Lift Up Your Hearts!

Can it have been almost four years since Kelly James, Brian Hall and Nikko Cooke died in a blizzard on Mt. Hood?  I'm not usually one to follow closely television's relentless coverage of unfolding tragedy, but knowing Kelly's brother, Frank, made the events personal.

In the Shadow of Mt. Hood is an article written by Frank James in the September issue of Christianity Today.  (It's available online if you follow that link.)  I'm a bit reluctant to provide excerpts this time, as there is nothing he says that's not important.  (Those of you who know that I knew Frank when he was an elder in our PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) church, and know how I feel about most PCA sermons, will understand how significant it is for me to make such a statement.)  But here is a taste, anyway:

Grief is a relentless predator. Those who have lost loved ones tell me that one never completely escapes it. Strangely, a part of me does not want the grief to stop, because the grief itself is a connection to Kelly. Yet another part of me is so weary from carrying the burden of a broken heart.

In the midst of our family tragedy, I made a peculiar discovery. One would think that grief and disappointment with God would lead to bitterness against him. In my nightmare, I not only prayed intensely in private but also publicly declared my faith and confidence in God on CNN—but Kelly froze to death anyway.

There is disappointment, sadness, and confusion, but oddly, there is no retreat from God. Instead, I find myself drawn to God. To be sure, he is more enigmatic than I thought, but I still can't shake loose from him. There seems to be a kind of gravitational pull toward God.

Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy Sayers (Avon, New York, 1967)

Dorothy Sayers is one of my favorite authors, both fiction and non-fiction, and her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories among the best of that genre.  I've read them all so many times that quotations from them worm their way up from the depths of my brain unbidden, enabling me to appear knowledgeable in fields where my ignorance is nearly complete, as happened earlier this year while I was sitting in on a class about medieval manuscripts. (More)

I wasn't going to write about the two recent examples of September 11-related hysteria run amok, because (a) there has already been too much reaction, and (b) believe it or not, the fate of the world does not hinge on what I write on the Internet.  But in another context I was invited to share my opinion, and you know how I love to get double duty out of the effort it takes to write.

First, the "Ground Zero mosque" flap.  Whether a mosque, or Islamic center, or church, or store, or apartment building, or library, or strip club is built in New York City is none of my business.  Nor is it the business of 99% of the others who have weighed in on the issue, including President Obama, foreigners, and talk show hosts.  It is New York City's business, at whatever level zoning regulations are made. If the neighbors object to a proposed project, they have the right, and possibly the duty, to oppose it at zoning board hearings, to write letters to local papers, to make local speeches, to go from door to door with petitions.  My opinion is irrelevant, as is that of the President of the United States.  (More)

Gabriel Kron. Of all the amazing people who have intersected with my life, he is probably the safest to write about, since he died more than 40 years ago.  So I will; he deserves to be better known.

I knew him as my father's friend and mountain climbing partner; my father knew him from their days together at the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.  Dad, a Tau Beta Pi engineer (like his father, two of his children, and a grandchild), was no intellectual slouch, but he never pretended to understand anything of Gabe's work. 

It didn't matter.  I myself joined the Kron Klimbing Klub at age seven, and was mighty annoyed when I later learned that some other organization had usurped the acronym, "KKK."

One firm rule of the Klub I remember distinctly:  No eating until you reach the top. (More)

One thing I find attractive about Christianity is the balance it achieves between the physical and the spiritual:  when the heart of one's belief is that God became fully human while remaining fully God, it's hard to pretend that the spiritual and the physical are not both of supreme importance—and perhaps less separable than we would like them to be.  Psychologists are finding this truth in a surprising form.

Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.  What they have found is that, in fact, we do.

[S]ubjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee ... then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person—rating them as happier, more generous, more sociable, good-natured, and more caring—than the iced coffee group. ...[S]ubjects were given clipboards [of two different weights, and] were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies.... [T]he subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards...not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked. ... [S]ubjects who were asked to recall an unethical act, then given the choice between a pencil and an antiseptic wipe, were far more likely to choose the cleansing wipe than people who had been asked to recall an ethical act.

Ever wonder why British and American spellings are different if we theoretically speak the same language?  Color vs. colour, traveling vs. travelling, center vs. centre, aluminum vs. aluminium—are these inconsistencies merely some sadist's design to torment the multicultural child?^*  If so, Noah Webster was the man, but he thought he was making things easier.

