Lift Up Your Hearts!

This article from becomingminimalist.com is filled with shocking statistics about Americans (and a few other nationalities). I'm naturally suspicious of that kind of survey and what goes into the statistics. But were it only half true, it would still be scary. If you click to the article, you'll see reference links to the sources of each statistic. That doesn't mean the data may not be lacking in veracity, but citing sources deserves commendation, and you can find out more if you'd like.

Did I say these statistics are scary? More than that, they're alien—have I landed on another planet? If this is the truth about our society, then we, our families, and our friends are 'way above average (or below, depending on your point of view). Here's an abbreviated version of the numbers, with commentary.

• There are 300,000 items in the average American home. Hmmm. Since the definition of "items" includes paperclips, I'm not sure that number isn't on the low side. Legos alone might account for it in many families. :) I know we have some 2,000 books on the shelves, and an inordinate quantity of office supplies, kitchen utensils, and computer paraphernalia, so we're probably guilty here.
• The average size of the American home has nearly tripled over the past 50 years. It's ironic, isn't it? Families are much smaller now, but have much larger houses—in which they spend much less time.
• One out of every 10 Americans rents offsite storage. Not us. I can see situations in which someone might do that—such as the folks who put up elaborate Christmas displays and need to store everything for the rest of the year, or someone in the process of moving—but mostly I wonder what can be worth the cost of external storage.
• Twenty-five percent of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside them, and 32% only have room for one vehicle. Exactly what is meant by these numbers is unclear, and it apparently leaves out people with one- (or three-) car garages, but if the number of cars parked on the streets of our neighborhood is any indication, it seems to be a common affliction. Porter made sure that every time we moved into a house, the car(s) went into the garage the first night. Because he knew that if we didn't make that push, it might never happen.... Still, in our extended family it is generally true that garages contain the indended number of cars.
• British research found that the average 10-year-old owns 238 toys but plays with just 12 daily. Define "toy." Are all 300,000 Legos one "toy"? :)
• The average American woman owns 30 outfits—one for every day of the month. In 1930, that figure was nine. I don't believe it, and if true, it's hardly excessive consumption. You can get 30 different outfits with five blouses, three skirts, and two pairs of shoes, which even I would call a pretty minimal wardrobe.
• The average American family spends $1,700 on clothes annually. Thanks to the meticulous financier in the family (not me), I actually have our data for this—since 1984! From then until now we have averaged $519 spent on clothing per year. For the period from 1984 to 2000, when we were clothing two children as well as two adults, the average was $691.
• Nearly half of American households don’t save any money. Of all these statistics, this may be the most shocking to me. All those two-income households and we're not saving? I won't detail our historical savings as I did our clothing expenditures, but I have noticed an attitude change over the years that I find most significant. For much of my life, saving money was a priority for most of the families I knew. We saved for big-ticket purchases like washing machines and vacations, we saved for medical needs, we saved for retirement, we saved for our children's college costs, we saved for unexpected expenses like job loss. What happens now? We run up credit card debt for those big-ticket items so we don't have to wait for them. "Normal" medical care has gotten so far out of whack that we've redefined "insurance" to cover everything, not just catastrophes. We expect the government to provide for our retirement and unemployment. College has become so expensive that we count on scholarships—where having money saved only hurts one's case—and want the government to provide this also. There is very little of a "savings mindset" left, and almost no thought of economizing by forgoing the things that in the past we have done very well without, such as cable television, eating at restaurants, and the latest fashions in clothing, cars, home furnishings, and phones. Worse, I've all too often run into the attitude that saving money is actually bad—evil. They call it hoarding money. This is not a call to charity, but the belief that if you are not out there buying, buying, buying you are not doing your part to support the economy. Never mind that money saved is still working to contribute to the economy (unless it's stashed under the mattress), and that NOT buying, buying, buying may be the best thing an individual can do to save the earth.
• Our homes have more television sets than people. And those television sets are turned on for more than a third of the day—eight hours, 14 minutes. Sadly, I have to plead more guilty than I'd like to here. We still have but one TV for two people, but for a few years now Netflix has encouraged us to have it on more than is good for us. I miss the days when our children were at home and the television was almost never on. On the other hand, the educational opportunities available now are fantastic, from the many subjects available on The Great Courses (good), to travel information from Rick Steves (helpful), to the education in modern culture gained from watching shows like NCIS and Rizzoli and Isles (fun and eye-opening, but almost certainly bad for our mental health). None of our children, however, own even one television set. They do sometimes watch audio-visual media on other devices, but technically, if you count all our immediate family, that's a 1:17 televison-to-people ratio.
• Some reports indicate we consume twice as many material goods today as we did 50 years ago. That's quite possible, especially considering our houses are three times as large (see above). But what is that figure measuring? What would be even more telling than total consumption would be the material goods consumption per person, since the average family size has shrunk. Personally? I doubt that in our case it's twice, but it's certainly more than when I was growing up, and 'way more than in the days of our ancestors, when estate inventories, even of the rich, would delineate down to the level of spoons and articles of clothing.
• Americans spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches than on higher education. Certainly not in our case (see above clothing expenditures). It's also a suspect figure: How are they counting the numbers for higher education? If they mean what we spend net of scholarships and other subsidies, I can believe it. But if they are counting the whole cost of college (and not excluding technical schools), I'm skeptical.
• Shopping malls outnumber high schools. How is this a meaningful statistic? Even large high schools serve a very small number of people (2800 in the case of our local school, which is huge), whereas shopping malls serve the entire population.
• Ninety-three percent of teenage girls rank shopping as their favorite pastime. Not me! I've always disliked shopping (except maybe for books), even as a teenager. But even for the rest of the population, I doubt this statistic is as much about consumerism as about the lack of meaningful work in teenagers' lives. Sure, the girls are out shopping, and no doubt buying, too. But is the primary impetus consumerism, or an opportunity to interact with friends? (I suspect that for boys the favorite activity is video games, which serves the same social purpose.) That they're not getting together to go hiking, or discuss books, or volunteer at the hospital, speaks more to skewed priorities and lack of convenient opportunity than to consumerism, I think.
• Over the course of our lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours searching for misplaced items. Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork top the list. I'm guessing this doesn't even count Google searches. :) This fact doesn't surprise me in the least. Certainly it's a logical consequence of having more stuff and bigger houses. And far too many people no longer believe in "a place for everything, and everything in its place." I've saved myself a great deal of time and effort by having a convenient basket that my keys go into every time I come home. If we always filed (and refiled) paperwork whenever we're no longer actively working with it (sadly, I don't) we'd waste less time keeping track of it. To view this apparently staggering statistic in perspective, however, if you figure a good life of 80 years, the time wasted looking for lost items amounts to less than eight minutes per day. I guarantee we all spend more than eight minutes daily on worse activities.
• The $8 billion home organization industry has more than doubled in size since the early 2000’s—growing at a staggering rate of 10% each year. This is a natural consequence of the previous statistic. I'm sure I've spent more time on organizational activities (reading, thinking, planning, doing, re-doing) than in actually looking for lost items.

