our self-identity, our persona, is an amalgam of biology and culture is fascinating to us but may not occur to millions of people who are just trying to wear their face for yet another day.

But the question, ‘Who am I?’ stops many in their tracks no matter the century. Jesus asked his disciples, ‘Who do men say that I am?’ I don’t think it was a rhetorical question. I think he really wanted to know. His own quest to understand who he was had driven him into the wilderness to fight the demons of fear, pride, and power; he had emerged stronger, lighter, more pliable, but God-haunted. In everything he did he could not help but gauge the reaction of the crowds around him. On a good day, after healing and comforting, calling and casting out, delivering up and drawing in, he must have thought, ‘This is who I am: the one who is to serve without ceasing. I can do this, but only through the Father.’ On a bad day, with some around him burning with jealousy and others throwing themselves at him, he may have longed for a clear, cool night of stars and prayer.

Anderson traces the idea of the self through history, pointing out that individuality is a fairly recent invention, as is the notion of privacy. For most of human history people took for granted that the space around them was not exclusively their own nor was their self separate from others. That’s not to say that they couldn’t see where their bodies ended and another’s began; it was rather that they understood themselves to be a part of the whole.

It’s ironic that our media-produced mass societies sweep us into any number of demographic groups, but without a sense of belonging. We think we have a persistent self that anyone could pull out of a lineup at will, yet the feedback we need from others is missing or sometimes mocking. Are we a collection of selves, bonded by a body, or do we live our lives exposed “like a candle in the wind,” constantly at risk of losing ourselves?

I was taught as a child to put Jesus first, others second, and yourself last. That would bring you joy and teach you a selfless way of life. It’s a good teaching, far more sophisticated than its simplistic approach would suggest. The wisdom is in the order—and the purpose. Like a few other profoundly important things in life discovering who we are cannot be approached directly. We find out who we are by doing other things: truly worshiping God by living truthfully in this world, listening more than speaking, trying to understand before putting in the knife, learning reverence for the world. Then, in those moments when we cross some line into a new territory of courage we might catch a glimpse of ourselves as we run to catch up, thinking ‘That’s the kind of person I’d like to be.’

The epigram is from Saul Bellow’s novel, Henderson the Rain King, a story about a brusque, volatile, ham-fisted millionaire who travels the world in search of a cure for his empty soul. Something in him cries out, ‘I want! I want! I want!,’ and it will not be stilled until it’s filled. Read the book. It’s a picaresque journey of faith, so I like to believe. In the end Henderson  does find himself, the true self that remains when the dross is burned away. It was there all along, of course, visible only at the edges of a vision that draws the eye forward.

Pencils to Death

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them. — Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

What should we do when everything we have tried seems to turn to ashes in our hands, when our best and most concentrated efforts have produced. . . . nothing. When we have failed?

We could take the route of Roseanne Rosannadanna, that lovable klutz from Ft. Lee, New Jersey, created by Gilda Radner all those years ago on Saturday Night Live. Roseanne once addressed an eighth grade graduating class on how little things can lead to a full crash-and-burn. You’re sitting in a classroom ready to take a test but you have no pencil. You fail the test, get kicked out of school, become homeless and die on the street. All because you forgot your pencil. It’s what my wife and I have come to call the Pencils to Death syndrome.

The ability to put failure in perspective is not coded into our genes. It’s a learned response and it takes a lot of failure to learn how to do it well. From an evolutionary standpoint, of course, all of us here today are the triumphant offspring of the winners—the ones who prevailed, adapted, overcame, and survived. The losers, wading in the shallow end of the gene pool, didn’t live long enough to reproduce and are gone and forgotten. But that glib scenario covers up the fact that the winners learned how to win by losing—not fatally, of course—but in enough small ways that effort had to be made and lessons learned. Don’t eat that! Don’t go there! Do we fight or run? Hello, hello? Guess I’d better run. . . .

But the lure of instant success is so powerful. All it takes is the trajectory of Justin Bieber shooting across the YouTube universe and into the welcoming arms of Usher to set the hearts of teenagers aflame with visions of personal stardom. Shortcuts to success abound in the popular mythology, their phrases ringing tinnily in the ear: The One-Minute Manager, Think and Grow Rich, The Secret. The culture encourages nay, demands, riches without work, knowledge without learning, success without sacrifice.

 As civilizations go ours is still an adolescent, beset with all the bumbling enthusiasm of a teenager, endearing in its energy, annoying in its arrogance, dangerous in its naivete. Our shiny hopes are easily bent; we grow surly when thwarted. In our impatience to grow up we bluster and brag, and then whine when we get the inevitable pushback. A country of immense natural resources, endless horizons, boundless opportunities—all those wonderfully elusive phrases that still pepper the speeches of politicians on the run—such a country will not be denied its place at the pinnacle. Will it?

In our unshakable faith in science and technology we believe that every problem has a solution, one that can be downloaded with the click of a finger, a swipe of a credit card, a flick of a switch. We can’t imagine a world in which some mountains cannot be moved or some barrier not be shattered. When in doubt, we say, put the pedal down and smash through it. Who has the time to untie the knot? Just cut the damn thing and we’ll be on our way. We seem to have little patience with difficulties, seeing them not as part of life but a personal slight, almost a slap in the face.

So I hear the wistful lyrics of Paul Simon in a song called American Tune to a melody by J. S. Bach:

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
Don’t have a friend who feels at ease
Don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to it’s knees.
But it’s all right, all right, We’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on,
I wonder what went wrong, I can’t help it
I wonder what went wrong.

What went wrong is that we never took to heart the truth that life is difficult. Philosophy, religions, literature, psychology, drama—they’ve all been nattering about that for eons. It’s one of the perennial issues that comes up in arguments about why people suffer, what evil is, and what God has to do with all of it. It is not the problem of evil, it is the mystery of evil. Gabriel Marcel, a French poet, playwright and philosopher, called it a mystery that has no solution but calls our very being into question. In answering it or trying to anyway, we discover our own unfathomable depths. We learn who we are in our response to evil and in our response to failure.

There’s something I’ve been living by for years that helps me. I think I may have picked up the terms from William Blake, that mad poet and visionary, but the illustration is my own. We begin in innocence, blessed beyond belief, and then we take a fall into experience. Down in the pit, cursing or sobbing, we look back up to the heights we occupied without realizing there were depths and we choose: death or life? In grace we begin to climb, foothold by foothold, until we arrive, after pain and effort, at innocent experience: the delight of discovery without the cynicism of defeat.  In this context we are no longer innocent for we have taken the inevitable fall into rough experience that comes to all humans. No one is exempt. What matters is how we react in the pit. Will we stay there, raging in our pride, or begin the climb, having sloughed off our naivete and arrogance?  We have learned and moved, on and up. And that’s good, very good, because we will have many falls in life and each one is a new occasion to learn. Failure may not be an option, but it can be an opportunity.