We've been enjoying tremendously the Teaching Company lectures on the History of the English Language.   I can't recommend it enough:  we've learned many fascinating things about the evolution of our native tongue.  Recently the course touched on American lexicographer Noah Webster. (More)

I was a Brownie, then a Girl Scout as a child.  Even then I was somewhat disenchanted, as I knew—thanks to my father's experience as a Scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts—how much more interesting the program, the experiences, and the skills learned would have been if only I'd had that Y chromosome.

Nonetheless, we had a good time, thanks to my father, who took us mountain climbing and taught us to build fires and tie knots, just as he had his Boy Scouts, and to a renegade leader who battled the Girl Scout bureaucrats for the right to take our troop on a tour of Europe.  (More)

Our local story of the disappearance and rescue of 11-year-old Nadia Bloom didn't stay local for long.

Mostly, I ignored it as much as possible, other than getting the occasional update for prayer purposes.  The media was going nuts.  And so were the nay-sayers, the gossips, and the fear-mongers.

To be sure, they had reason.  We've had at least two recent, high-profile cases here of "missing" children where at least one of the tearful, pleading relatives was most likely the perpetrator of a horrendous crime.  That's enough to cause a little cynicism. But cynicism and suspicion don't accomplish much, and in the end, Nadia was rescued after four days in Florida swampland by an ordinary man of faith:  faith in God, and faith that Nadia's disappearance was exactly what it appeared to be—a beloved child who adventured a little too far and needed help. (More)

In “All Religions Are the Same…” (except Where They’re Not), John Stackhouse takes on the fallacy that all religions, at heart, are basically the same and of equal value.

What needs to be argued and not just asserted is that each of the major religions really does reduce down to moralism or mysticism without a loss to its essential character. And, in my view, most religions do not so reduce. Devotional (bhakti) Hinduism (the most popular form of Hinduism) doesn’t; Mahayana Buddhism (the most popular form of Buddhism) doesn’t;  Judaism doesn’t; and Christianity and Islam, the most popular religions in the world, certainly don’t. (I recognize that there are moralistic and mystical varieties of each of the Abrahamic religions, but the majority of believers and of those religions’ formal traditions do not, I maintain, reduce to mere moralism or mysticism.)

[A]s politically useful and personally pleasant a belief as it would be—that all religions are basically the same—I continue to aver what most of the religions of the world actually do say: They’re not basically the same and one does have to choose.

We’ll have to keep investigating and thinking about what Map of Reality (which is what religions and all other forms of life-philosophy purport to offer) is the best one. We don’t have to conclude that all religions are wrong except one. More than one map can depict at least some of the territory at least somewhat correctly. But we can’t blithely suggest that they’re all equally, or even fundamentally, right, either. That would have to be shown, and I haven’t seen a good argument yet for that (unlikely) hypothesis.

This started as a comment to the Sockdolager post on Daley Ponderings, but it turned out to be long and off-topic, so I migrated it here. The article in question is a thought-provoking one, but it had one unintended consequence.

I've been having an ongoing conversation with our rector, who insists on frequent use of simple "praise choruses" at all our services, even the most traditional, so that they will stick in our heads and we'll have them handy in times of need.  I understand the motivation:  this is why I memorize Scripture, hymns, liturgy, poetry, anthems, and other useful and helpful works.

But because I know he does not set out to torture his congregation, I know his brain processes music in a different way from mine.  By this I don't mean that he likes different music from me, although that is certainly true.  The issue is not a matter of style or taste, but of processing.

Music sticks in my brain.  I wish it were only the best music that sticks in my brain, but it's not.  The simpler and more banal it is, the more it sticks.  And it won't go away.  Round and round and round it plays like a track on eternal "repeat," until I manage to kick it out—often by substituting something else—or go crazy.  So far I've managed not to reach the latter point...quite.

This can be a useful affliction, as it does help with learning choir pieces.  But it doesn't stop after we're done with the anthem.  A little of that can be enjoyable, but even my favorite anthems can get stuck, and I have to work actively to stop the process so I don't end up loathing them.  And if I don't like a song from the beginning, you can imagine what I think of it by the 455th repetition.

The more complicated the work, the less likely it is to annoy me, which is why the simple praise choruses are more than usually troublesome.  But complex music is not exempt:  the other day I had part of Mozart's g minor symphony stuck on "repeat" and it was driving me nuts, even though I really like the piece. Fortunately, I know enough of that one that I was able, by effort of will, to kick it over into the next section.

