Powder Chutes

snowy mountain chutes
loose pow tight turns rocks and trees
feeling my age again

Sermon on the Mount

"Easter has been sidelined because this message doesn't fit our prevailing world view. For at least 200 years the West has lived on the dream that we can bring justice and beauty to the world all by ourselves. . .we still want to do things our own way, even though we laugh at politicians who claim to be saving the world, and artists who claim “inspiration” when they put cows in formaldehyde."
--NT Wright, Easter Sermon.

I'm not a fan of "social justice" or at least how I perceive that term to be used. To me it seems like the antithesis of grace--grace being the one unique value or virtue of the Christian faith according to St Clive-Staples. So today, when a good friend sent a note about being three-days behind on a column for Sojourners Magazine, I kind of moaned internally. Sojourners is all about helping others get theirs, about redistributing wealth and making Christianity a socialist religion--that's my bias.

So, I recommended re-reading Jimmy Carter's 1975 Playboy Interview, which was ground breaking at the time and in which he talks about his devout Baptist theology and international relations. Significantly, he discusses some of the problems of being too weak with the USSR in Helsinki and our problems with identifying the problems of creeping elegance of the Vietnam War--of seeing the need to support an ally, but not being able to retract once we engaged and the cause was lost. While I do not want to get into a debate about how Vietnam or Helsinki were managed, I thought it interesting that both Russia and protracted land wars were the same topics today in the international relations community. It seemed that there might be some nuggets in his interview that Sojourners readers would value.

Another college friend suggested a longer extract from the NT Wright sermon above. It seemed much more interesting to me than my own suggestion, not because mine was bad but because the NT Wright sermon, if understood correctly, would seem to fly in the face of Sojourner's Christian-works-justice=the-Kingdom-of-God theology.

Grace to me is kind of like an eternal mulligan, it's this concept that there is nothing we can do to earn resurrection, life-eternal, heaven, salvation, or however you define the finish line. It's a free gift that it's not even clear we have to accept. Many feel pursued, engaged, broken down and consumed by God (not to be confused with just being hassled by over-zealous religious types). My point is that, we do literally nothing to earn this.

Given that we do not earn the gift, that we are literally all the worst sinners until we are covered in the blood of the lamb, the idea of fighting for justice is kind of like the idea of fighting a Holy Land crusade. It just doesn't jive for me that justice or getting what's owed you is a Christian virtue. There may be other reasons to do it--civil, moral, or ethical--but I don't see a Christian justification.

Intent seems critical. I think that Christians who believe in grace help other pilgrims along the road out of gratitude for what they've been given, not because anyone is owed anything. When it becomes a self-righteous belief and a demand, it seems to lose its Christian appeal.

I don't recall Christ motivating crowds to have peaceful strikes against Roman civil injustices, he basically said to give them what they ask for, in fact, give them more. When he fed the 5,000, he didn't say that he was feeding them because they had the right to food and wine, he gave it as a gift. He was apparently capable of making sure that people on earth at the time didn't starve, but he didn't do that, many people still went to bed hungry outside Galilee that night of the Beatitudes. In fact, if social justice theories are correct, the biggest crook is God, for letting injustice go on, if not now, at least when he walked the Earth.


hot afternoon wind
persecuted are blessed
make some food and wine

Team Burka

My wife, Sarah, and our son, Schuyler were up at Alta Laguna Park, here in Laguna Beach last weekend where Schuyler takes his tennis lessons. It's a beautiful park at the top of the first range of hills that rise up from the Pacific and mark the peak of Laguna Beach housing. A lot of folks come up there to see the vistas, use the parks and enjoy a beautiful day.

This weekend we are enjoying the company of Vasco, the nearly-adopted son of friends. He's a 4th-grader from Malawi who is smaller than average due to a defective heart, which has been repaired since coming to the USA a year-or-so ago. He's learning about all things American, including our language. Like most boys, he loves warrior-related play and stories. His almost-mother, Cathleen, refers to him as the Chocolate Ninja.

So Sarah, Schuyler and Vasco are up at Alta Laguna, walking to the courts and they pass a woman in a Burka (not a usual thing in Laguna Beach) and Vasco asks, "She ninja?" Sarah and Schuyler nearly died and quickly explained that women in burkas were not ninjas, and as much as they could get across about muslims, coverings, etc. . .

When Sarah was telling me the story later that night she mentioned that it was kind of ironic that Vasco connected the dots between ninjas and Muslim women as the hope of Islam and developing the Middle East largely relies on educating and including women in that world. She started playing with the idea of Muslim, burka-wearing women as "ninjas"--the secret weapon of their culture. I'll let her develop the idea further, but it spawned this short haiku last night:

winter black burka
the mystery of darkness
superheros await

Skin Deep MLK Day

Today I replayed the Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream" speech and posted the video on my FaceBook page. Throughout the day, I replayed it. Even got a YouTube of an angry "ginger"--the name that South Park gave red-headed kids with freckles, to make fun of making fun of people based on the color of their skin. Not all the kids got the joke, some red-headed kids are getting bullied from the episodes and reactions are happening. Satire can detonate in your hands sometimes.

