Chasing the Tide Charts

The Pass

2010-07-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

This trip to Australia, the surf has not been accommodating. In Margaret River (Western Australia), it was supposed to be 10 ft, and it probably was, but you couldn't tell with the on-shore gale (although it was beautiful). No in Byron Bay, one of the most-beautiful beach towns in all Australia, it has been raining and on-shore winds too. "Blue Bottles" or Portuguese Man-o-war litter the high tide line.

Yesterday, I was supposed to skydive and shoot an XS video with the Eatons, a couple with a great business we support. It was rained out. Today, I surfed The Pass, a relatively famous wave here in Australia/Byron Bay, but it was still beat up, disorganized and generally a lot of work and not much return. Ce la vie!

We do not plan this
Life, it is what we choose to
Make of it. BIG FUN!

New Day for G

2010-07-18T17:33:00.001-07:00

I've been a bit overwhelmed with travel and work and. . .excuses. Getting back into writing deliberately. Since my last post, I've been in Japan a bunch, did a family trip to the Netherlands (boating the canals of our ancestors in Friesland), Spain (surfing the Basque Coast) and France (more attempted surfing--unfortunately, the waves were 20 feet and not something we could ride with the equipment available). Also, our 10-year-old lab, Genevieve had to be put down while we were overseas. Something that is difficult and compounded by the fact that we were not there with her to say good-bye.

Genevieve, or "G" as we called her most of the time, was a sweetheart. One of the most 'soulish creatures' as Lewis called dogs, that I've known. I've written about her already as Genevieve the Meek a couple months ago. She loved us, and we loved her--we both gave and we both received from each other. We miss her dearly. It was hard to come home and see all her things, her bed, bowls, leashes. . .empty.

My brother, Joel, spent a lot of time with G. He was her alternate master and loved her and she him. Fortunately, he was with her during her sudden illness (spleen cancer) and departure from this silent planet (Lewis again). A wonderful family friend, Cathleen Falsani, was also with her when she passed on. Cathleen published this wonderful piece on her blog. It is beautiful.

http://falsani.blogspot.com/2010/07/godstuff_16.html#comment-form

Somehow I had felt guilty mourning a dog--something in my Dutch Christian Reformed roots. After reading Cath's blog I feel fully justified in missing our family member. There is a hole where G was in our lives that won't ever be filled. We will continue to pour God's love and our belief in, as Fr. Mac at Grace Episcopal said to young campers at one point: "The dogs? They all go to heaven!"

g, the golden one
a space that was love, now dread
soulish creature, home.

Bloed Oranje

2010-06-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

We've had an odd week-or-so in Laguna. A friend and I got into a friendly series of bets and heckles over the Celtics/Lakers NBA Finals. While we live in Orange County (defined as "not LA" by so many in Laguna), when it comes to basketball, the Lakers have a decidedly large following in town.

The betting started with game four--a Laker victory and I would have been wearing some verison of a yellow Speedo and purple cape to the Dirty Bird (our local watering hole), but a Celtic victory would have Ron Pringle, aka "Ron-i" the lead singer for World Anthem, a great reggae band, having Boston Chowder dumped on his head on-stage. Ron-i got chowdered.

Sunday, before game five, Ron and some friends burned my Laker Hater t-shirt (stolen the night of the chowdering) and left it on my steps. In my mind, they were unleashing a deeper Celtic magic by sacrificing something stolen. . .and the Celtics won again.

Monday morning, a bigger event happened--the KNVB, the Royal Netherlands Foot Ball team beat Denmark 2-0 in unspectacular play. It's funny, but I didn't really care that much about the Celtics v. Lakers--it became interesting because of the betting and shananigans. With the Oranje, I could watch them play what is arguably one of the most boring sports on television (not a lot of scoring) because I feel actually connected to them somehow. . .weird, I know.

Then a friend posted this epic Nike ad on my page--"Orange is the Color of Insanity," which captures the character of the Dutch and their passion for the Oranje so well. Bloed Oranje or "Bleed Orange" is my new mantra. How can we be born across an ocean from our homeland and still feel it deep in our souls?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0BStdL8siY

insanity is
cheering for a ball passed
oranje dna

On Memorial Day

2010-05-31T07:35:00.000-07:00

Remembering my best friend and others that have given so much on Memorial Day. It's the least we can do.

The images are of my friend's family (his wife and parents) and the plaque they installed at the commissioning of it all in Emerald Bay, CA. It's also of his daughter both on his fresh grave and this year. . .the images shows what he's missing for all of us.

I didn't think I'd have a lot to add to Mr. Helprin's essay, so I'm reposting:

On Memorial Day
Mark Helprin

In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even at the famous sites, tourism is inconstant. Sunsets and dawns, winter nights, softly falling snow, and gorgeous summer mornings mainly find the graves and those who lie within them protected in eternal tranquility. Now and then a visitor linked by love, blood, or both will come to make that connection with the dead that only love can sustain. Sometimes you see them, quiet in some neglected corner beneath the trees or on a field above the sea, but numbers and time make this the exception. If not completely forgotten, the vast ranks of Civil War dead are now primarily the object of genealogy and historians, as the fathers and mothers, women, children, and brothers who loved them are now long gone. As it is for everyone else it is for the dead of all the wars, and neither proclamations nor holidays nor children innocently placing flags can cure it.

Nonetheless, a universal connection links every living American with those who have fallen or will fall in American wars and overrides the lapses in sustaining and honoring their memories. We are and shall be connected to them by debt and obligation. Though if by and large we ignore the debt we owe to those who fell at Saratoga, Antietam, the Marne, the Pointe du Hoc, and a thousand other places and more, our lives and everything we value are the ledger in which it is indelibly recorded. And even if we fail in the obligation, it is clear and it remains. What do we owe soldiers on the battlefields of the present or--do not doubt it--the future? How does one honor the inexpressibly difficult decision to walk toward annihilation, in some instances guaranteed, for the sake of the imperfect strategies of war, their confused execution, and their uncertain result? What can we offer the soldiers who will not know the outcome of their struggle, or ever again see those left behind?

We owe them a decision to go to war ratified unambiguously by the American people through their constitutional and republican institutions. Except where instantaneous response is necessitated by a clear and present danger, this means a declaration of war issued by a Congress that will fully support its own carefully determined decision and those it sends to carry it out--nothing less, nothing hedged, nothing ducked.

This requires in turn the kind of extraordinary, penetrating debate that can occur only among those wise enough to understand mortality and weigh it against principles that cannot be left undefended. It requires a president who can argue for his decision not merely with eloquence but substantively and tenaciously--guided only by the long-term interests of the United States, not fatuous slogans, political imperatives, and easily impeachable ideological notions of the right, left, or center.

Look ahead, not back. If we commit soldiers to battle, we must support them unstintingly. There are many ways to pay for war: taxing, borrowing, cutting other expenditures, sharing the burden with allies, adjusting war aims, and starving the means to fight. The only unacceptable one is the last. If the general population must do with less, so be it, for the problem is only imagined. Better than feckless politicians who think it lives by bread alone, the American people has always known that its enlisted sacrifices are hardly commensurate with those of the maimed and the dead.

A soldier's destiny must rest, rather than with careerists, in the hands of grave and responsible officials and commanders, those who experience what Churchill called the statesman's "stress of soul." He should never have to die for the sake of an academic theory once the doctoral thesis of an Ivy League idealist working his way up through the bureaucracies and think tanks.

And yet the commander who does not labor to educate himself unceasingly is likely no better than his opposite number in the seminar room. Above all, he must have a genius for war, an inherent quality that cannot be manufactured and is usually crowded out by that part of the brain that makes for a brilliant career, and punished by the higher ranks for having what they do not. Such people deserve the protection and promotion that mostly they do not receive, for when they do they become Grant, Churchill, Marshall, Eisenhower, and Patton.

The debt we owe, and in regard to which we are at present deeply in arrears, may be difficult to pay but it is easy to see. To grasp its conspicuous clarity one need only walk among the graves and pause to give proper thought to even just one life among the many. Read slowly the name, the dates, the place where everything came to an end.

I have seen lonely people of advancing age, yet as constant as angels, keeping faith to those they loved who fell in wars that current generations, not having known them, cannot even forget. The sight of them moving hesitantly among the tablets and crosses is enough to break your heart. Let that break be the father to a profound resolution to fulfill our obligation to the endless chain of the mourning and the dead. Shall we not sacrifice where required? Shall we not prove more responsible, courageous, honest, and assiduous? Shall we not illuminate our decisions with the light that comes from the stress of soul, and ever keep faith with the fallen by embracing the soldiers who fight in our name? The answer must be that we shall.

Enablers

2010-05-27T15:11:00.001-07:00

Saw an outrageous photo of an Indonesian baby (2-years-old) who supposedly smokes two packs of cigs a day and is 53 pounds--apparently they don't help him with weightloss.

Obviously, the image incites a range of emotions from anger to humor, but what struck me the most was that this kid can't get cigarettes on his own--his parent(s) have to serve him. While this is news in the USA, a very similar epidemic is also in full swing here, childhood obesity.

Young children don't buy their own food, it is served to them by their parents. We are destroying the current and future health of our children by supersizing them via the food choices we bring into our homes and deliver. As Tommy Thompson said when he was health secretary: "Obesity has become the number one preventable form of disease that leads to death, and high fructose corn syrup is the new cigarettes." [Reciting from memory.]