Having now read Justo Gonzalez' The Story of Christianity, I am condemned to remember the following every time I hear the phrase, "Be reasonable!" This event seems to have been sanitized from everything I previously learned about the French Revolution.

The French Revolution created its own religion, called first the Cult of Reason, and later the Cult of the Supreme Being. ... The revolution wished to have nothing to do with the church. Even the calendar was changed, giving way to a more “reasonable” one in which weeks had ten days and months were named after conditions of nature in each season—“Thermidor,” “Germinal,” “Fructidor,” and so forth. Great ceremonies were also developed to take the place of religious festivals—beginning with the solemn procession taking Voltaire’s remains to the Pantheon of the Republic. Then temples to Reason were built, and an official list of saints was issued—which included Jesus, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and Rousseau. Other rites were prescribed for weddings, the dedication of children to Freedom, and funerals. All this would have been merely ridiculous, were it not for its cost in suffering and bloodshed. The promoters of the new religion made use of the guillotine with cruel liberality. 

Religions that grow over time, out of human need and experience, have all been afflicted by great cruelty. However, I also see in them sincere efforts by people to reach out to something transcendent and superior to themselves, and often evidence of God's efforts to reveal His own nature.  But attempts by human beings to create new religions all at once out of whole cloth always seem disassociated from reality, hence ridiculous, and man-centered, hence selfish.

I wrote this in 2011 and it seems no less appropriate now. If you're curious, you can click on this link to see the comments made to the original post. I present no universal solutions to the problems of Christmas stress, just a few thoughts about what helped and hindered us, particularly when our children were young.

A Facebook discussion set me to pondering what I have learned through the years about necessary and unnecessary stress at Christmastime. Yes, I think there is such a thing as necessary stress. The discussion was prompted by this quotation from Ann Voskamp: Whenever Christmas begins to burden, it’s a sign that I’ve taken on something of the world and not of Christ. Any weight in Christmas has to be of this world.

I appreciate the point, but I beg to differ, slightly.

The Christmas season, like all other seasons, has its own burdens and blessings. The work that goes into it, like the work that goes into life, can be delightful and can be stressful. I don't think it's a sign that we're doing something not of Christ just because it's stressful or burdensome. Good things take work. Labor, as in the birth of a baby. The more effortless a work of art looks, and the more joy it brings to others (inspiring musical performance; smoothly-running household; creative, confident, well-behaved children), the more labor you can assume went into it. Yet there's no denying that we can get so caught up in the effort that we miss the point, be it Christmas, or a wedding, or life itself.

Here are some things we've done, or not done, over the years, that made a difference to our Christmas stress level. Your mileage may vary.

Media exposure. One of the best decisions we ever made was to severely limit the presence of television in our home. This included—for good reason—videos and public television, but it was the lack of commercial TV that made the greatest difference at Christmastime. Our children didn't beg for toys they didn't know existed and certainly didn't know they "needed." That wasn't our motivation for banishing children's television programs from our lives, but it was an especially helpful benefit.

Santa Claus. I grew up with the excitement of the jolly ol' guy, but we decided to tell our children from the beginning that honoring the real St. Nicholas had evolved into a fun, but fictional, Christmas story. I won't say that Santa never delivered gifts to our house—there were grandparents' wishes to consider—but we never, ever, stood in a long line, or paid ridiculous prices, or fought over the last Tickle Me Elmo just because our children had asked Santa, and Santa was expected to deliver. (That line never worked in my childhood, but somehow expectations have grown over the years.)

Loss of anticipation. Despite the absence of a too-generous Santa, our children did not lack for presents and other reasons for looking forward to Christmas. But they never experienced the long period of anticipation I remember. In my childhood, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Chistmas j-u-s-t d-r-a-g-g-e-d. Life is busier now, and children feel time flying in a way that was once only an adult curse. Holiday stress has no age limits. [Note from 2019: If you read the comments in the original post, you'll see that our children disagree—they still thought time dragged.]

 Christmas parties. Every organization or activity we or our children were involved in felt it necessary to have a Christmas party, complete with gift exchange, during the busiest and most expensive season of the year. I don't know why: the secular organizations had no need to celebrate Christmas, and the churches should have realized that Advent / Christmas Eve / Christmas / Epiphany worship services are a much better excuse for a celebration than "we have to have parties because everyone else does." I realize that some people are energized by such events, but I could have drastically reduced my stress level by declining at least half of the Christmas events we were invited to. I would much, much rather have baked and decorated cookies at home than attended parties, yet more often than not the latter squeezed out the better.