It's not only music that does this to me, but words—though usually only if I'm writing them.  I tend to compose paragraphs while walking—often they later become letters or blog posts.  That can be an efficient way to think, but sometimes I'll get stuck going round and round with the same phrases and thoughts, and that's when I know it's time to pull out the mp3 player and let someone else's words into my brain.

Does anyone else share this blessing/affliction?

But the point of all this is what happened after I read the article, which is about Davy Crockett and the Constitution.  So far, writing this post has been the only thing able to stop my endless mental repetitions of The Ballad of Davy Crockett.  I never saw the movie, nor the television show, but as a child I had a record of Disney songs, of which that was one.  Despite 50 years or so having passed since I last heard that record, I could still sing it to you.

I won't, though.  You can watch this instead.

Our greatest involvement in our children's public schools came during the heyday of the self-esteem movement, and I recall the frustrations of being a lone voice crying out that easy success is as much an inhibitor of learning as repeated failure.  Those who sail through their early educational encounters with too much ease are often surpassed by their supposedly less able compatriots later in life, because they've missed the important lessons taught by failure.

With a hat top to Free-Range Kids, here's a Wall Street Journal article on why that college rejection letter, that teacher's put-down, and even our own weaknesses can be agents that propel us to success.

Warren Buffett was devastated when Harvard Business School rejected his application.  Buoyed by his father's "unconditional love...an unconditional belief in me," he looked for Plan B, squeaked in under Columbia University's application deadline, and was accepted, later donating some twelve million dollars to the institution whose investment in Buffett turned out to be as savvy as Buffett himself.

"The truth is, everything that has happened in my life...that I thought was a crushing event at the time, has turned out for the better," Mr. Buffett says.

Columbia's current president, Lee Bollinger, grew up in a small town with limited educational opportunities.  He, too, was rejected by Harvard, and the shock taught him to take responsibility for his own education, to realize that "it was up to him alone to define his talents and potential."

His advice: Don't let rejections control your life. To "allow other people's assessment of you to determine your own self-assessment is a very big mistake," says Mr. Bollinger, a First Amendment author and scholar. "The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you."

Success has many lessons to teach, too, and frankly I prefer that classroom.  But for grit, determination, perseverance, responsibility, and hard work, failure may be the better teacher.

Cleaning out old things, found this Hagar the Horrible comic, probably from last October.  (The link is to the current comic; if you can't see the image below—some feedreaders strip images—you'll have to click through to the original post.)

Take it any way you want.  I see it mostly as a statement of how weak and selfish we have become to care more about prosperity than freedom.  But it also bears a hint of the truth that without economic freedom, the higher liberties are endangered.

Beer, bread, cheese...and now musical instruments.   Jan Swafford's recent Slate article, In Search of Lost Sounds, mentions that in Europe, artisanal craftsmen are creating reproductions of period instruments for those interested in more flavors than the standardized, homogenized, modern sound.  This comes as no surprise, since Janet owns at least three such instruments.

The article is long, and some of my readers will be tempted to skip it, but please don't.  Skip the text if you wish, but don't miss the recorded excerpts, which are Flash objects that I can't reproduce here.  Hear Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy on the pianos of their day, and compare the sound to the same music on today's instruments.  Whichever you like best, you'll agree that the older instruments have a different and often exciting flavor.  (They also occasionally sound out of tune to me, and I'm wondering if it's my ears, the recording, or a different tuning of the pianos—though I thought equal temperament tuning was common by Beethoven's time.) (More)

What drives spam?  Money, obviously.  And sin.  Sin on both ends:  the sin of greed on the part of the spammer, and the sin that the spammer is hoping will entice his victim to throw money his direction.  Spam, therefore, may be a diagnostic tool, an x-ray scan revealing the broken and diseased places of our society.

If the spam that hits this blog (and is mostly filtered out before you see it) is any measure, the sickest area of our society is sex, although that observation is a bit like peering at an x-ray and announcing that the patient's leg is broken when anyone can see the jagged bone protruding from the flesh.  Porn of the worst kind, body part enhancements, "performance" drugs:  "greed meets lust" is a terrible combination. (More)

Someone else posted an enthusiastic link to Michael Hyatt's Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog?  That I am not so enthusiastic is probably due to having a serious problem with the first sentence, which reads, 

Assuming you want to increase your blog traffic, there are certain mistakes you must avoid to be successful.

After reading Hyatt's article I realized that not only do I make several of the mistakes, but I often make them on purpose.  That's when I realized the real problem:  I'm not convinced I want to increase my blog traffic. (More)