Dr. King has a famous sentence: "I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Since this phrase has become accepted as truth, I thought it might be provocative to find a way to challenge it and get some debate and discussion about what this means today. I made my personal status, "Last MLK thought for the day: It wasn't clear from the speech, do we still retain the right to be judged by the color of our skin, or do we all now have to be judged by the content of our character? I'm thinking some folks may want to stick with the skin bit."

Immediately, a friend on a FaceBook Thread of college friends wrote: "...what does that mean coming from a really white Dutch American male? I'm just sayin'...you may want to click 'delete'... I mean, I think I get what you are saying, but the masses may not."

I believe "delete" as an option in social media, is weak. Instead I posted the below:

It invited some off-beat questions that I thought were provocative:

1. Will Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson start judging people by the content of their character?

2. Was OJ guilty or innocent because of skin color, dollar-to-attorney ratio, or content of his character?

3. If my character really sucks, can I go back to skin color?

4. If I believe in original sin, neither judgment criteria works very well.

5. Should we be judging folks, like political figures, religious leaders and celebrities on the content of their character? For what and when do we get to throw the first stone? There seems to be a big debate over that these days, what that criteria actually means and when it applies.

I think the vast majority of Americans agree that judging people based on skin color is foolish (hence today's national holiday). I'm not sure we all agree that judging people based on the content of their character is such a great criteria anymore. Thought it might be interesting to ask the question about skin vs. content of character.

So here is my attempt at a haiku (leaving as much space as possible for interpretation) about MLK Day:

mlk throwing stones?

judge not skin color
but moral soul character
please don't dig too deep

AYSO Lost Weekend

This weekend was spent at AYSO (American Youth Soccer Organization), getting my Intermediate Coaching Certficate, again. Somehow it was lost and so, the traffic school of the soccer world became my world.

One of my pet peeves is to spend time sitting in a classroom reading the same powerpoint/handout as everyone else together. I read and retain well enough on my own. It doesn't help me to read aloud as a group for the benefit of those that, apparently, cannot.

You put enough people in a room and inevitably someone feels like they have to ask a question, argue a point or provide their input, not because it's valid, necessary or important, but because it makes them feel like they've been heard. It must be affirming for them, but it is a complete and utter waste of time for the rest of us. What could have been a simple on-line learning module with maybe a half-day of review for the folks that couldn't get it, is a Friday night and Saturday of soccer classroom hell.

Sunday is field instruction where you spend the day doing drills. It's much better than classroom time and is taught by some qualified English coaches. We also had some cute, female high school, varsity soccer players in our class, and as I had played college soccer and used to be competitive, I had to put out significant effort. There is something in this 40-year-old man that cannot allow himself to be beaten by high school girls. At one point, a coach called my efforts "explosive" which does wonders for a 40-year-old ego. Thirty minutes before the Sunday class was over, my calf popped, and I was done--a pulled muscle while attempting to sprint for a pass. The costs for losing an AYSO coaching certificate go up.

ayso lost weekend

it seemed a coaching
certificate, lost
could be regained
in a lost weekend

two-and-one-half days,
a weekend of soccer
instruction for the slow
moving ones
and me

thinking i'm all that
forgetting what is
40 years-old
last hour of drills
"explosive" sprinting

"pop it" jokes of dumb parents
screaming dumber things
they don't get it, the game

my calf tight
show these people
what a former player can
(pop! goes my calf) do

the costs of coaching ayso
of regaining a lost coache's license
of losing a weekend
have been found

Losing a Survivor

Yesterday I drove to LA to visit a friend whose father had recently died unexpectedly. It was Friday and I knew that I needed to go, but at the same time, was dreading the drive there and back, alone and in the inevitable traffic that the weekend brings.

My friend is Jewish. His father survived the Shoah, the Holocaust. We sat in his home and he showed me his family tree on his father's side. Utterly amazing to see the impact that the Nazi's had--on the family tree, there was a Star of David for each member of the family that was killed in the Holocaust. Looking at roughly a dozen families, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers. . .nearly all were wiped out.

Dan, my friend, showed me his Eulogy. In it he ended by talking about an image he had of his father chasing a fly around the kitchen of his home in the Boston area. He would jump around and chase it until he could cusp it and then set it free outside. For someone who was a survivor when everyone he loved was killed, life was that important--even the life of a fly.

It's funny how there are times when we think of our own hardships, of what we are giving up to "give" something to our friends--a little time in the car for me. Really, it was me who got something, who gained a little more life from the story of a survivor who has passed on.

winter shiva home
survive the shoah not life
covenant endures

Why am I adding another thing to do?

I try to spend my life in the service of my wife and boys and chasing the tide charts in our home here in Laguna Beach. My wife is working a new writing discipline in the new year (2010), so I thought I'd try to follow her along.

In a new film that I participated in--Lost Prophets: Search for the Collective, Tom Morey narrates, "It's been said that we are living life as if asleep; well, here are some guys who are doing their best to wake up." It seems that a first good step toward waking up is making sure that what we do is deliberate.

Let's raise a glass (or can of XS) to 2010 and living deliberately!