Lift Up Your Hearts!

I mentioned in the last post that I am cleaning the kitchen. (You can tell how easy this project is by how many blog posts I've written today. Writing is my favorite form of break.) So...I just threw out some spices with expiration dates in the early 1980's. Yes, I tasted them, and no, they weren't worth keeping. We hauled those spice jars from New York to Florida, from Florida to Massachusetts, from Massachusetts back to Florida again...but enough is enough!

Jon's Johari Window was a nice break from cleaning the kitchen, so I decided to set up one for myself. There's more to the Johari Window than a simplistic personality profile tool, but this version is kind of fun. Despite my frustrations with the limited, multiple-choice format, I think it may even be useful in the quest "to see oursels as ithers see us!"

If you go to this site, you will be given a chance to pick five or six words that you think describe me. (You will be asked for your name, but feel free to use a pseudonym if you want.) The site then sets up a grid (which changes as more people participate) comparing the characteristics I picked for myself with those other people chose.

Have fun! (Then go clean the kitchen.)

The weather forecast given on our local classical music stations considers itself to be grim. But highs in the mid-90's, although unpleasant, are commonplace here. I go from my air conditioned house to my air conditioned car to air conditioned just-about-everything-else. When I ride my bike it is hot enough, but there is A/C at the end, and a cool shower or swim at home. Nothing to complain about.

My heart goes out to those in the Northeast, with temperatures forecast to peak around 100, with excessive humidity as well, and not so many places with A/C. I remember those days—I'd pack up the kids and go visit somewhere, anywhere, even a shopping mall, just to find some cool air.

I hope you get relief soon!

Tom Grosh alerted me to this October, 2003 Christianity Today interview with Yale University professor Lamin Sanneh, Sanneh's observations are especially important in light of the great division in the worldwide Anglican Communion between the Third World countries and the West, particularly the American Episcopal Church.

Sanneh was born in The Gambia of African royal descent, raised an orthodox Muslim in a highly-educated family, and became interested in Christianity through reading about Jesus in the Qur'an. He eventually became a Christian—with more hindrance than help from missionaries and Western-based churches—and contributes all this perspective to his analysis of Western Christianity and the future of Christianity in general.

Some points that particularly interested me:

• [When asked how his early life differed from that of the typical North American] It's like living on another planet. I was raised in a culture where the stress is not on the individual but on the community, on tradition, on fidelity to past models, on respect for parents and elders, on rote memorization of knowledge, on scarce material resources offset by a wealth of social capital. We had limited access to the modern world, but lavish access to family and clan achievement and honor. We had close proximity to the natural world without the demand to subdue and exploit it.


• Once the choice was made about the significance of Jesus in God's work of salvation, it was not difficult to make the decision to join the church. Getting accepted in the Protestant church, however, was a different matter altogether, thanks to the church's suspicion and skepticism....I do not know the reason for that. It could be cultural, it could be liberal distrust of religion, it could be residual hostility toward converts as illegitimate fruits of mission, it could be unfamiliarity with non-white people, it could be presumptions about my political motives and leanings, it could be any or all of the above.


• We should remember that while God and Jesus are swear words in the West, that is not so in the Muslim world. People would never take the name of God and God's prophets in vain. We need a dose of Islam's reverence to keep us honest about our own faith.


• The African members of my extended family have little conception of my world, little idea of the milieu of my life and work and the expanding network of friends and colleagues spread across the world. For many of them, the West is the land of riches, and so it appears implausible to them that anyone could be said to be successful who was not successful in the financial sense. I am often tempted to lecture them about mortgages, college tuition, about the insurance Leviathan that engulfs home, car, body, limb and teeth, about fuel and utility bills, or about Uncle Sam's long and heavy hands on our wages and our spending. An occasionally sympathetic listener might say perceptively, 'but you don't own yourself anymore,' but otherwise it is a futile exercise. The love of money is a universal desire, admittedly, but being in America turns it into a prerequisite. It trumps everything else.