Christmas traditions. Frankly, I don't have any answers here. I still grieve over not having established our own family's holiday traditions, and for letting some treasures from my past fall by the wayside. For years we celebrated Thanksgiving with my in-laws; after that, we joined my family's gathering at my sister's house. Our children have wonderful memories of time spent with our extended families, which is of infinite value ... but no memories of Thanksgiving at home. Christmastime was usually spent at our house, but always with company, usually my in-laws. This was a great treasure, and I wouldn't trade it. But it was also stressful, as we accommodated their desires (e.g. Santa Claus), and in the time crunch I dropped some of my own cherished Christmas traditions. Why stress ourselves with making and decorating cookies (precious memories from my childhood) when we knew Grandma would bring piles of wonderful food with her? This was one of the "if only I were more organized" stresses: couldn't I have fit it all in, somehow? Without a doubt, family is far more important (and fun) than a particular cookie tradition. But there's still a loss, and a stress to deal with. [Note from 2019: Here's grace for you: Our children apparently picked up and passed on a number of family traditions, including those from my own childhood, despite my feelings that I mangled that rather badly.]

We've been part of our church's Christmas services for nearly as long as our kids have been alive, in some combination of childen's choir, adult choir, Christmas musicals, Scripture reading, and/or setup and takedown. Overall this is a great thing, and I find it hard to "do congregation," especially in churches where congregations don't do all that much. Active involvement is both educational and inspirational. But it also has its losses and stresses, from missing the neighborhood Santa drive-by (small loss, I think, but the kids loved getting the candy he tosses); to staying up into the wee hours of Christmas morning finishing tasks, having returned from church well after midnight; to burdening our guests with the choice of (1) be at church with us for a long time, sometimes attending multiple services, (2) providing their own transportation (difficult when the church was a complicated 40-minute drive from home), or (3) staying home without us, whom they had come long distances to be with. On the plus side, what with the exhuastion and staying up late, we rarely had to deal with early-rising children on Christmas morn. [Note from 2019: In 2011 we were new at a church that is only an eight-minute drive away from home. Eight years later, I can heartily recommend that situation. What a difference it makes in the stress levels.]

Gift giving. This deserves a post to itself, but I'll try to keep it short. A gift, whether inexpensive or costly, can be a precious expression of love, or at least appreciation. But there's no question gift giving can be a problem, even without Santa in the picture.

• For a long time I was embarrased about the number of gifts under our tree, but I've gotten over that. Even though we had only two children, we always had visitors for Christmas to swell the present pile, and we have many generous relatives. We also made a point of wrapping as gifts things most families probably just buy as a matter of course, such as clothing (yes, even underwear), educational materials, and other necessities of life, just because it's so much fun to watch people unwrap presents—and they were never ungrateful, not even for the underwear. Most of the generous relatives were good about sending useful presents, too.
• The number of presents wasn't the only reason it took us all morning and most of the afternoon to open our gifts. It was important to us to treasure each gift (even the underwear), so we opened gifts slowly, and two gifts were never opened at the same time, no matter how many people were in the room. All attention was focused on one person, one gift. I can't say strongly enough how wonderful this custom was for us. Every gift was treasured, every giver thanked in person (or the gift carefully noted down if the giver was not present). The ungrateful do not deserve gifts. Thankfully, we never had to enforce this.
• Unfortunately, we were pretty bad about thank-you notes. We almost always got them out, but much later than we should have. I don't know why it was so difficult. The children were truly thankful, but getting them (or, to be honest, myself) to put pen to paper was a battle. But, really, how hard can it be? If I were doing it over, I'd include under the tree a special box of notecards for each child, and make a point of sitting down at the beginning of each subsequent day and writing one thank-you note. Even with our generous family, they'd have been finished before Epiphany. Let me add that, in these days of multiple means of communication, I wouldn't insist on hand-written, need-a-stamp notes, although those are always lovely to get. But whether expressed through letter, e-mail, phone, Skype, SMS, IM, or Facebook, what the giver wants to know is: Did the gift arrive? Was it broken or defective in any way? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? Here is a great opportunity for a lesson in basic courtesy: how to thank someone for his thoughtfulness and generosity while letting him know that at age 12 you really don't want any more pink elephant slippers. Trust me, the giver has better things to do with his money than to give you presents you don't want. And please, mention gifts individually. "Thank you for the presents" meets the bare minimum requirements, but does not satisfy a loving and generous heart.
• If I were doing it again, I'd fret less about some of the gifts our children received that didn't fit well with our priorities and values. There was never anything truly awful—though in my opinion, a Barbie doll comes close—but I don't think they were scarred for life by being given stick-on plastic earrings and play nail polish. Relatives are good for expanding one's horizons.
• Charity gift catalogues (e.g. World Vision, Compassion, Heifer Project) are a gimmick, I know, but nonetheless a very effective and educational way to involve children in contributing to those in need. And I think the donation of a goat, or a bicycle, or an anti-malaria bed net would be just perfect for those otherwise meaningless Christmas party gift exchanges. I wouldn't go as far as this family (the same Ann Voskamp mentioned above) and have no gifts at all under the tree: receiving gifts is not only a joy for children but also a lesson in thankfulness. And anyway, what would we do without underwear? But the basic concept is worth working into our gift-giving, one way or another. Buy a few extra items to keep on hand during the year, too. They won't spoil (you get a card; the gift has already been given) and you'll have an easy present to pull out when needed.
• When I read, years ago, about a woman who had all her Christmas shopping done before Thanksgiving, I knew I could never be so efficient. Deadlines inspire me, but they must be real deadlines: I'm no good at mentally determining to be done by a certain time if my gut knows I really have another two weeks. But for the past several years, Thanksgiving has been a real deadline, because that's when our family gets together, and we all like to save on postage. True, it's a soft deadline—I can and do still shop in December—but it's solid enough to spur me into action a month early. It's an awesome feeling to go into December (and Advent) with much of the labor completed!
• What I really want to do is gather Christmas gifts slowly, all year 'round. This is harder to do for children of a certain age, whose interest in a particular item may not be sustained from February to December, or for things that people might buy for themeselves in the interim. But that still leaves a number of possibilities, from consumables (food, sandpaper, crayons) to items you know someone would love but would not treat himself to.
• We need to get over our embarrassment about homemade gifts. Few things say love like something that takes time and effort rather than a credit card. Homemade jam and hand-knit sweaters were always big hits at our house. Just don't take anything homemade to a Christmas party gift exchange, where for reasons I still don't understand, mockery is frequently mistaken for humor.