He gets angry if
Cigs and sugar aren't served
two-year-olds gone wild

Commitment

2010-05-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

Am on my rounds with XS enthusiasts--Amway Independent Business Owners (IBOs) who are some of the most committed people on earth, thankfully some of that commitment includes the XS brand.

Last night I was in Edison, NJ, participating in a meeting for a good friend, Charlie Durso. He told me about a young guy on his team, 'MegaDoug,' who rolled his car the night before, coming home from a product demo. "I doubt he'll be there tonight," Charlie told me as he showed me the picture of MegaDoug in a neckbrace. . .

I'm sure that MegaDoug was in some real pain last night, but he showed and we called him out for being a champion--what an animal!

overcoming pain
megadoug defeats injury
blue-vase champion

Victory at Sea

2010-05-23T21:01:00.001-07:00

Since 5:45am, I've been watching the tide charts today, that and the surf. It's huge but it was also blowing 30 knots since 4:30am (according to Surfline.com). This means, very choppy, barely rideable conditions with lots of bombs on the head. Reminded me of Beowulf in the opening scene when he and his crew are sailing their dragonship through a storm-tossed sea to get to Geatland.

mountains roll beneath
gray/green/brownish kelpy soup
spring winds blow the sea

Shinkansen

2010-05-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

geeze that train goes fast
wizzing through rice fields and rain
lemmings at high speed

Lost in Translation

2010-05-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

How is that even using Ambien CR, I still wake up at 4:30am in Tokyo? Easy to see how Heath Ledger ended up with too many sleepy-time drugs in his system by accident. . .

tokyo tower
outside my 4:30 window
loosing its appeal

Graceland

2010-05-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

I have learned that the most important difference between people is between those for whom life is a quest and those for whom it is not.

--Walker Percy

This weekend I was in Memphis working with over 1500 distributors with many that didn't speak English. Between my broken Spanish, their broken English and one of our staff that spoke both fluently, we found each other. What seems constant between us is that we are all on a quest, an adventure and that as fellow adventurers, we work to help each other out. We share grace with each other along the way.

One of the things that came up regularly was how our Spanish-speaking distributors in Arizona won't travel too far to hear us speak--they're afraid of being deported under the new laws that allow law enforcement to stop people for appearing to be illegal. It's controversial, and really was written to give broader authority for US agents in the border wars currently going on--situations where some ranchers live in constant fear of drug runners with automatic weapons and constant violence. The broader powers are creating havoc for illegal immigrants who are productive members of our society.

What struck me was how hard these new friends are willing to work for their version of the American dream, how hard they work moving XS Energy Drinks, and the hurdles that our own government puts in their paths to succeed, to create the wealth we desperately need in our diminishing economy. We need more entrepreneurs, we need more people working off the grid of government taxation without representation, we need more entrepreneurs who aren't raping other people's money to benefit extravagant lifestyles on unsustainable business practices. We need more cash-driven businesses operating in the black and creating wealth, not jobs.

The IRS is scared-to-death of an economy without federal withholding taxes--they hate entrepreneurs. We cannot cut spending because we cannot shut down worthless government programs. We cannot shut down worthless government programs, because they are run by government unions with guaranteed "rights" to wages and benefits. I'd trade 10 government employees for one illegal alien paying thousands of dollars to come to smuggle themselves into America to work for cash and start their own micro business. Those data points are the reality of the economy, the trends we see in newspapers and on television are not--trends are imaginary lines drawn against averages, against fictions of what appears to be occurring at a macro level.

If you believe in free markets, you believe in the power of the individual. If you believe in individuals, you believe in micro economics. You believe in data points. You understand that making things work on a small level is what makes macro pictures, not in reverse. The fallacy of macro economics is that there are levers to make the fictions move, when really the macroeconomists spend much of their time re-calculating data to justify why their levers are working. I like to roll up my sleeves, get in the trenches and figure out what works at a micro level to make the macro work, not vice-versa. I don't believe in central anything, let alone central government.

Grace to me is meeting a person, developing a relationship and giving to them without a claim of justice, without cause--not because I have to do it. When we enter into free trade, when we have the liberty to decide who want an economic association with, to me that is a form of grace. It's not dictated or controlled. It's two people, taking a risk--me investing my time and travel budget and they investing their time and event costs to hear each other. To see if we can share something of value with each other. It's spiritual and it's an exchange at the most basic level. Creating artificial borders between two groups of people that are willing to share a grace, whether economic or otherwise, seems like a travesty to me.

But I digress. . .

I was in Memphis, learning how our Hispanic friends are building businesses with my products and how I could help them. I was also sharing how we are working with other small business owners to grow the macro picture. It was powerful. At the end of the weekend, I went to see Graceland, to see Elvis' home in it's preserved state.

Elvis died in August of 1977. His home is basically in the same state it was at that time. He was in his early 40s when he died and he bought the house for $100,000 when he was 22. Like anyone's home that they've owned for roughly 20 years, it's different rooms were designed and furnished from various points in time through those years. Part of what makes it so dramatic is that Elvis collected so many cars, planes and other odds and ends. I kept thinking that if he was still alive and if they were all current, it would be much less interesting. Seeing a snapshot of life in the 60s and 70s via Graceland was like walking back in time and seeing what money could buy back then.

My father's uncle was a very successful businessman and a wonderful father and leader. That side of our family gathered every Christmas Eve for a family party at his house. He had bought it in the late 50s and developed it with his business growth over the decades. He always had interesting things--from exotic sports cars to an indoor pool with sliding glass greenhouse (so it could be an outdoor pool in summer), to planes and helicopters to you name it. During the last couple decade of his life, my great aunt began losing her memory and the house remained locked in time, I would guess to remain as familiar as possible to both of them. The last time I was there, about 15-or-so-years-ago, one of the things that struck me was how various rooms dated from different eras. Similar to walking through Elvis' home.

Seeing Graceland reminded me of some of my thoughts from my last trip to my great uncle's home--that things quickly lose their value. What has also struck me is that the enduring business my uncle created, the people who continue to develop their own dreams through the micro business opportunity he templated for millions of people around the world, continues to change people's lives--even illegal aliens who are desperately seeking ways to take control of their own destinies. While the physical homes that both he and Elvis will eventually disappear, the hope and joy that they inspired continues on.

With our family, we pray each night that God will grant us the power to become better ambassadors of his grace the next day. While the embassies may fade with time, the grace that we share with others, whether economic, personal or spiritual, will hopefully endure. Sharing that grace is a quest for us, it is an adventure that we hope will be a benefit, enlighten and empower others and ourselves along the way.

Cinco de Blatito

2010-05-05T23:39:00.000-07:00

Late night fiesta de Peligroso

blahbideblablah
cinco de la watto de blah
my head will hurt soon. . .

Sweeping with Sissi

2010-05-03T10:35:00.001-07:00

Part of the joy of living in Laguna Beach is the simple proximity to the ocean. Sissi and I are off for a paddle on a glassy, late morning--we are blessed to live in such a lovely place and don't take it for granted.

floating on green glass
window to chilled depths below
will the selkie show?

Manhattan Car Bomb

2010-05-02T23:12:00.000-07:00

You know you're impacting your kids' ideas when they repeat your phrases, verbatim. Tonight at dinner, Willem, our 12 (almost-13-year-old) was interacting with our commentary about why a car bomb in New York at Times Square is very different than a car bomb in LA ("Where would they put it to do any damage?" I asked).

Willem said, "Times Square is like Disneyland."

car bombs are compact
springtime allah paradise?
times square disneyland

Life in the South

2010-04-29T22:52:00.000-07:00

Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the South during the short life of the Confederacy. I was there last weekend for an XS-related event and a good friend of a good friend offered to take me on a personal tour.

The history of the Civil War, or War of Northern Aggression (as it is called by many south of the Mason-Dixon line), is something that I love to read about and am far from expert on. Both sides seemed at fault, from Lincoln’s suspension of the Constitution, effectively making himself a king, and usurping states’ rights, to the South’s enduring commitment to human slavery. It created myths and legends that endure. Visiting the historical sites of the Confederate Whitehouse and Capitol made me think about how different this country could have ended up if things had ended differently.

One of the greatest assets of the South was the general who executed Lee’s vision—Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, Stonewall Jackson. Stonewall was an undefeated general who followed the Napoleonic tactics better than most, keeping his opponents off-balance, attacking in concentration and quickly moving to further locations to attack again. He was a man who simplified strategy so that his troops could deliver great results in difficult situations. His troops regularly defeated Union armies with double, triple and quadruple the number of soldiers. He was also deeply religious.

Stonewall Jackson was a Calvinist. He believed in the sovereignty of God, the idea that if he was successful it was because God willed it and the only way to participate in success was by sticking close to God’s will. Jackson never believed his success was because of himself but always attributed it to God. He was also incredibly calm—his nickname came from his willingness to stand firm despite the odds against him, holding a hill at an early Virginia battle when others would have ran, a move (or lack thereof) that allowed the Confederates to win the battle around his hinge-point. Stonewall was killed by his own troops in a confusing volley as he returned from reconnaissance run to the Union lines, his wounds required his arm to be amputated and he later died from complications (pneumonia).