• The cultural captivity of Christianity in the West is nearly complete, and, with the religion tamed, it is open season on the West's Christian heritage. But I don't believe that dismantling the West's Christian heritage will protect the West from ideological intolerance of the most damaging kind. I worry about a West without a moral center facing a politically resurgent Islam.


• [Comparing Christianity in Africa and in America] The main difference I see is the difference between a post-Christian American society and a post-Western Christianity rising in Africa and elsewhere. The one is in decline, at least intellectually, and the other is in spate.


• [On the role of Christianity in preserving indigenous life and culture] Christianity is invested in languages and cultures that existed for purposes other than Christianity, including the names by which local people call God. To that extent, Christianity has been anticipated, and to that extent, too, it has fulfilled the potential of cultures. Christianity has not so much been divided by the languages of the world as been enriched by them, and enriching them in turn. The overwhelming majority of the world's languages have a dictionary and a grammar at all because of the modern missionary movement. With such systematic documentation the affected cultures could promote themselves in unprecedented and unsuspecting ways. More people pray and worship in more languages in Christianity than in any other religion.


• At [the Anglican Communion's Lambeth Conference], and subsequently, there was widespread consternation among Western bishops that the Third World bishops seemed misguided enough to think that the Bible could replace enlightened reasonableness as a standard of guidance and Christian teaching. The unprecedented large conversions taking place in Africa and elsewhere were viewed as unwelcome resistance in the path of the West's cultural juggernaut.


• The West limits its role in the new Christianity to taking precautions against too close an encounter with it. According to many church leaders, the Anglican Church is threatened with a major schism in the foreseeable future. The extraordinary irony is that Anglicanism has never been stronger, never more appealing and more global in membership than at present. In the mystery of God, you wonder whether that energy will find other channels rather than dissipate entirely.

It is interesting how some of his comments resonate differently with me after having read Mere Discipleship. The interview closes with these challenging and encouraging words:

An extraordinary new world of Christianity is now unfolding before our eyes. It is an unprecedented world, something that will change the face of Christianity. In other words, Christianity today has never been more vibrant, more varied, more pro-active, and more widespread. The text for it might be, "Behold, I make all things new."

You didn't think our political culture could go any lower? In a reminder that we have made no forward progress since 1999, when David Howard of Washington, DC was forced to resign his city government job because he used the word "niggardly," Massachusetts' Governor Mitt Romney has apologized for referring to the disastrous Big Dig project as a "tar baby."

I tend to be overly sensitive to hurtful language. I dislike "humor" that gets its laughs from insult or mockery, and I hate it when people hurt each other and call it jest. Words spoken in anger, whether directed at me or at others, sting like a whiplash. The Bible says it well: "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." (Ephesians 4:29)

But today's hypersensitivity to "incorrect" speech, where people choose to be insulted where no offense could possibly have been meant or implied, is frightening. Surely most of it is based on ignorance. Not everyone's vocabulary includes the meaning and origins of the word "niggardly," and we can no longer assume that Americans know the Br'er Rabbit stories, once part of our common culture. With their origins in Africa, developed by southern African-Americans, popularized by Joel Chandler Harris (Uncle Remus stories) and Walt Disney (Song of the South), these stories should not have been lost. But Disney will not even release Song of the South on DVD for fear of controversy. Perhaps if they had, more people would have appreciated Romney's reference, which says so much more than calling the Big Dig a "sticky situation."

From someone who has heard the expression "tar baby" used as a racial slur, or who has been so hurt by the word "nigger" that "niggardly" brings pain merely by the association of sounds, an initial reaction of anger is understandable. But the apology went the wrong way. Once the context and meaning are understood, the one who misinterpreted should apologize to the one his anger wronged.

Literacy should never have to apologize to ignorance. Explain, yes. And educate. But not apologize.