What has helped—or hindered—your celebration of Christmas?

A phrase from George McDonald sums up how I'd like to approach this season of blessing and stressing. Labor without perturbation, readiness without hurry, no haste and no hesitation. For the visual thinkers and chart-minded among us, I've created a graph that I find helpful in determining whether or not a particular Christmas activity is worthwhile for me.

The y-axis, Duty, represents the importance of a project or activity, whether in my own mind or imposed by others; the x-axis, Delight, is a measure of the joy received as a result of my participation. There is nothing mathematical about the placement of the adjectives within a quadrant; they are merely suggestive.

A given type of event may fit into any of the four quadrants. For example, the Christmas party.

The first quadrant is all positive; this is where you want to be. For me, it would be a small gathering of good friends, where we take our voices and various instruments on a carolling tour of the neighborhood, preferably on a still, quiet night with a few snowflakes falling. Then we'd repatriate and warm up by a cheerful fire with cups of steaming cocoa and an assortment of snacks and cookies. (Yes, I'm aware that I live in Florida.)

Quadrant Two might be your office Christmas party, which you dread, but you know that if you don't show up—with a smile and a gag gift—your boss will consign you to the "not a team player" abyss. Grit your teeth, take a good attitude with you, and please try to stay out of trouble.

The third quadrant is bad all around: no fun and no good reason to be there. Perhaps it's your church's production of The Young Messiah, served with Crystal Light lemonade and peanut butter cookies, which you know will distress your ears, your brain, your stomach, and your musical sensibilities. You like to support church activities, but they're expecting an enthusiastic crowd of three hundred and you will not be missed. Cross this one off your list with gratitude and a sigh of relief.

Quadrant Four is where you'll find the chocolate cake of life: Not good for you, but not harmful in limited quantities. Perhaps your neighbors are staging a back-to-back showing of your favorite Christmas television specials. No one will be offended if you stay home, and you don't anticipate any benefit, not even a chance for conversation—no one but you appreciates pausing a show to discuss the philosophical implications of the Ghost of Christmas Present, or the symbolic significance of the Island of Misfit Toys—but you would love to see A Charlie Brown Christmas again. The greatest danger with activities from this quadrant is that it is too easy to let them accumulate until they've multiplied stress by crowding out Quadrants One and Two.

I see the Ann Voskamp quotation as unrealistically one-dimensional: Anything that is not in Quadrant One must be in Quadrant Three. I suggest that the Christmas season, like life, cannot be reduced so neatly—not even to my two-dimensional analysis. But in any case, a reasoned consideration of what contributes to a joyful celebration and what detracts should lead us in the direction of a

Merry Christmas!

Which is an appropriate activity for Advent.

Rick Steves' audio tours were a mainstay of our recent visit to Rome. They tend to be a bit flippant for my taste, and sometimes a bit raunchy, but they come with a lot of great information, too.

The following paragraph pulled me to a complete stop, however, right in the middle of the Pantheon.

[Italy's] Victor Emmanuel III ruled for 44 years but lost favor because he collaborated with Mussolini and the Fascists. During World War II, instead of standing by his people, the king abandoned Rome to the Germans and fled. After the War, the Italians voted for a republic, and proclaimed that no male Savoy could ever again set foot on Italian soil. In 2003, descendants of the Savoy kings were allowed back into Italy for the first time. But they've demonstrated a knack for bad press relations, and saying stupid things. They still complain that Italy owes them money, even while they live in stunning wealth in Switzerland.

What's wrong with this? Why did it have me scratching my head? It's the final sentence: They still complain that Italy owes them money, even while they live in stunning wealth in Switzerland.

Maybe it's the math major in me, but I hate logic that isn't logical, and that sentence—and even more, the derision with which it was spoken—makes no sense.

Perhaps the Savoy descendants are stupid and rude; many of us are. Perhaps they do live in stunning wealth. What does that have to do with whether or not Italy owes them money?

There's a Rockefeller somewhere who owes me 25 cents. Her children and ours were in the same YMCA swimming classes. This was back in the days of pay telephones—when not even Rockefellers had cell phones—and she borrowed a quarter from me because she didn't have the required coin. I expected her to pay me back at the next class, but she forgot, and I didn't ask. The amusement factor of being able to say that the Rockefeller family owed me money was well worth 25 cents.

Technically, she still owes me the money. And if the situation had been reversed, and I owed her the quarter, my debt would still stand, despite the fact that the wealth of the Rockefeller family is now estimated to be some eleven billion dollars. If that's not "stunning wealth," I don't know what is. (Maybe their famous ancestor's wealth, which in today's dollars would make him more than three times as rich as Bill Gates.)

You can argue over whether or not Italy really owes money to the Savoys. But that question is completely independent of how much money the Savoy family has or does not have. In Switzerland or elsewhere. As it stands, Rick Steves' statement is a travesty of both justice and logic.

Does it matter? In a light-hearted tour guide, no. But I'm afraid there are all too many people today who would not have been stunned by the statement, nor would have descried any inconsistency with logic, justice, and reason—and that's a problem.

I recently rediscovered this video from 2014. I loved it then, and I love it now. It was originally a Christmas commercial, but it's appropriate for Veterans Day: a reminder that our enemies are human beings, like us.

Evil must be opposed in the strongest terms, and sometimes by force of arms. But oh how often the foot soldiers in the working-out of the world's evils are simply ordinary people, with families and jobs and otherwise ordinary lives, at heart not that different from our own. They are not innocent, any more than we are innocent, but they are human, they are the "neighbors" whom we are commanded to love.