Christians on both sides of the Civil War believed with great ferocity that God supported their side and their cause. It may be that they were both right to a greater or lesser degree. To me, the great lesson of Stonewall Jackson is that whether we end up in causes that win or lose wars, what is important to both man and God is not the end result but the way in which we chose to execute the details along the way—life is a journey, not a destination.

stonewalls in tall grass
still stand despite causes lost
stone remains as stone

Genevieve the Meek

2010-04-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

Sissi has been on a Mary Karr binge since she read The Liar's Club, which has translated into me also getting in on the action. Karr's poetry is wonderful--her collection SINNERS WELCOME includes one about what being meek means:

WHO THE MEEK ARE NOT

Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent
under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep
in the rice paddy muck,
nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles
make the wheat fall in waves
they don't get to eat. My friend the Franciscan
nun says we misread
that word "meek" in the Bible verse that blesses them.
To understand the meek
(she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop
in a meadow, who--
at his master's voice--sizes up to a stunned
but instant halt.
So with the strain of holding that great power
in check, the muscles
along the arched neck keep eddying,
and only the velvet ears
prick forward, awaiting the next order.

A typical morning when I'm home is to take the kids to school, hit Jean Paul's (the French coffee Nazi) for his version of a "cafe" (don't ask for a special order) and then take Genevieve, our 9-year-old lab to the beach for our morning constitutional.

Labrador Retrievers are amazing animals. They've been bred or designed for the purpose of retrieving, particularly in the water--two layers of skin, webbed feet, and an innate ability to go find the object of desire and bring it back to their owner.

Our female lab has a ferocious bark, but she's a huge lover--she'd lick a burglar before she'd bite, I'm pretty sure. We affectionately call her our "killer attack dog" because she isn't when it comes to kids or other people. Once an Hispanic friend came to visit and didn't know our dog, she ran to the door with her deep, loud barking. He poked his head in the door and I said, "G! Kill the Mexican!!!" Miguel took off running. . .I think I broke a rib laughing. He did too, eventually.

Back to Mary Karr's poem about the meek, I really felt something dramatic when Sarah read it to me. It changed my idea about what Christ meant at his Sermon on the Mount, at least when it came to "Blessed are the Meek" and the whole Monty Python, Life of Brian sketch:

MAN #2: You hear that? Blessed are the Greek.

GREGORY: The Greek?

MAN #2: Mmm. Well, apparently, he's going to inherit the earth.

GREGORY: Did anyone catch his name?

MRS. BIG NOSE: You're not going to thump anybody.

MR. BIG NOSE: I'll thump him if he calls me 'Big Nose' again.

MR. CHEEKY: Oh, shut up, Big Nose.

MR. BIG NOSE: Ah! All right. I warned you. I really will slug you so hard--

MRS. BIG NOSE: Oh, it's the meek! Blessed are the meek! Oh, that's nice, isn't it? I'm glad they're getting something, 'cause they have a hell of a time.

Seriously though, the idea that the meek aren't the weak among us but the strong and capable that submit themselves to their master's authority, the idea moved from "oh that's nice, isn't it? I'm glad they're getting something, 'cause they have a hell of a time" to a much more powerful concept of the powerful putting themselves in the will of the Father, in his service. It's like George Washington learning to control his temper, to discipline himself to focus his powers for a cause rather than random outbursts.

Last night we read the poem after dinner and out loud to our boys. Willem was listening and we discussed the idea. We talked about how it was like the difference between a super hero who just gets their powers and hasn't managed to control them yet, and the veteran superhero that has all the powers under his/her control in the service of the good.

So back to Genevieve, seeing her retrieve today with her veteran abilities and trained nature, also reminded me of Mary Karr's stallion, hearing it's master's voice and responding with restraint, with power and with grace.

into green water
dog meets stick tumbled by waves
one motive, for him

Burn One Down

2010-04-20T22:25:00.000-07:00

From Ben Harper:

Let us burn one, from end to end.
And pass is over to me my friend.
Burn it long, but burn it slow,
to light me up before I go.

If you don't like my fire, then don't come around.
Cause I'm gonna burn one down.
Yes I'm gonna burn one down

My choice is what i chose to do;
and if I'm causin no harm,
it shouldn't bother you.
Your choice is who you chose to be;
and if your causin to harm, then your alright with me.

If you don't like my fire, then don't come around, cause I'm gonna burn one down.
Yes i'm gonna burn one, down.

Herb the gift, from the Earth,
and what's from the earth is of the greatest worth.
So before u knock it, try it first.
and you'll see it's a blessing and it's not a curse.
If you don't like my fire, then don't come around,
cause i'm gonna burn one down.
Yes i'm gonna burn one.

oh yeah

From a good friend on FaceBook about Moses:

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner speaks to this obedience of the spirit in his chapter Paying Attention regarding Moses and the burning bush.

"People usually explain that God used the burning bush to attract Moses's attention. But suppose you were God and could do anything--split the Red Sea, make the sun stand still, set up a pillar of fire...Perhaps the burning bush wasn't a miracle but a test. God wanted to find out if Moses could see mystery in something as ordinary as a bush on fire. In order to see it as a miracle, Moses had to watch the flames long enough to realize that the branches were not being consumed and that something awesome was happening.

Once God saw that Moses could pay attention, God spoke to him."

From the current Pope, Benedict XVI, about Jesus:

The Book of Deuteronomy contains a promise that is completely different from the messianic hope expressed in other books of the Old Testament, yet it is decisive importance for understanding the figure of Jesus. The object of this promise is not a king of Israel and king of the world--a new David, in other words--but a new Moses. . ."And there was has not risen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face" (Deut 34:10). . ."No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father's heart, who as made him known" (Jn 1:18). It is in Jesus that the promise of the new prophet is fulfilled. What was true of Moses only in fragmentary form has now been fully realized in the person of Jesus: He lives before the face of God, not just as a friend, but as a Son; he lives in the most intimate unity with the Father. (Jesus of Nazareth. Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.)

if i am burns one
am i face to face with him
focus, watch the bush

Home Alone

2010-04-18T22:38:00.001-07:00

This weekend, Sissi went to Calvin's Faith and Writing conference--I love it that she makes time to develop her talents and spend time with friends and relatives on her own. I also love a 'lads weekend' from time-to-time.

This weekend was simple: I had a board meeting, soccer practice, kids running around to various social occasions Friday, sleep, soccer games, surfing, brat and beer fest with lads, Kick Ass film viewing and then big breakfast, tennis lessons/play and Sissi back. Need a rest from the weekend, but I dearly miss my wife when we're apart.

sissi where are u?
my soul has a hole in it
even if briefly

Mr. Mark Day

2010-04-11T21:59:00.000-07:00

April 11, 2008 is the day that my best friend was killed in Iraq training the Iraqi special forces and "advising" them on an early morning raid to pick up high profile targets in Sadr City. Below is the Eulogy that I wrote for him and read, never once without balling my eyes out--"what a pussy" Mark would say with a wink and a nod.

Mark and I met in college in the late 80s, we were members of an elite club –passionate surfers going to college in Chicago at Wheaton. Later we became roommates, went on surf trips and various adventures together, both married women named “Sarah,” both moved to Laguna after marriage, and both are raising our families on Brooks Street.

My wife and I moved to Laguna, when we were looking for a new home in Southern California, because Mark said he’d kill me if I moved to Newport. Joe pushed it by moving to the DMZ, Corona Del Mar. Mark & Sarah helped us find a relatively inexpensive rental that would work for our family when we moved down. He also made me go to his church, an Evangelical Free Church, which was a flavor of Christianity that I would not have chosen, but am so happy we did. He helped me and my Sarah find a home on Brooks, across the street from them later. Sarah & Mark introduced my wife and me to the Day family and Growers First (http://www.growersfirst.org ), an organization that we now support as much as possible. Sarah Metherell and I service on the Growers First board together. Mark and Sarah plugged me and my family right into the community in a very deep way. Much of who I am today is a very direct result of my friendship with Mark.

Mark was an anomaly. He was extremely unique. It’s very hard to encapsulate someone who lived his life in such a large and meaningful way into a summary or a nutshell or even words. To steal from Derrida, Mark was the nutshell – pieces of his life don’t really tell the whole story very well. It was the whole thing that was so amazing. But we don’t have time for that this morning, and I don’t think that I could deliver that story on my own.

At a men’s group met for breakfast last week, we all shared what we knew and remembered about Mark. We used a format to keep us all from rambling too much that used the Inklings at Oxford, CS Lewis, Tolkien, TS Eliot, and their friendship and work together sharpening each other’s writing as an example. At one point, a member of the group died and Lewis said something to the effect that, “While he’d miss Charles personally, what he’d miss the most was how Charles made him a better person.” Brad’s question was how did Mark impact us to help make us better people? I think it’s a good question for a gathering like this one today.

Honesty, loyalty, humility and love would seem to be qualities that best characterize Mark to me. He wasn’t loud and he hated being in the spotlight. He probably wouldn’t like all of us sitting here talking about him and he really wouldn’t like the big memorial service that’s going to happen this week, but he’s just going to have to get over it.