A U. S. Department of Agriculture study has determined that watermelons stored at room temperature^* are far more nutritious than those stored in the refrigerator. Apparently its power-packed carotenoids, lycopene and beta-carotene, continue to develop after a fully-ripe melon is picked, but the process is slowed by refrigeration. What's more, refrigerated watermelons spoil faster.

The news about watermelons makes me wonder if a similar process is going on with tomatoes, which are another rich source of carotenoids. Conventional wisdom says tomatoes should be stored at room temperature rather than in the refrigerator. This means we have to eat them rather quickly here in Florida, but I can attest to the superiority of their unrefrigerated flavor.

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^*70 degrees Fahrenheit, which according to the article is "room temperature in an air-conditioned home." I wonder whose home they are talking about, and what their power bills might be. Ours is now set at 78 degrees, a real luxury considering for years it was 84, but we're older, more self-indulgent, and (most of all) this overall setting keeps the computer rooms at a bearable level. Not that 70 degrees wouldn't be really nice....

In 1971 I worked with researchers at the University of Rochester who were studying the algae blooms that were making a mess of Rochester, New York's Irondequoit Bay. At the time, the limiting factor for algae growth in the lake was phosphorous, and household use of detergents containing phosphates had fueled an algal population boom. Thanks to such research, low-phosphate detergents soon became. I presume the effect on the Bay was salutory, though I graduated and lost track of the researchers.

That was 35 years ago, but apparently we are still learning the same lessons. Please take time to read the long, but worthwhile, article from the Los Angeles Times on the frightening overrowth of toxic algae and other primitive organisms in our oceans.

I know I’m an independent sort of blogger. My need is to write, and I use the blog format because the LifeType software is so easy to use, is very flexible, and allows comments. The only reason I'm familiar at all with commercial places like LiveJournal, MySpace, and Blogger is that I have to venture into that territory to read some of my friends' blogs. So I'm really clueless about the whole blogging community thing, especially memes and tagging, which generally seem pretty silly to me.

However, a friend has this on her blog, and I like it, so I'm going to do it. I won't tag anyone, but I'd love to read your responses if you want to put them in a comment here, or on your own blog if you have one.

Note: I could answer every one of these points with "The Bible," except possibly #7 (though in some moods, who knows?), but that would be rather pointless, so I'm going to leave it out and consider other books.

1. One book that changed your life:

All books change my life, one way or another. For the moment I'll single out Marie Winn's The Plug-In Drug, because that opened my eyes to what television does to children and other people. Liberating ourselves (i.e. learning to use the tool carefully and sparingly) from that mind-numbing, time-wasting device was one of the best decisions we've ever made.

2. One book that you've read more than once:

Almost any book worth reading is worth reading more than once. (Maybe my memory is just too poor.) But a good answer would be everything George MacDonald wrote. I have the complete collection from Johannesen, thanks to my very generous father, and there is enough goodness packed into even one book to merit re-reading many times.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island:

Hmmm, I might have to break my resolve and say the Bible. I would have plenty of time for uninterrupted study (if I weren't too busy trying to secure water, food and shelter), and being marooned would certainly provide plenty of opportunities to test my faith. Practically speaking, however, I'd look for something called How to Survive on a Desert Island.

4. One book that made you laugh:

Most recently, Holy Humor by Cal and Rose Samra of the Fellowship of Merry Christians. I was reading while Noah was sleeping on my chest, and I had to stop because the upheavals kept waking him.

5. One book that made you cry:

Books generally don't make me cry. Music does, but not books. Unless I'm crying because there are so many good books and I'll never be able to read but a tiny fraction of them.

6. One book that you wish had been written:

Updates from authors on how their views have evolved since they were set in ink. John Holt did this beautifully with the revised version of How Children Learn. I particularly would like to know how C. S. Lewis's view of women changed after he married Joy Davidman. I know it did, but that was within a few years of his death, and after most of his books had been written.