The surgeon who removes a man's leg to prevent the spread of gangrene does not hate the leg, nor the man; he hates only the evil that is destroying him. This is why it is right, and perfectly consistent, for a soldier to shoot a man in the course of war, and then, coming upon him dying on the battlefield, to offer him a drink of water and make him as comfortable as possible.

We who oppose war and protest killing, do we hate, revile, despise, and sneer at those with whom we disagree? Do we rejoice when they suffer?

I remember, from the years of the Vietnam War, a former draftee telling me how they were forced to march to a cadence of "F**k VC!" (Viet Cong) This, and much like it that happens during training, is a terrible thing. The job of a soldier (sailor, airman, and all) is a noble one. We must teach our people to kill, but we can at least refrain from teaching them to hate.

If we forget the importance of this, we are lost.

The Man He Killed

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like—just as I—
Was out of work—had sold his traps—
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

— Thomas Hardy

Psalm 22:21, New international Version (NIV) translation: Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen.

Psalm 22:21, Coverdale translation: Save me from the lion's mouth; thou hast heard me also from among the horns of the unicorns.

No doubt the NIV, product of both modern scholarship and better understanding of Hebrew, is the more accurate rendering. But there is something appealing about Coverdale's version.

And you thought unicorns were pink, purple, sweet, and girly. Clearly they were previously understood to be powerful, fierce, and dangerous.

Watch out next time you underestimate a girl.

Of course, if you've read The Rithmatist, you already know that about both girls and unicorns.

It's funny how often when we react against something we nearly always throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Having had my cultural-formation years, and well as my Christian-formation years, steeped in Protestantism of the more Reformed sort, there were two things it never occurred to me to do: (1) show any particular respect for Mary, the mother of Jesus (except briefly, at Christmastime), and (2) read the Apocrypha—those writings from "between the Testaments" that are considered to be part of Holy Scripture by Catholics but not by Protestants. (I'm simplifying the situation somewhat.)

I think the greatest reason for the first was that Catholics make so much of Mary, often—or so it appears to Protestants—making her seem more important, and more venerated, than Jesus. To avoid that error, it was safest to ignore her. Plus there's no denying a certain historical bias against women. In more than one church of my experience, certain (male) saints are highly venerated, especially St. Paul. Also St. Peter, though he's a bit tainted because he's so important to Catholics. But Mary? Almost no mention at all, and very little honor paid. In fact, we once were called on the carpet over an instrumental-only version of the beautiful and famous Bach/Gounod Ave Maria played during the service. Did I mention that it was instrumental only, i.e. no words, offensive or otherwise?

It's not surprising that I never heard anything from the Apocrypha during a church service. Church readings tend (rightly) to be from Scripture, and if you don't think a book is part of the Biblical canon, better skip it. But these books (more or less) were included in the Bibles used throughout most of Christian history, including by Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, and John and Charles Wesley. Luther called them "useful and good to read," though not equal in value to the canonical books. The Anglican "39 Articles" accepts the Apocrypha "for instruction in life and manners, but not for the establishment of doctrine." What's more, they were part of the world in which Jesus lived, and one can see their echoes in the New Testament.

But none of these reasons are why I decided to—finally!—read through the Apocrypha. I was tired of being culturally illiterate. In the world of art, music, and literature, many important works reference stories from the Apocrypha. Even if we consider them completely fictitious, why do we not learn their stories the same way we learn the ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse myths? We know about Apollo and Daphne; why not about Judith and Holofernes?

 
Apollo and Daphne by Bernini, Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio

Cultural literacy aside, what did I think of the Books of the Apocrypha? Mixed. Here's the list, as they appear in my Revised Standard Version Bible (Catholic edition), followed by my reactions. (I deliberately read these books without learning anything about them, wanting to collect my own first reactions, unprejudiced.)

Tobit, Judith, The Additions to Esther, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, The Letter of Jeremiah, Song of the Three Young Men, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, and The Prayer of Manassah.

The reading started out well. It was exciting to read the stories, such as those in Tobit, Judith, and Susanna. Several of the others seem to fit in with Old Testament books, but apparently are not considered authentic enough to be included.

The Wisdom of Solomon reads very much like Solomon's writings in Proverbs. Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) is a collection of similar proverbs, but feels as if written at a later time than Solomon's. Proverbs is one of my favorite Bible books to read, but I found Sirach, on the whole, boring—sometimes even offensive.  Many of the proverbs show wisdom, but others are strange. For instance:

Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good, and it is a woman who brings shame and disgrace.

This one's better (emphasis mine):

Speak, you who are older, for it is fitting that you should, but with acccurate knowledge, and do not interrupt the music.

Speaking of music, how about this one?

Do not associate with a woman singer, lest you be caught in her intrigues.

On the other hand, this is an interesting anticipation of the language of the Eucharist, which if you first encounter it in Jesus' words seems more shocking than it probably was for his disciples.

[Wisdom speaking] Those who eat me will hunger for more, and those who drink me will thirst for more.

Sirach is also the source of the familiar line, Let us now praise famous men. Many such revelations pop up in the Apocrypha: "Oh, so that's where that came from!"

The biggest disappointment was the Maccabee books, not only because they are much like my least favorite parts of the Old Testament—war and more war—but mostly because the story of the miraculous eight-day supply of oil, which is the event celebrated at Hanukkah, is not there, where I expected it to be. Apparently that event, though it occurs in the time of the Maccabees, was not written down until much later, in the Talmud.

I very much enjoyed the between-testaments "feel" of the books, particularly in the ones that are not just additions to Old Testament books. You can see how Jewish thought is evolving, in particular to include belief in resurrection and life after death, and in the Messiah whose coming was fully anticipated to bring military triumph to the Jewish people.

1 Esdras reads like normal Old Testament history, but 2 Esdras is just plain weird. If you enjoy Revelation, you'll love 2 Esdras.