My favorite story about Mark’s dislike of the spotlight is also reflective of his love of mission work. He and his wife, Sarah, who both were passionate devotees to developing missions in this church and making it the focal point it is today, had just gotten back from a trip to Mexico with Growers First, a group that helps rural poor farmers around the world. Jay Grant, saw them sitting in church, knew they had been on a recent mission, and asked Mark and Sarah to stand and talk a little about their trip. They both got up, I think Sarah did most of the talking, and after church Mark went up to Jay and said, “Don’t ever, ever do that to me again!” Now Jay knew that Mark had been a Navy SEAL and was very effective at his work and didn’t know Mark very well, and from what I understand, Jay was a little careful around Mark for a while after that. Mark used to love that story and always chuckled when he told it.

Mark didn’t try to be cool. He hated facades and veneers. He reminds me, in a strange way, of William F Buckley Jr. Hosting him at a fundraiser years ago, I remember that this very well-heeled writer and publisher seemed to be intent on maintaining his school-boy disheveledness. Shaggy hair, frayed cuffs, a huge old Louis Vouitton bag that would seem to hold a Volkswagen that he just threw everything into. Bill’s first impression seemed intentionally to not be about first impressions. Mark was very similar. He avoided first impressions entirely. He loped when he walked, like a big golden retriever or Mr. Snuffalufagas, he never wore jeans, his uniform was khakis (long or short), t-shirt of a well-worn variety, flannel shirt and “flippity floppities” as he called them – flip flops. He was always shaggy-haired and the harriest man I know – diametrically opposed to body razors. The worst criticism he could give you was, “Wow, that’s cool, Dave.” It meant that you seemed to be trying to be something you weren’t. Something that I’ve needed a lot of help with in life, and something that Mark was better than a brother at helping me manage.

But that was part of Mark’s core personality – he was very quiet with new people. He didn’t need a lot of friends. He was polite but also very blunt with people that felt they needed to espouse some version of BS. He seemed to have this efficiency with words, probably because he thought a lot about who he was talking to and what he was saying before he spoke, that were more powerful from their economy.

His very best friend took the place of Joe and Dave and I almost 10 years ago when he married Sarah Ochs. They became Mark & Sarah, a unit. Someone recently said that no man will love Sarah as well as Mark did. I’ll take it a little further and say that few men love their wives and treat them with the respect that Mark did. It may sound like this is candy-coating my friend, but he really did love Sarah as close as any man I know could come to the way Christ loves the church.

Recently I was talking with Howard Hills, a long-time neighbor on Brooks Street and very good friend of Mark and Sarah’s. He said that Mark seemed to know what he needed to hear and how to say it without any direct effort at trying to convert Howard or proselytize him, just to deliver something true that would provide value to Howard. You can get the whole story from Howard, and you should – it’s powerful, but the part I love is that when Mark was trying to get across to Howard that the Christian life isn’t about being good, it’s about realizing the state we are all in, that we live under this state of original sin, and we can’t get out from under it on our own, and we’re all pilgrims on the same journey just trying to help each other out. But we can’t journey together until we all agree on the fundamental assumption that we can’t do it ourselves. He paraphrased that for Howard by saying, “Howard, what I have come to realize is that basically, I suck.” He just left that statement hanging in the air, and Howard talked about how it made him stop and deeply reflect on how big of a statement that was coming from such an amazing human being.

Mark lived his life for others. I don’t know all the details of what he was doing, but I know something of what he did. He was a soldier and he worked very closely with local people in countries where he operated in ways that were unique. In Afghanistan, he actually lived with the tribal people he was serving and training. He was invited to an Afghani wedding, something that never is allowed for foreigners. He was one of them, he loved them as people, because he believed that we are all children of God. When he died, Mark had essentially put himself in the lead vehicle in a convoy going into a dangerous area with Iraqis he had trained. He realized that if he was going to be an effective leader and if the Iraqis he loved and trained were going to be able to stand on their own without him, then he had to lead by example so they could do the same. Like Stonewall Jackson, Mark lived the way he expected his team to live. He did not lead from the rear. We read a lot of he same adventure stories by Bernard Cornwell. The worst characters in those novels are the leaders who are dishonest. Who lie to themselves because they try to lead while eating different food, sleeping in different beds and removing themselves from hardship and from harms way. Mark realized that to be the tip of the spear, you have to ride point, and if you expect others to do that then you have to be willing to do it yourself.

We all lie to ourselves, especially us men, and I’m pretty bad at fooling myself. The quality in Mark that I will miss the most was how he was brutally honest with me, which forced me to be brutally honest with my own lies. It is probably one of the best qualities, assuming love, that you can find in a friend.

It seems funny that such a quiet guy could leave such a hole in my life, and I am sure a crater in Sarah’s, but it is a hole that creates tremendous substance from the vacuum it leaves. And in a horrible way, I think that the economy of that void will help make me a much more honest person in much the same way that Mark did.

But I don’t want to talk about Mark in the past tense. I am a firm and resolute believer in the very real body of believers, the communion of the saints living and dead.

When my own older brother died from Leukemia14 years ago, I remember asking God to show me that he was safe and whole and happy again – I knew he was a believer and that he was living a complete life in the presence of the Father in Heaven, but I needed to see it. God granted me a vision of my brother smiling deeply and joyfully and wholly again. His look told me that he was living entirely in the joy of the sovereignty of God.

My older brother and I started surfing on the Great Lakes together. Mark helped fill part of that hole as a brother, like my younger brother Joel does. It’s a bond that creates a tribe among surfers. You see it here in Laguna with the Laguna Bros, the Hakamoms and other rogue gangs. Every time that I would go surfing, it seemed that I was having a baptism of water and the spirit, it was a place that I could always go to feel closer to my brother.

One of Mark’s favorite verses is Genesis 1:2 “. . . and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

Mark is more alive now, more real now, more true now and more whole now than he ever was on Earth. The difficulty is that we have this veil between us that separates us for a time. For me, getting in the water – getting our gills wet, as Mark and I used to say – helps bring me into communion with the body of believers beyond the veil. It is where I find the spirit of God most often and all the saints, living and dead. I find great comfort in being a small part of that body, it keeps me close to my brothers, some who are alive and some who we are separated from, for a time.

now more real than me
st mark intercedes for us
hovering over

Pirate Radio

2010-04-11T15:10:00.000-07:00

Flying back from a great but tiring weekend, I watched Pirate Radio on the flight home. Admittedly wasn't expecting much but found the film surprisingly wonderful.

The story takes place in 1967 off the coast of England on a ship that is broadcasting pirate content--pop music--which at that time was not allowed to be broadcast in Great Britain. The DJs and crew live a bohemian existence that reminded me of our days at Wheaton, in what I now look at fondly but was a bit wild and crazed at the time.

As I'm getting older, the character "Quentin" inspired and reminded me a bit of myself. He's played by Bill Nighy and is the guy who runs the ship and keeps things going with a minimalist approach to management and a maximalist approach to hedonism within boundaries.

The inspiration came from a group of loosely organized libertines who figure out how to live together and manage their internal disputes whilst battling the British government, which is adamantly working to shut them down. It reminded me of The Church of Reason with our own minor publications (the scrolls in red crayon posted on the Forum Board and The Icecream Socialist) winning the hearts and minds of many friends but ultimately loosing to an administration who was worn thin with time.

to love liberty
requires that you allow
things you do not like

Didya Want to Be a Rockstar?

2010-04-08T00:22:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but it sure seems like there are a lot of frustrated rockstars out there. I made an assi, late-night, one-too-many-cocktails-while-cruising-FaceBook comments on Rob Bell's Resurrection video, something about 'a bit over-produced for my taste but not surprising for a guy that is a frustrated-rockstar preacher.' It actually wasn't that mean, but that's what I was thinking. Poor Rob--I really like what he's doing, but the video felt like it was Rob-as-Bono, and I wanted more Rob. I'm blaming his producer.

About a day later I got a little cosmic aikido. Was cruising unread emails and I found a note from Carlos Vergara, an old Wheaton friend and photog who had attached some images I'd never seen before from an outdoor show we put on at a house party where I went to college (Wheaton) at the house I was living in at the time. It slayed me. It took me back in time as I tried to figure out what I was thinking, where I was and what the hell was going on in those images.

No doubt I count myself among the wannabes. Not that I was that talented a rock musician, but I did have a brief moment in the sun, more from pure balls and marketing/promotional ability than talent but there was Dungus Mangulaneous (still not entirely sure how to spell the second name of our band).

On Sundays at Wheaton, a few friends and I would drink a Coors Party Ball. It was a 'spiritual discipline' that we forced ourselves into as part of our Reformed Pledge. If you don't know Wheaton, it is a very conservative Christian college outside Chicago. They have a pledge that students sign saying you won't drink, dance, smoke, gamble or fornicate. We created a Reformed Pledge that we signed stating that we would do at least one of those things every day, thus "keeping the pledge today." The Coors Party Ball was our Sabbath rest. I don't recommend this.

Anyway, after completing the discipline of the Party Ball, we decided to create a rock band and to cement the deal, we started calling clubs to book a gig with this band. We named it Dungus Mangulaneous after an abnormal psychology term someone had heard at a party the night before. We got a meeting to book a gig at Club Stodolla. The problem was we didn't have a band, didn't play instruments and didn't even know where to get instruments.

The first thing we did was use the new world of word processing via Apple Mac and laser printers to create a press kit that looked way more professional than was thought possible (1990) and went to the club. We dressed up, acted crazy and had a story. We were looking for a club to kick off our national 'Label the Jar Tour.' Stodolla bit on it.