7. One book that you wish had never been written:

As a writer, it's hard to wish any book unwritten; that would seem like wishing someone's child had never been born. But there are many books I wish I had left unread. Books change the mind, and foul images and foul attitudes are nearly impossible to expunge. Unfortunately, a visit to the children's section of your local library will most likely reveal a sizeable collection of such books.

8. One book you're currently reading:

Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat. I can't comment on it because I haven't finished, but I'll post a review when I have.

9. One book you've been meaning to read:

The complete works of Francis Schaeffer. I've read several of his books, but I have the whole set on my bookshelves and I'd like to fill in the many missing pieces. Reading The God Who Is There as part of my Lenten discipline two years ago, I was struck by how many things it explains now that I didn't understand back in the 1970's, and even more by how it agreed with what I was reading in John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. When an evangelical Protestant theologian living in Switzerland and a self-described lapsed Catholic schoolteacher from Pittsburgh tell me the same things, perhaps I had better listen.

The good news is that Starchild Abraham Cherrix and his family finally found a judge brave enough to lift the lower court order that would have forced him to undergo chemotherapy for his cancer. The bad news is that it's a temporary reprieve; he'll have to fight the battle again in court next month.

Abraham is not the only teen who has had to spend precious energy, resouces, and especially time fighting for the right to choose or refuse medical treatment. (See also Who Will Make Medical Decisions for You and Your Family?) That he has the full support of his family in his decision matters not to the social workers; they saw that as a reason to attempt to take custody of Abraham themselves.

This is not a diatribe against chemotherapy, which has been life-saving for many. But the right to make medical decisions, large and small, belongs to the individual, or in the case of a minor, his family. The courts should never have become involved in the first place, since Abraham and his family agree. Maybe they are wrong. Maybe their alternative treatment will lead to his death, and chemotherapy would cure him. But we have the right to be wrong. Even if a person chooses no treatment at all, prefering a shortened life to the agonies of therapy, that decision should be between him and his family.

If it weren't so serious, it would be amusing to consider the statements made by "experts" who insist that a 16-year-old is too young to make his own life-or-death decisions. You can't tell that to a genealogist. At that age, many of our ancestors were married, having babies, fighting in wars, and traveling thousands of miles away from home—and doing it quite capably, I might add.

How did we get to the point where our society can with one breath say a 12-year-old girl has the right to "control her own body" to the extent of having an abortion without so much as parental knowledge, let alone consent, and in the next deny a 16-year-old boy the right to refuse, with his parents' agreement, a painful and dangerous medical procedure?

I can't recommend the movie Lost in Translation to anyone I know. It's an R-rated film with an uninspiring story and scenes you'd rather not have in your mind. However, we watched it the other day and I enjoyed it very much, because it is set in Japan. It was fun to hear the crosswalk music (not Comin' Through the Rye, which you can hear in Swing Girls, but the tune for the other direction. I would never have noticed it in the movie if we hadn't been to Japan. It was also wonderful to be able to recognize some of the spoken Japanese words, though I was embarrassed by how much katakana I have forgotten.

Because the film is set mostly in Tokyo, it shows many of the parts of Japan I didn't care for, from the garish lights and colors to the pachinko parlors. But even those were reminders of our trip, and thus enjoyable.

If you live in the United States, you may never have a chance to see the movie, Swing Girls. It is presently unavailable in this country, and if you get it in Japan you need either a region-free DVD player or a good friend in the A-V business. But this is the movie to see for the best glimpse into Janet's life in Japan short of spending a very long time in an airplane. You'll see a school that looks very much like hers, from the physical layout to the students' uniforms to their voices and actions. Although the movie was filmed in a different area of Japan, the scenery is much the same. You'll even get to hear the crosswalk music, that famous old Japanese tune, Comin' Through the Rye. I loved the crosswalk music, though Porter thinks it would drive him crazy if he stayed in Japan very long. There's a different tune for crossing in the other direction, but I don't know what it is; it does sound a little more as if it might really be a Japanese song.