My verdict on the Apocrypha? I'd say Luther was right. It is "good to read," though not as infallible Scripture. It is at least as interesting, helpful, and important as the history, wisdom, and stories we read from other sources without thinking twice about it.

I see no reason why the books of Apocrypha, honored in religion and culture for most of their history, should in modern times be in such disfavor. I won't be reading them annually the way I do the Old and New Testaments, but I'm glad I finally made their acquaintance.

What's next?  I'll begin my yearly cycle again when Advent comes, but in the meantime, since I just finished reading C. S. Lewis's book, Reflections on the Psalms, I think I'll run through the Psalter. For this purpose I'll step briefly away from the Revised Standard Version and pick up my 1928 Book of Common Prayer, which retains the Coverdale translation of the Psalms. I think I'm still reacting to my two years with The Message. After this, I'll revert to the more middle-of-the-road RSV. Lewis says,

Even of the old translators he [Coverdale] is by no means the most accurate; and of course a sound modern scholar has more Hebrew in his little finger than poor Coverdale had in his whole body. But in beauty, in poetry, he, and St. Jerome, the great Latin translator, are beyond all whom I know.

What a pity we can't get both modern scholarship and beauty!

When it comes to travel, I'm a huge fan of Rick Steves. Not of his politics, but if you avoid his more informal, off-the-cuff broadcasts, such as the ones you'll find on Facebook, you can mostly avoid that; his shows and guidebooks have the advantage of better editing. We've found his products enormously helpful in planning a visit to an unfamiliar city, from finding hotels to organizing our days to learning about the sites and sights we are seeing.

That said, we differ from Rick on sightseeing almost as much as on politics. If he says a museum visit will take an hour, we know to count on three. And we are simply not the least interested in the nighlife of a city, which he finds vital and stimulating. Neither his television show nor his guidebook mentions our great discovery about visiting Rome: Do as much as you can in the morning. (More on that in another post.)

Then there's people-watching. Apparently that's one of Rick Steves' favorite activities, as he frequently mentions it as a highlight of a trip. I've never seen the attraction, so I made a point one night, while enjoying gelato in the little shop down the street from our hotel, to try the exercise.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't remain focussed.

I'd start out taking notice of the people around me: the man carrying his crying child, no doubt exhaused from a day of sightseeing; the fashionably-dressed women accompanied by scruffy men; the customers who thought a single cigar worth the €20 price tag. I noticed with appreciation a woman whose grey purse exactly matched her grey suit—I've never in my life bought a purse to match an outfit. Then I noticed another woman whose bright orange purse exactly matched her bright orange outfit ... and my mind was off down a rabbit hole.

That purse can't be useful with very many colors. Does the woman wear nothing but orange? Does she have a purse for every dress she owns? I can barely handle three: something I need is inevitably back home in another bag. And I cringe at the cost every time I need to replace a worn-out purse; I can't imagine spending money on one that is useful solely for one outfit. She doesn't look wealthy. Then again, what does "wealthy" look like; how can I presume to judge her financial situation? How, for that matter, can I presume to judge her spending priorities? Why am I staring at her anyway? Seems downright rude to me.

Reluctantly, I hauled myself back to the nightlife around me, but soon my internal voice (a.k.a. Li'l Writer Guy) took over again. After about twenty minutes of such struggles, I gave up on people-watching.

Perhaps it's a sport for extroverts, who apparently do not engage in this constant internal dialogue. (I can't imagine that, but I'm told it's true.) At any rate, I found the exercise moderately interesting, but nearly as exhausting as a three-hour museum experience.

Last Sunday, our church celebrated the Feast of Michael and All Angels.  Also known, it turns out, as Michaelmas, a term I had only known thanks to a murder mystery in which "Michaelmas daisies" are featured.

The sermon included a short dissertation on the difference between actual angels and our popular conception of those beings, which reminded me of the observations we made during eight days of bingeing on Italian art while visiting Rome.

Biblical angels apparently feel the need to begin their encounters with humans by words like "Fear not."  I'm guessing it's a pretty overwhelming encounter.

Angels in art?  All too often they look as if they are about to announce, "Aren't I adorable?"

Promising, practical ... and, as with so many applications of massive data collection and analysis, maybe a little perturbing. This post is primarily for the materials scientist in the family, but it should be interesting to anyone.

Scientists at MIT and Berkeley, using Artificial Intelligence algorithms to pore over abstracts from papers related to materials science, have successfully predicted scientific discoveries.

Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used an algorithm called Word2Vec sift through scientific papers for connections humans had missed. Their algorithm then spit out predictions for possible thermoelectric materials. ... The algorithm didn’t know the definition of thermoelectric, though. It received no training in materials science. Using only word associations, the algorithm was able to provide candidates for future thermoelectric materials.

Using just the words found in scientific abstracts, the algorithm was able to understand concepts such as the periodic table and the chemical structure of molecules. The algorithm linked words that were found close together, creating vectors of related words that helped define concepts. In some cases, words were linked to thermoelectric concepts but had never been written about as thermoelectric in any abstract they surveyed. This gap in knowledge is hard to catch with a human eye, but easy for an algorithm to spot.

In one experiment, researchers analyzed only papers published before 2009 and were able to predict one of the best modern-day thermoelectric materials four years before it was discovered in 2012.

This new application of machine learning goes beyond materials science. Because it’s not trained on a specific scientific dataset, you could easily apply it to other disciplines, retraining it on literature of whatever subject you wanted.

Here's an article from MIT that's a bit more technical.

MIT and Berkeley may be doing this particular research, but anyone want to guess where the Word2vec algorithm was developed?

Google.

I posted the following back in 2011, and its message is just as vital today. Unfortunately, the link to the Occasional CEO article no longer works. I'm hoping that Eric, who occasionally stops by here, will provide the correct information—at which point I'll fix the link.

Educators, please don't miss this post on innovation from the Occasional CEO.