Next, we got some friends in a good band, Fish Club, to teach us how to play, loan us equipment and get us through a set list--simple songs; i.e., "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash, loud volume and lots of distortion. We also added playing in boxer shorts with dayglow body paint under black lights for effect.

I had just been kicked out of Wheaton a few days before (long story) and was the director of recreation for College Union, so I rented a bus to pick up all the kids that would be at our kegger the night of our show at the house I lived in. We had some friends put the kegs on the bus, everyone followed the kegs and, voila, we had a sold-out show.

Our band sucked, but we had a lot of fun. The Sex Kittens opened for us (a real, legit punk band in Chicago), we won the bets about whether we'd play or not, and our drunk friends cheered us on. Club Stodolla re-booked us for their big Halloween show that fall. . .idiots. These photos are from a party at our house the next night (I think), where we did an outdoor concert. . .until the cops showed up.

wanna be famous
fun to be at the center
now what do i do?

Becoming Real

2010-04-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the [Velveteen] Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

--From The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

We had some mixed emotions on the Thread today--new babies, dead uncles, published articles and whatnot. It seemed like life was hitting full-force--like we were experiencing becoming a bit more real, more fulfilled, more whole.

Truth to me seems to be the things that aren't always easy but the things that make me feel like I am being fulfilled, being turned more and more into the divine creature that my nature was formed from--of God or one with God. I've got a long way to go for sure.

As George MacDonald says, "We are not and cannot become true sons without our will willing his will, our doing following His making. It was the will of Jesus to be the thing God willed and meant him, that made him the true son of God. He was not the son of God because he could not help it, but because he willed to be in himself the son that he was in the divine idea. . .And we can be sons and daughters, saved into the original necessity and bliss of our being, only by choosing God for the father he is, and doing his will--yielding ourselves true sons to the absolute Father. Therein lies human bliss--only and essential. The working out of our salvation must be pain, and the handing of it down to them that are below must be in pain; but the eternal form of the will of God in and for us, is intensity of bliss. [From Creation in Christ]

It seems odd to me that so many Evangelical Christians want this Earth to pass away and to flee in the fourth quarter--as if that is how God works during Armageddons. It appears that during the great floods and fire-from-heaven episodes of the Bible, the righteous are left behind--Noah, Lot, Rahab, etc. . . I'm becoming a fan of NT Wright's work, particularly his affinity for nature and the way that God reveals himself to us in the great work he created around us and Christ is recreating for Him. As my friend Shani wrote in her FullFill article this month (http://www.fulfill.org) quoting NT: "You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are--strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself--accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world."

Sheldon Vanauken paraphrased CS Lewis in A Severe Mercy: "Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other."

CS Lewis said it even better (in my humble opinion): ". . .every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either in a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other." [From Mere Christianity.]

becoming more real
pain of regeneration
dios mio, man

Being Remade by the Living Word

2010-04-05T23:03:00.000-07:00

Christian Meditations by Hans Urs von Balthasar has been resonating deeply with me these Lenten and Holy Week seasons.

This was from a friend this week who has also been reading Ezekiel and getting into what "eating the scroll" means--what it means to injest the Word and to be reborn/remade by it:

Then the friend is on the ground. Kathy and I are burying her in the dirt. She is still trying to talk to me and taunt me and I kick dirt over her face and tell her if she says it again I will stomp on her face. She is completely buried now except for her eyes.

Next scene: I watch the friend come up out of a pool. Face up toward the sky, wet hair down her back, and I think to myself, “Oh good, she got all the dirt off.” I am also standing in the water up to my waste aware that dirt is coming off me as well.

Baptism.

Here are some words from Balthasar about the continual rebirth/renewal we experience in the Word:

Now in the bridal oneness of Christ and the Church, as God-Man and as the Father's Word, he certainly remains the active Word in quote another way, above all in the free spontaneity of his Eucharist. The Church receives the gift of the Word--like Mary, as handmaid of the Lord--in "reverential fear" (Eph 5:33). And the word that she returns to him as response s an echo; as it were, of his Word, although an active echo that the power of the Word has given her to express. So given that she is first of all "produced" (Eph 7:27) by the Word; in her very response she is a creature, a product of the Word. This is so not only once but ever anew, inasmuch as she is continually being "produced" by the Eucharist of the Bridegroom; but she likewise receives perpetual authority to "produce" this Eucharist herself. As response to the Word she is empowered to speak back to the Father (in the eucharistic Sacrifice) the Word itself in thanksgiving (eucharistia).

In both these contexts it reminds me of how the DNA that God gives us, the code or word of ourselves, is constantly remaking us--how our cells are constantly regenerating tissue. When our internal code, our DNA, our word is corrupted the regeneration can evolve into things as normal as the aging process and as abnormal as cancers. One of the benefits of stem cells is the renewel of the reservoir of that code. In the same way, we as the body of Christ, the church, the Communion of the Saints, need to continually renew our DNA, our word by 'eating the scroll' by meditating, injesting the Eucharist and speaking back in thanksgiving.

eat the living word
regeneration happens
baptized by the scroll

Aikido Jesus is My Easter Bunny

2010-04-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

A friend posted a story on FB a couple days ago about a church in Texas that is giving away over $2m worth of luxury items as "an opportunity to share Christ with people who may never go to a church for any reason." I commented back that it makes complete sense for a church where Jesus is the Easter Bunny.

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100402/texas-megachurch-to-give-out-cars-tvs-at-easter-services/index.html

So many criticisms come to mind from the utilitarian--how about putting that money to good use reaching people that are desperate to hear the good news? Who need simply to eat, get clean water and some help back on their feet? Christ cleaning out the temple is another easy response, "It is written," he said to them, "'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a 'den of robbers.'" (Matt 21:13 NIV). I'm learning to be careful of the con when something like this seems so easy to criticize--it's like there is some cosmic aikido just waiting to happen.

The most unsettling word came from an old friend in Florida this week, ney, today. She highlighted her own turmoil over Oswald Chambers' devotional for today (April 4th) from My Utmost for His Highest:

After we have been perfectly related to God in sanctification, our faith has to be worked out in actualities. We shall be scattered, not into work, but into inner desolations and made to know what internal death to God's blessings means. Are we prepared for this? . . . Are we prepared to let God do as He likes with us - prepared to be separated from conscious blessings? Until Jesus Christ is Lord, we all have ends of our own to serve; our faith is real, but it is not permanent yet. God is never in a hurry; if we wait, we shall see that God is pointing out that we have not been interested in Himself but only in His blessings. The sense of God's blessing is elemental.

What struck me the hardest about my own condemnation of the church in Texas was that it was really a condemnation of my own personal desires for God's blessings--very scary stuff indeed when it is presented in such a clear mirror with such harsh lighting.

what i want from god
spring blessings rust and decay
mammon stares at me

Let Us not Mock God with Metaphor

2010-04-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

More epic verse from another modern writer, John Updike:

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

Advent for Easter

2010-04-03T23:15:00.000-07:00

I know that "Advent" by Sheldon Vanauken is an Advent poem, but it feels like it's better served at Easter (it also jives perfectly with Christian Meditations by Balthasar):

Two thousand years go by while on the Cross

Our Lord is suffering still--there is no end

Of pain: the spear pierces, nails rend--

And we below with Mary weep our loss.

The chilling edge of night crawls round the earth;

At every second of the centuries

The dark comes somewhere down, with dreadful ease

Slaying the sun, denying light's rebirth.

But if the agony and death go on,

Our Lady's tears, Our Lord's most mortal cry,

So, too, the timeless lovely birth again--

And the forsaken tomb. Today: the dawn

That never ended and can never die

In breaking glory ushers in the slain.

Advent by Sheldon Vanauken

from A Severe Mercy, Davy's Edition, p. 122.

The Simple Math

2010-03-31T21:46:00.000-07:00

The WSJ published an article about the math of taxation and the diminishing returns that increasing tax rates generate--it's been studied pretty thoroughly at some of our best universities and, using non-political analysis, it basically said that at best, there isn't much more blood to be had from the turnip that is "rich folks" to fund the $1.2 trillion needed for the new healthcare concept. (There also are not enough doctors.)

I'm gonna keep looking for Goerthe's dog:

Ein Hundchen wird gesucht,
Das weder murrt, nocht beiBt,
Zerbrochene glaser friBt
Und Diamanten schieBt

Wanted: a small dog that
neither growls nor bites, can
eat broken glass and shit diamonds

Food for the Other

2010-03-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

I bumped into an old friend, Tim Brown, who is the new President of Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. The curious thing is that he was walking through the Minneapolis airport with three books in his hand and seemed to be reading them all at once.

Tim was head pastor of one of the fastest growing churches in America, Christ Memorial and then went back to teach at Western, to work with the next generation of spiritual leaders in the Reformed Church (Dutch and Protestant), after my older brother and another young adult member of Christ Memorial both died from cancer in 1993.