Swing Girls is not great art, but it's a fun story with no objectionable parts if your children can't read. If they can, be warned that the English subtitle translation of the Japanese contains a few four-letter words. Whether the Japanese itself was offensive, I don't know.

Home Education Magazine has a great article by Deborah Markus called Being a Cheerful Rebel. Sometimes being a nonconformist feels great, and sometimes it just feels lonely. Sometimes you love explaining your lifestyle choices to others, and sometimes you wish they'd just mind their own business. But ready or not, the questions will come, and Markus has some good suggestions for preparing to meet them. My favorite is

Don't Apologize: Stand strong. If you don't seem firmly convinced of the rightness of your course of action, why should anyone else? Especially someone who's never heard anything but conventional wisdom on the subject, all of which disagrees with you?

St. Peter knew something of the pressures of being outside the mainstream, and he had good advice, too:

Always be preparied to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence; and keep your conscience clear.

[R]esistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modestly in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.

None the less, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

True power remains with individuals. Ultimately we have the power to shape and even change lives. It is unleashed when families with young children control access to or eliminate television in their homes; when those children are educated at home or in private schools where their family's beliefs are upheld, not in state schools where the values of the state are taught; when people stay married in good times and in bad; when quality time with children is quantity time; when people are valued more than things; and when parents, not children, rule.

We always expected our children to surpass their parents; after all, they have the advantage of standing on our shoulders, and of learning from our experience. And there's no question that they have, particularly in the academic and spiritual domains.

So I should not have been so surprised to find both of them carrying our family unconventionality further than we ever imagined.

Not that we were ever all that revolutionary. We followed most of Neil Postman's prescriptions, and those of Cal Thomas, though we were already well established in that lifestyle before we read them. Getting along on one income, and refusing promotions that would have disrupted family life were becoming unusual, even in those days, but not radical. Perhaps had we stayed in the Northeast, our Christian faith might have raised some eyebrows, but not in the South. The decision that we had better things to do than watch television, and our devotion to classical music, certainly set us apart. But more than anything else, what set our children on their radical paths was homeschooling. You don't question the basic assumptions of society in one area without opening others to inquiry; you don't teach your children to think differently about education and expect them to conform blindly in other areas; you don't give them a taste of freedom and think they won't look for other ways to loose their chains.

Heather and Jon chose to reclaim childbirth the way we reclaimed education. They paid a high price for their convictions, which made it all the more difficult for us to recognize how right they were. But, after much struggle, we came around with enthusiasm.

Thus it is that I am trying to maintain an open mind as Janet explores her own non-conformist path, which I will tentatively call reclaiming vocation, unless maybe it should be "reclaiming life in general." I find myself disagreeing vehemently with some of the literature she has shared with us, and some of it could scare me if I let it. But the homeschooling and home birthing communities have shown me that wherever there is a fringe, there is also a lunatic fringe, the existence of which does not negate the value of the basic idea. And from those with whom we have little else in common, we can still learn much.

With that in mind, I recommend checking out Ran Prieur's essay on dropping out of our crazy modern lifestyle. You can spend quite an interesting time wandering around his site. Many of his notions are just plain nuts, but there's gold amidst the dross. I like his insistence that you have to prepare intelligently for freedom.

The goal is not to get out of the prison, but to get out in a way that enables you to stay out. Be patient. Think ahead. Getting free is not like walking through a magic doorway—it's like growing a fruit tree.

Nor does he advocate throwing everything out, just what you don't need and don't want. He plans for his wilderness home, with no other externally-supplied utilities, to have satellite-based Internet service.

He has some good advice—as far as I can tell—for buying land.

I do think he's wrong about the benefits of "mindless" jobs and the advisability of separating vocation and avocation, employment from the rest of life. I think earning your living doing something you enjoy is an important and worthwhile goal. However, I agree there's no shame in doing low-paying or "lowly" work if it enables you to do whatever you find meaningful.

However crazy some of his notions, Ran Prieur is a RETHINKer with some valuable ideas.