Children in America used to want to become cowboys and Indians, doctors and firemen, astronauts and acrobats. Now they want to become entrepreneurs and innovators. They are told they must change the world, often before they enter it.

But 90% of the population should not become innovators.

It’s not because they can’t do it well, though that’s possible too. It’s just that innovation can cause great damage to the things we love. To the guy making the fries at McDonalds or the pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks: Don’t innovate. To the person building the next lot of iPhones from which I’ll be purchasing one: Please don’t innovate. To my tax accountant: Do Not innovate. The mechanic fixing my car. The pilot flying my plane. To the fine people at Apple: For goodness sake, stop sending me updates and new operating systems. I hate em. Just when I get everything the way I like, you innovate me into something that costs me two hours at the Apple Bar. Where, incidentally, I want zero innovation from your hip kids in blue shirts. Just follow the FAQs and fix my iPad.

When we complain that schools are not teaching our kids to innovate, I say: Bravo! People who can innovate will always find ways to innovate, while most of the rest of us need a serious tutorial in how to follow directions. Show up on time. Do our jobs. That’s not something that comes naturally for many human beings.

There’s nothing less intelligent or inferior about people who practice consistency. Consistency takes extraordinary talent, just like innovation. ... We have made innovation glamorous and consistency somehow mundane and less worthwhile. That’s our fault, not the fault of talented people whose consistency, attention to order, willingness to show up all the time and insistence on a little good ol' tradition improves our lives.

Here endeth the lesson; the following is my editorial comment:

Children do not need to be taught to be innovators and inventors. They need to be taught the facts and skills that will become materials and the tools with which they can innovate, practice consistency, or both. Then they need freedom and time and opportunities to learn to use those tools effectively.

I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to read and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress had been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand. — C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy

Written more than sixty years ago, even more applicable today.

I read a satirical article recently in which someone from Political Group A wrote as if he were from Political Group B. Except for the vituperation and bad language, it reminded me of a "debate" I once heard at a former church, which had been billed as a chance to hear both sides of a controversy, in a debate format. It was a good idea; there was just one problem: The underlying assumption was that most if not all of the audience agreed with one side, and in fact so did the presenter of the opposite side. In a formal debate one is expected to be able to expound and explain a position whether or not one agrees with it—but this presenter apparently had no intention of doing so; his facts and arguments seemed selected for the purpose of making it clear how stupid they were.

The result of the event? Those who already believed in the chosen position went away cheered and even more convinced they were right. Those who believed in the position that was mocked went away convinced that there was no hope for understanding or reconciliation (and this in a church!). And some of us were merely embarrassed.

I get it. We all need the encouragement that comes from talking with like-minded people. But I'm pretty sure that mocking and demonizing one's opponents is the worst form of cheerleading. It's bad for our own souls, and if it falls into the hands of those opponents, it does not change their minds but saddens and hardens them, possibly beyond recovery.

Which brings me to an enlightening article by James Clear: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. It is well worth taking the time to read the entire article. Clear does not deal directly with the issues of anger and mockery, but illuminates a bigger problem: most human beings do not develop their views of the world based on rational argument—and we don't change our minds that way, either.

(Clear unfortunately plays fast and loose with singular vs. plural in the article. It drives me crazy. But I've let his words stand as he wrote them.)

Humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world in order to survive. If your model of reality is wildly different from the actual world, then you struggle to take effective actions each day. However, truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter to the human mind. Humans also seem to have a deep desire to belong. ... Understanding the truth of a situation is important, but so is remaining part of a tribe. While these two desires often work well together, they occasionally come into conflict. ... We don't always believe things because they are correct. Sometimes we believe things because they make us look good to the people we care about.

Parents, if your child has already become dependent on a peer group, don't be surprised to find that he is deaf and blind to all the facts and logic you throw at him.

Social media, which ought to be a great place for the lively interchange of ideas, is perhaps the worst, because any attempt to move away from the consensus of one's Facebook friends is likely to be immediately called out and derided. We may be a long way from the Medieval Church, but excommunication is still a devastating threat.

If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome. The way to change people’s minds is to become friends with them, to integrate them into your tribe, to bring them into your circle. Now, they can change their beliefs without the risk of being abandoned socially.

The British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that we simply share meals with those who disagree with us:

“Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt – disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.”

I'm sure it's no coincidence that Jesus set up the meeting together of his disciples, his Church—which would mix together people of great differences in race and religious background, social class and culture—to center around a meal.

Another reason friendship is the best vehicle for exchanging ideas is that we are more likely to be convinced by someone with whom we already have much in common.

If someone you know, like, and trust believes a radical idea, you are more likely to give it merit, weight, or consideration. You already agree with them in most areas of life. Maybe you should change your mind on this one too. But if someone wildly different than you proposes the same radical idea, well, it's easy to dismiss them as a crackpot.

This is a good reminder to people like me, who like to broadcast information and arguments via Facebook or blogs:

If you divide [a spectrum of belief] into 10 units and you find yourself at Position 7, then there is little sense in trying to convince someone at Position 1. The gap is too wide. When you're at Position 7, your time is better spent connecting with people who are at Positions 6 and 8, gradually pulling them in your direction.

Here's an argument that hits in the gold for a book-loving introvert:

Any idea that is sufficiently different from your current worldview will feel threatening. And the best place to ponder a threatening idea is in a non-threatening environment. As a result, books are often a better vehicle for transforming beliefs than conversations or debates.

In conversation, people have to carefully consider their status and appearance. They want to save face and avoid looking stupid. When confronted with an uncomfortable set of facts, the tendency is often to double down on their current position rather than publicly admit to being wrong. Books resolve this tension. With a book, the conversation takes place inside someone's head and without the risk of being judged by others. It's easier to be open-minded when you aren't feeling defensive. Arguments are like a full frontal attack on a person's identity. Reading a book is like slipping the seed of an idea into a person's brain and letting it grow on their own terms.