Here is what he was reading:

Christian Meditations by Hans Urs von Balthasar
Spiritual Theology by Diogenes Allen
Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I bought the books that night on Amazon and just finished Christian Meditations which was life-changing. Some short quotes that I recently shared on our FaceBook thread are below:

All, reading Christian Meditations by Hans Urs von Balthasar (Ignatius Press), worthy of the time and investment to find more unity in our individual pursuits of truth, love and grace:

I'm having a hard time pulling short quotes, but here are a few:

. . .this blessedness of poverty is likewise manifested in the Eucharist as the heart of the Church and thus in the whole of ecclesial life. It is Jesus" blessedness so to dispossess himself that he can become the living space for all who receive him and, through them, for all others. . .

Origen very strongly emphasized this in interpreting the texts in which the prophet Ezekiel and the seer of the Apocalypse are commanded to eat the Word (in the form of a scroll). This Father of the Church knows that "the Word is the true food of the spirit", and "what could be more nourishing for the soul than the Word?"

The concrete spoken Word cannot be detatched from the Word that he himself is. . .This is why, above, we could bring Word and Eucharist into such close connection and compare mediation with Communion. Christ who seems to stand before us, asks to be admitted to a common meal with our being: "See I am standing before the door knocking. . .I will go in to dine with him and he with me." (Rev 3:20)

It leads to an exchange in the deepest level: each one becomes food for the other.

(Photo credit: Cathleen Falsani)

Schuyler's 16th Birthday

2010-03-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

Schuyler and I went to mainland Mexico, the Zihuatanejo area, for a surf trip with our brothers at Little Church by the Sea. He was turning 16; I am into my 40s now. It was a great coming of age. . .for both of us.

father and son surf
coming of age in the sea
one baptism again

Glory Holes

2010-03-08T22:36:00.001-08:00

Beautiful break of light through the clouds over the Pacific as I drove the boys home from soccer practice tonight. . .reminded me of a simple truth: God's love can pierce any clouds that hover in our lives--the Spirit can break through life's difficulties if we give in and relinquish.

From St Oswald today:

To be born from above of the Spirit of God means that we must let go before we lay hold, and in the first stages it is the relinquishing of all pretence. What Our Lord wants us to present to Him is not goodness, nor honesty, nor endeavour, but real solid sin; that is all He can take from us. And what does He give in exchange for our sin? Real solid righteousness. But we must relinquish all pretence of being any thing, all claim of being worthy of God's consideration. . .When a man really sees himself as the Lord sees him, it is not the abominable sins of the flesh that shock him, but the awful nature of the pride of his own heart against Jesus Christ. When he sees himself in the light of the Lord, the shame and the horror and the desperate conviction come home.

dark winter cloud-dread
suffocating soul and mind
relinquish my claim

XS Academy Awards

2010-03-07T22:44:00.000-08:00

Kind of a big night for XS and possibly my all-time favorite Academy Award ceremony.

High point had to be Jeff Bridges getting an Academy Award. Such a cool guy. Love him. Pretty epic pic my brother doctored up of the Dude double-fisting Gold.

Also, was pretty stunned by the XS props on stage with the crappiest dance number ever. My friend Gabe highlighted the silvertone with a bit of green.

the dude showed tonight
xs on stage I kid you
not, no fuiking way

Dudes Day

2010-03-06T22:50:00.000-08:00

Interestingly, we are nearing the end of Lent and last night/today we celebrated the Dude's Day. Below are a few concepts of what it's all about from the Dudespaper:

This year on March 6th we’re going to get fired up about chilling and make it official: It’ll be the first annual sacred Dudeist high holy day, The Day of the Dude.

Every religion needs its high holidays, and no religion takes taking a break more seriously than Dudeism. Though we considered many days for the holy day, we settled on March 6th because it’s the day that The Big Lebowski was bequeathed unto the world way back in the year of our Dude, 1998.

At first we considered April 20, but that had already been taken by the Church of the Subgenius; then we though to have it on September 11th as that’s the day the Dude writes on his check for 69 cents at the beginning of the movie, but of course that would be offensive to many folks. So finally we settled on March 6th, the Day of the Dude. So that’s when and what you call it. Probably in the future we’ll have more high holidays strewn throughout the year but you’ve got to start somewhere.

We recommend celebrating The Day of the Dude by getting together with like-minded Dudeists, drinking white Russians, watching the sacred film, and going bowling.

However, anything that pays honor to the high principles of Dudeism is fine:

Spend it alone in your private residence by taking a bath with candles and tapes of whale sounds.
Go to the beach (or the river, or the lake, or the swimming pool) with some pals and symbolically scatter the ashes of the previous year (suggestion: the ash from some naturally-occuring herbal substance will do).
Get dressed up in your robes, shorts, sunglasses and sandals and pass out the Take it Easy Manifesto at your local shopping mall.
Organize a full-on Jackie-Treehorn style garden party.
Set up a stand in a public area and ordain people into the Church of the Latter-Day Dude. Yes! If you’re ordained as a Dudeist Priest you have that power! You only have to get their name and their email address and email us the list. Or, even better - set up a laptop and a printer and do it for them right there on the website, then give them a free printout of the online certificate. People will definitely dig your style.
Drive around while listening to Creedence, or the movie soundtrack and enjoy the occasional acid flashback.
Make some strongly commendable Dudeist art and send scans of them to us for our online gallery.
Go for a long walk and don’t answer your phone all day.
Get a discussion group together to discuss The Big Lebowski, Great Dudes in History, Dudeist philosophy, etc.
Write an article about how you spent the Day of the Dude and send it in to the Dudespaper via center@dudeism.com. The best one will receive a free copy of the Dude De Ching!
Engage in a natural, zesty enterprise with a willing partner. Then tell each other about yourselves over cocktails and what-have-you.
Go to In-N-Out Burger, or make your own.

So I posted this and got one little lady all riled up about until a group of Dudeists mellowed her out. Quality day.

Last night was pretty special, though. . .

I'm calling the night before Dudes Day something else--St. Dudesday Eve. Cathleen Falsani had a book party, served us all White Russians, aka "Caucasians," showed the film on the wall, read from her book and made us all show up in costume (see FaceBook). I was kind of swamped and didn't have much time to prep. Was considering going as The Dude, but then thought others would too. Then thought I'd sweep it by going as The Big Lebowski, but didn't have time to drive out to Costume Castle for a bald wig, at which point Nirvana poked me and I called my good friend, Glenn Rogers to be The Big, while I wheeled him around as Brandt. We won the Canadian-USA combined costume award, of course. I mean, does the Pope shit in the woods or what?

it's down there somewhere
dude, at least it's an ethos
lost my train of thought

Mission Impossible

2010-03-04T21:47:00.000-08:00

Two days ago we had bigger-than-normal surf in Southern California. Nate Apffel, who made the Lost Prophets film I supported wrote this as his FaceBook status:

Scariest surf... HUGE 6-8ft hawaiin blacks. I take three on the head, almost drown. I go into the beach and see a surfer who was a paramedic giving CPR to a guy who had drown. 6 minutes of no heart beat and the guy is saved! After being stretchered up to a waiting ambulance he is concious and talking... I do believe in miracles!

From St Oswald today regarding asking for the impossible and believing that we will receive it:

This man received his sight. The most impossible thing to you is that you should be so identified with the Lord that there is nothing of the old life left. He will do it if you ask Him. But you have to come to the place where you believe Him to be Almighty. Faith is not in what Jesus says but in Himself; if we only look at what He says we shall never believe. When once we see Jesus, He does the impossible thing as naturally as breathing. Our agony comes through the wilful stupidity of our own heart. We won't believe, we won't cut the shore line, we prefer to worry on.

Not getting into details, I have some daunting tasks facing me, some challenges that seem overwhelming. I'm at the point of frustration where I start getting angry with people that I care about and love because of it. That's not who I like to be. These are my breakthrough moments with God and in my own personal development--the times when I have to breathe, pray and listen more. . .

lost amid the noise
scratching towards the surface
miracles of air

Threading Knuckle Babies

2010-03-02T21:19:00.000-08:00

A bunch of friends from Wheaton College started a thread on FaceBook almost two years ago when our mutual friend, Mark Metherell was killed in Iraq. It's a wild place where we kind of started off assuming that we were all the same people we were in school and have found that almost two decades of adulthood has a way of changing folks. We simply refer to it as The Thread.

One of our friends who was raised as a Baptist has converted to Roman Catholicism (he spent over a decade in the Episcopalian/Anglican church from college to his recent conversion). We were discussing the theology of sexuality in the Roman tradition and masturbation came up. Most of the Protestants on The Thread were surprised that the concept of "making knuckle babies," as one post described it, was still verboten.

This was our friend, James' story about how he approached the concept with his mother, a conservative Baptist, whom he thought would side with him:

Regarding masturbation, I've kept my mom a little bit apprised of our discussion, and I thought at least on the issue of masturbation I could get her to agree with the Catholic (me). Mind you, I've never, under any circumstances discussed masterbation with my mother. So this shows you the lengths I'll go to try to reach her (I understand some might find my efforts misguided). So I presented the claim about Protestant liberty.

What was her response? Kind in mind that this is the same mother who banned rock 'n roll in our house growing up, disconnected our cable tv, and once dragged my dad and older brother on a mission to disrupt my brother Stephen's escapades with his girlfriend in high school. I don't say any of this with disrespect, but only offering evidence that would suggest I am within the bounds of logic to think that on this issue she would would agree with me, the Catholic.

"I've never seen that as that big of a crime," she said.

The shock and horror. I really did not want to persue the discussion and pretty much left it at that after a flailing effort, "what would Dad say about your theology now?...Dad?...oh never mind..."

how did jelly fish
make their way from the deep sea
to my shower floor?

Chub Chasers

2010-03-01T21:20:00.000-08:00

My son Willem has a term called "Chub Chasers" that I will leave mostly to your imagination--it involves a category of person looking for a category of person. I leave it at that.

This video seemed to capture Willem's amusing terminology aptly.

expectations of
gaelic sean-nos magnify
the chubby humor

Newest Vanderveen

2010-02-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

My brother, Joel and his wife Katie had a son last week, Emmett Joel (EJ), the newest addition to the Vanderveen Collection. Sarah and I went to visit him today, he had just been circumcised--eight days after his birth as per Jewish law and custom (my brother and his wife keep a version of Messianic Judaism). Beautiful boy.

Holding another child from my brother's family, now larger than my own, and his first son, I started to think more about what his boy will be like when he's a teenager like my own two sons. It's like you're looking at a blank slate, some of which will develop via the DNA and some of which will be shaped with environment, prayer and time. "Who's in there?" I kept asking.

EJ WTF?
peanut-like in size and shape
who are you? who? who?

Home Again

2010-02-27T13:05:00.000-08:00

After traveling for two weeks of family time and work (Mammoth and Maui), I never really feel like I'm home until I reconnect with Sissi (Sarah), my wife.

Landed yesterday morning at 7am from Maui with an Ambien and Sarita hangover, worked out, surfed, coached soccer, took kids to band practice (forgot one--apologies Harrison), went out to dinner with a good friend and then crashed hard. . .woke up this morning with my well-tussled and beautiful wife to realize I was finally home again.

powdery mountains
azul tropic tubes and back
sissi brings me home

Haikutomatic Lent

2010-02-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

During my second day of attempts to fly from California to Maui (yesterday from Mammoth, today from Laguna via LAX--currently in a four-hour delay my second day), I came across the Haikutomatic on the Dudesblog:

http://dudeism.com/haikutomatic.html

Obviously haiku is my genre of choice lately, and this little device pulls randomized five and seven syllable sequences of phrases from the script of The Big Lebowski. After flipping through it for a while, I came up with this little Dudiku for Lent:

don't roll on shabbos
that had not occurred to us
dios mio, man

Losing Control

2010-02-18T23:50:00.000-08:00

I received a couple of interesting messages today, this one from a friend from a book titled The Message:

"Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life."

From my Dad today via another friend from Isaiah 55:

“ For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, And do not return there, But water the earth, And make it bring forth and bud, That it may give seed to the sower And bread to the eater, 11 So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it."

All this was in my inbox BEFORE I got to Mammoth airport at 10am, sat there until about 1pm and then learned my postponed flight to LAX was cancelled--the same flight that was supposed to connect me to my fight to Maui. So I spent the day meeting new folks, breaking some bread with them, sharing some drinks and flying via Reno to LAX and catching a ride home to Laguna. Typically I'd get a bit bent out of shape, but not today, because I'd been told twice that I didn't need to be in control of it all already.

Then of course, St Oz drives it home:

Read John 13. We see there the Incarnate God doing the most desperate piece of drudgery, washing fishermen's feet, and He says - "If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet." It requires the inspiration of God to go through drudgery with the light of God upon it. Some people do a certain thing and the way in which they do it hallows that thing for ever afterwards.

embrace drudgery
displace worry, lose control
transformed spirit

Eyes Wide Shut

2010-02-17T22:44:00.000-08:00

Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth: Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our mortality and penitence, that we may remember it is only by your gracious gift we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Savior.

Posted by a friend on her FB page.

Here is what St Oswald says:

The disciples went to sleep when they should have kept awake, and when they realized what they had done it produced despair. The sense of the irreparable is apt to make us despair, and we say - "It is all up now, it is no use trying any more." If we imagine that this kind of despair is exceptional, we are mistaken, it is a very ordinary human experience. Whenever we realize that we have not done that which we had a magnificent opportunity of doing, then we are apt to sink into despair; and Jesus Christ comes and says - "Sleep on now, that opportunity is lost for ever, you cannot alter it, but arise and go to the next thing." Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ, and go out into the irresistible future with Him.

Today was Ash Wednesday. I pretty much skied, drank a PBR tallboy and part of a great Bloody Mary, went to a wonderful dinner with friends and essentially slept through the day that is supposed to be the day we remember our penitence and mortality AND the gracious gift Christ made for us. Just when I was feeling the first pangs of guilt, I read St Oz who said, basically, "Fuck it, you missed it. Be ready for the next opportunity." [I paraphrase.]

how did i miss this?
waking up my eyes wide shut
irresistible

Barley Pops

2010-02-17T01:18:00.000-08:00

Some days are wonderful but not for apparent reasons. Some days the magic, the ju-ju, just kind of sneaks up on you when you don't expect it.

This is some of what St. Oswald has to say about Feb 16:

We all have any number of visions and ideals when we are young, but sooner or later we find that we have no power to make them real. We cannot do the things we long to do, and we are apt to settle down to the visions and ideals as dead, and God has to come and say - "Arise from the dead." When the inspiration of God does come, it comes with such miraculous power that we are able to arise from the dead and do the impossible thing. The remarkable thing about spiritual initiative is that the life comes after we do the "bucking up." God does not give us overcoming life; He gives us life as we overcome. When the inspiration of God comes, and He says - "Arise from the dead," we have to get up; God does not lift us up. Our Lord said to the man with the withered hand - "Stretch forth thy hand," and as soon as the man did so, his hand was healed, but he had to take the initiative. If we will do the overcoming, we shall find we are inspired of God because He gives life immediately.

Sissi and the boys and I are up at Mammoth. The weather and snow and friends have been perfect--spring conditions, great meals, and a great combination of people.

Tonight we had fondue, good wine and great cognac with some friends (I'm giving up cheese for the Lenten season, I think). Sarah and I came home and watched Crazy Heart. An amazing story about a drunk and washed-up country western singer who falls in love with a younger woman and her son. He loses that relationship because of his drinking, but that loss finally puts him at rock bottom and gives him cause to sober up. He bucks up, then God delivers the inspiration to begin writing great songs again.

Jeff Bridges plays Bad Blake, the alcoholic singer/songwriter. There are a lot of overlaps between Jeff Lebowski and Bad, from the opening scene in a bowling alley to the "barley pops" ("oat sodas" in The Big Lebowski) that Jeff and Robert Duvall drink whilst fishing to kill a hangover. I don't drink a lot of beer anymore, and I rarely drink it from a can, but today I had the same barley pop as Jeff and Robert did in the film, a Pabst Blue Ribbon, which was pretty much perfect with my chili on the slopes. Guess I have some bucking up to do myself.

initiative
barley pabst blue hand stretches
my inspiration

Mammoth in the 20th Century

2010-02-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

Some parts of Mammoth are still in the 20th Century, one my favorites is Tamarack Lodge, GPS won't get you there:

go through the tunnel
past the snowy bridge, turn right
gewurztraminer

The Sacrament of Nature

2010-02-12T00:34:00.000-08:00

Nature to a saint is sacramental. If we are children of God, we have a tremendous treasure in Nature. In every wind that blows, in every night and day of the year, in every sign of the sky, in every blossoming and in every withering of the earth, there is a real coming of God to us if we will simply use our starved imagination to realize it.

From Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest.
http://www.myutmost.org/02/0210.html

I have written other places about how my relationships with my brothers and the ocean are sacramental. They touch my soul. Truly, I believe that while surfing, I have communion of the saints, unity with the body of believers, living and dead through this baptism of water and the spirit.

In Genesis 1:2, we see that ". . .and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

It seems pretty obvious that as Christ walked on water and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters during creation, so man has a unique relationship with his God via the ocean.

This week was an interesting one. As I was having some significant challenges with partners, a deal and some overall business issues, I felt like the Word was speaking to me via St. Oswald. I went surfing (not that unusual). The surf was fun, I got into a stupid argument with a guy in the line-up, but walking out of the water, I had to pass through a flock of seagulls. Thinking about St Oswald and the sacraments of nature, I reflected on what sacraments I had taken that day.

Walking out of the cold, February water and onto the low-tide, exposed sand bars of wet and compact sand, I had to pass through a large group of seagulls. I slowed down. Everystep I took the brids would fly away as if I was passing through them. It reminded me of Avatar when the main character was touching the flowers at night and they responded to him. It was as if nature and my interactions were connecting in a new way I had never experienced before (except that it was something I had experienced many times before). It was seeing something rather common as an epiphany.

The magic and the pure joy that sprang from my frustration did seem like the pure hand of God liberating my imagination through the sacrament of nature.

Ex Nihilo

2010-02-07T21:33:00.000-08:00

Last night was our first high school prom-type event. Laguna Beach High School Winter Formal (2010). Schuyler went with a very nice girl, Taylor Nederlander--a tennis star and beauty. Looking at their photos, I cannot believe how big our little boy has grown. It was a late night and we got to pick them up and drive them home.

This morning, we slept in, made breakfast (chili-egg scramble), watched 30-Rock on DVR and then I read the "Other Side of Hate" from GQ to the boys. Such a powerful story. I think it's still settling on all of us.