I'd be with him 100% here—except that so many people these days simply don't read books. I wish Clear had addressed a far more effective, even insidious, way people are now being induced to change their beliefs. The seeds planted by music and the visual media slip in far more easily and take root much more deeply than those planted by logical arguments in books. Certain books of fiction do that well for me, but as I said, few people read. The movie version of The Lord of the Rings has affected far more people's beliefs than the book (the worldviews are not the same)—and the influence of Star Wars is several orders of magnitude greater still.

Finally, Clear makes the much-needed point that bad ideas and false stories persist because people continue to talk about them.

Silence is death for any idea. An idea that is never spoken or written down dies with the person who conceived it. Ideas can only be remembered when they are repeated. They can only be believed when they are repeated.

And how are bad ideas most often repeated? When we complain about them!

Before you can criticize an idea, you have to reference that idea. You end up repeating the ideas you’re hoping people will forget—but, of course, people can’t forget them because you keep talking about them. The more you repeat a bad idea, the more likely people are to believe it. ... Each time you attack a bad idea, you are feeding the very monster you are trying to destroy.

Fortunately, there's a solution, albeit one that is more difficult to implement.

Your time is better spent championing good ideas than tearing down bad ones. Don't waste time explaining why bad ideas are bad. You are simply fanning the flame of ignorance and stupidity. ... Feed the good ideas and let bad ideas die of starvation.

Of course, there's still a place for correcting misinformation. (Emphasis mine)

Let me be clear. I'm not saying it's never useful to point out an error or criticize a bad idea. But you have to ask yourself, “What is the goal?” ...

When we are in the moment, we can easily forget that the goal is to connect with the other side, collaborate with them, befriend them, and integrate them into our tribe. We are so caught up in winning that we forget about connecting. It's easy to spend your energy labeling people rather than working with them.

If our goal is not "to connect with the other side, collaborate with them, befriend them, and integrate them into our tribe," what business is it of ours to try to correct them?

I never fail to get a kick out of the way my mind has a mind of its own. There are things I know that I don't know I know, tucked away in the depths of those "little grey cells," waiting to be called forth, or more likely, to bubble up at random times, unbidden.

For example, there was the time I saw an interesting-looking butterfly flitting around the garden, and into my mind popped, "It's a gulf fritillary." I had no idea I knew what a gulf fritillary butterfly was, but I know I'd seen the identification before, having quite long ago made a book about butterflies for our grandchildren. It was there in my mind, somewhere, even though I could not have voluntarily recalled that information.

Then there was this, quite recently: I had just finished reading C. S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy, and when my eyes passed over the title of the book on our kitchen counter, my mind filled in, "Impatient as the wind." After a moment's wonder, I realized that I was quoting a poem, and my next thought—again unbidden—was, "It's probably Wordsworth." Which, I later confirmed, it is. I have no idea from what depths that knowledge was dredged, nor why, at this particular time and place, it came to me.

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—
But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

I had been looking at the book and its title multiple times a day for several days, yet never once in those previous days had the poem come to mind.

I'm reminded, also, of the time early in her mathematical education, when our younger daughter cried out in frustration when I—dutiful teacher!—asked her to show her work, instead of just writing down the answer to the problem. "I can't show my work!" she exclaimed, "There is no 'work'—there is just the answer!"

I think we all know a lot more than we think we do—not everything we learned went in one ear and out the other. The problem is not so much knowledge as retrieval. It's all the more interesting to me because one of our grandchildren appears to have this undependable retrieval system under much better control than most of us: When he learns something, he knows it and he remembers it—at least a lot better than most of us do. How does that work?

And what other fascinating facts are there, sleeping in the recesses of my brain, that I know but don't know I know until they choose to reveal themselves?

I was eleven years old when the Beatles first came to America. The cultural effect, as viewed from sixth grade, was more momentous than the Cold War. Air raid drills—filing out of the classroom at the sound of a siren, covering our heads and leaning up against our lockers—we considered a normal part of life, but the Beatles dropped like an atom bomb on our world.

Their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show left me less than impressed. I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Truthfully, I still don't. Oh, I listened to Beatles songs, I sang Beatles songs, I even almost liked Yesterday. That was the cultural water we swam in, back in the mid-60's.

My negative feelings toward their music were exacerbated by a detested art teacher. No doubt my memory does her a disservice, but I hated her looks and style of dress, especially her heavy makeup, which bordered on scary—and most of all I hated that she single-handedly dismembered, destroyed, and demolished any thought I may have had that I could ever learn to draw. Art class was torture to me, and the fact that she insisted on playing Beatles records while we worked added injury to insult. I'm sure she thought she was doing us a favor, and I suppose that for most of my classmates she was right.

Some of the boys and nearly all of the girls were stark, raving mad about the Beatles. I never saw anything like the screaming crowds and high emotions that followed them wherever they were glimpsed. It's possible that my dislike of crowds and my distrust of mob mentality had their birth right there. I always say that the 1960's have a lot to answer for.

That's the backstory.

Our choir director recently went to New York City to attend a workshop. Broadway musicals being for him a large part of both vocation and avocation, he attended several while he had the opportunity. At one of them, he recognized the man who sat down beside him: Sir Paul McCartney.

Knowing Tim, he was (outwardly) cool and calm and didn't even trouble the man for an autograph. Inwardly I can only guess.

Being faceblind, I wouldn't even have recognized the former Beatle. Besides, I'm the kind of person who can go to New York City for two weeks and never see a Broadway show, preferring to spend all that glorious time in the New York Public Library. It was thrill enough for me to run into Gary Boyd Roberts, the New England Historic Genealogical Society's genealogist who guided my first faltering steps in family history back in Boston seventeen years ago.  (For those who are wondering, I had no trouble recognizing him, because I heard him speak before I saw him.)

But had they been in Tim's position, most of my female friends in middle and high school would have fainted on the spot.