Tennis lessons for Schuyler, Willem revived from his sleep-over and then gearing up for Sissi's baby shower for our sister-in-law, Katie and a Superbowl party for the boys at friend's homes.

Willem went to a friend's and Schuyler and I hung out at the Crank Brothers, pro mountain biker party, with a bunch of XS Lemon Blast and Beers--XS Radlers or "cyclists" in German, as they call beer and lemonade drinks.

We skipped church. It felt really good.

today nothing is
what we are about today
ex nihilo est

The Other Side of Hate

2010-02-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

I was going to write another rant about grace and justice, but instead I found an article that I've been holding and re-read it. It's about the failure of corruption and social justice in Zimbabwe and the success of radical grace from a farmer with a laundry list of injustices against him.

Please read the linked article below. Most radically of all, it appeared in GQ, in an issue with Will Ferrell on the cover in a ridiculous swimsuit (the reason I bought the magazine in an airport).

This is a hilarious Will Ferrell slideshow from that issue:
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/200606/will-ferrell-slideshow#slide=1

This is the article that is radical grace:
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/200606/andrew-corsello-george-bush-zimbabwe

Injustice Basterds

2010-02-05T22:36:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to a screening of Inglorious Basterds at the Tolerance Museum. It was a deeply moving event on a number of levels. First, through connections to the family of Holocaust survivor (now deceased), I am gaining a better understanding of the generational costs of that atrocity to the Jewish community--it's unlike any injustice in the Western world that I am aware of today.

Second, as I try to understand the Jewish culture and beliefs better, I had a conversation with a rabbi in the lobby of the Tolerance Museum that was private but telling. He said to me that the museum should be called the Museum of Intolerance. As an example, we were discussing the security and he talked about an extremist who came to LA to kill Jews and an immigrant, entered the Tolerance Museum and left, because he recognized that if he started shooting in there, he would not make it out alive. The rabbi said to me, "Jews cannot be tolerant of Muslims until every Muslim that wants to kill a Jew is dead." I heard similar comments later that evening about Nazis who killed Jews. It's an eye for an eye. Makes total sense if the goal is perfect justice, or as close to it as you can get.

So the screening was roughly 300 people, a packed house. Many in attendance were quite old and many of those had survived the Holocaust. Like other viewings of Basterds, there was cheering and audience enthusiasm when Nazis were scalped, tortured and beaten to death with baseball bats. It has seemed odd to me that our nation does not allow water boarding of totalitarian, Muslim extremists who are intent on killing innocents, but we cheer the horrific demise of "Nazis"--of these caricatures of German soldiers.

Granted, the Nazis are guilty of one of the worst (and best documented) crimes against humanity. Mao and Stalin may have killed more people, but Hitler kept records. He also did it systematically and to a race of people. The Holocaust has been documented and recreated so that most of us are well-aware of its horrors and moral terror. It has created a deep injustice and indebtedness between the Germans who participated or supported the Nazis and the peoples who were damaged by it, the Jews being the group that lost the most.

Here is what struck me: no one else is still fighting for their national injustices. My family is of Dutch ancestry. Many Dutch hid Jews and fought in the underground resistance. Many Dutch ended up in camps and died for the Jews and in their fight against the Nazis. The Dutch are not continuing to seek repayment. The Americans are not continuing to seek repayment. We ended the war and cleaned it up as best we could decades ago. I believe that process comes from a fundamentally different concept of rights, responsibilities and what justice demands.

After the showing a number of people involved in the film discussed it. It was primarily a Jewish affair. Eli Roth, who played Sgt Donny Donnovan in the film, the Bear Jew, the guy who beats Nazi's to death with a baseball bat and (spoiler alert) shoots and kills Hitler, said, "Jews are like money lenders (audience laughs), we charge interest on past injustices. . . I care more about an injustice that happened 50 years ago than I do about an injustice that happened yesterday."

It's unclear to me how you pay dividends on injustice. The Hatfield and McCoy model of seeking justice doesn't seem to work well. I don't think we'll ever get to peace in the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Middle East if we're all trying to rectify the injustices we can find between our fathers. As the evening wore on and the accounts of injustices against Jews by Nazis continued, a phrase popped into my head that we used to joke about in high school: "Remember the Hittites."

The Hittites, or the city of Ai, or other peoples of Canaan were largely wiped out, according to Biblical accounts, under the commands of God to the Israelites. In fact, with the city of Ai, God commanded that the Israelites not spare any man, woman, child or beast. The Israelis could not even keep any loot--it all had to be destroyed. Total genocide. Who is owed that debt and how much interest has accrued over the past few thousand years?

The concept of forgiveness does not seem to exist in the Jewish model I saw last night. Grace is entirely foreign. To not exact justice is an insult to the people who were killed for these Jewish friends. I get it, I understand the demands that Justice makes. Somehow though, it seems unyielding or enslaving to try to balance the scales. The great liberation of the Christian message, the message of giving an extra mile, more clothing and loving your enemy is that it sets you free from having to try to exact repayment for injustices against you and ones that you (or your past generations) may have committed. Truly, the Christian to response to personal injustice is to forgive and be forgiven, it is to simply reply, "I was told there would be no math." Christians have this right because they believe that their sins are against God primarily. Christians believe that God made a perfect sacrifice through his son, like Abraham nearly did with Isaac, which serves as a scapegoat for all the sins of man. Accepting this free gift of grace has a requirement that you also extend it. The freedom has a cost--give up the claims of injustice against you.

The revolution of grace to me is not that it requires anyone to give up their rights or privileges--it acknowledges them, it says, "You have every right to expect repayment, but the real bugger is that others have every right to expect repayment from you as well--and no one ever views their sins as badly as the person they've been done against. Release and be released. Take a mulligan and give one." I believe that the message of grace is one that recognizes that justice-based systems are doomed to failure, to create a world that is a harsh place to live and impossible to balance. It says that you can take a mulligan, but you've got to offer everyone else a mulligan as well. The greatness of a mulligan-based system is that it allows folks to move on, to be liberated from the slavery of attempting to exact justice.

Rabbi Hier was in attendance. He has won two Academy Awards for documentaries, most recently (2003) for Genocide. He mentioned that very few Holocaust films were made until the 60s and 70s--decades after WWII ended. Today we seem to have a proliferation of films, articles and other justice and social justice movements. My concern is that although the amount of injustice in the Western world seems to be diminishing, particularly between Jews and Nazis, the anger, outrage and cries for repayment seem to be getting louder and bigger. The crowd of people, particularly the younger folks in the audience, seemed more upset and angry about the Holocaust last night than the survivors were in 1950. I don't see that as a healthy trend.

Do I believe that we should have fought the Nazis? Of course. Do I think we should be surgically targeting and eradicating religious extremists who are a danger to innocents and our world? Of course. Do I think we should be building systems that count past grievances, costs and the interest due on those accounts? I don't think so--it seems to build a sense of entitlement for debts that will not and cannot be repaid, which simply leads to expanding expectations that cannot be fulfilled. As the Davies J-Curve demonstrates when the gap between reality and expectations grows too great, societies become unstable and revolution ensues. That does not enhance anyone's life--I'm not interest in justice at the hands of the Jacobins.

I think that I have a better understanding of the depth of the injustice that the Jews inherited through the Holocaust from the screening last night. Certainly, I understand their claims against Nazis that killed and exterminated Jews in camps. It makes sense that a film glorifying the Jews who fought back (and should have) is going to be popular and give the Jewish people a sense of getting some additional justice. I'm concerned that it also seems to enhance the belief that more is owed than can ever be repayed. As one Israeli soldier in the audience said [I paraphrase], "I went into the Israeli Army, not because I thought that I could fight the Nazis, but so I could fight others who want to kill Jews the way the Nazis did." I'm not sure that such visualization helps make the world a happier or better place.

growing debts still grow
how does one harvest that shit?
help a brother out

February Birthdays

2010-02-02T22:38:00.002-08:00

Cath posted a great one about our friend, Mark, today--he was killed in Iraq two-years-ago in April. We were college roommates, neighbors in Laguna, both had wives named "Sarah," and both had February birthdays, he was a day after my Mom's and eight days before my own. I beat him to 40 and now have to beat him to 41--that sucks.

This is Cath's post: http://2010creationandsubtraction.blogspot.com/

Made a memory today.
Went to see where my friend Mark is buried.
74.4 miles south of my home is where his grave is.
(At first I typed "where he is." But Mark isn't there. He's elsewhere. Surfing with Jesus.)
It's peaceful at Rosencrans. The view is beautiful. While I was there, in the harbor down below in the distance, an aircraft carrier slowly moved by toward the open sea. So did a tall ship with three masts, and a destroyer.
There was a gentle breeze and birds sang and flirted in the nearby trees.
It smelled like mown grass.
In three days he would have been 41.
I miss him.

I tried to comment but couldn't figure it out. Blame it on the Mac. I sent Cath a note.

"I think I know where he is. . .'and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.'" Gen. 1:2.

god takes my brothers
baptism of the spirit
communion of saints

Powder Chutes

2010-01-30T17:21:00.000-08:00

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

Sermon on the Mount

2010-01-27T21:25:00.000-08:00

"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

2010-01-25T13:36:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-18T22:57:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-17T20:03:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-16T20:48:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-01-12T23:19:00.000-08:00

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!