But it’s got middle-aged people jitterbugging in it, and having a really good time as near as I can tell. And so it made my day.

Two things I like about it, now that I’m thinking of it:

1. I love when ordinary people who aren’t that young, that pretty or that slick-looking go ahead and go for it. The world has a way of pushing its own idea of Beautiful People at us, but I like to see people push back once in a while.
2. It took me halfway through the song to realize that it was “Me and Bobby McGee,” which I still think of as an anthem of the depressing ’60s. Still, if anyone had told Janis Joplin that someday senior citizens would be jitterbugging to the song, she probably would’ve thought her last dose of heroin was dodgy.

There’s nothing new in pop culture about re-enacting the ultimate battle between Good and Evil. And Lord Voldemort certainly fit the familiar stereotype in many ways: His revolting appearance, unrestrained cruelty, frightening abilities to know people and manipulate them — all of it combined to make him appear a foe that was virtually unstoppable.

But what I noticed in both the book and the movie, and what strikes me as a surprising bit of truth for J. K. Rowling to present, was that there was one other quality that Voldemort’s evil brought out in him …

Read the rest HERE

I should make more out of things like that. I heard that there was sleet last weekend in Missouri. I’ve been wondering why I can’t … what? Unfold? That’s the way it feels, like I’ve braced for impact and then stayed in crash position. The past year took a lot out of me. We had a big trifecta of health problems, money problems and church problems, and I’m still waiting to snap back to my normal self.

I looked around at the big buildings around me, the light rail gliding down Central. Yep, it’s a for-real city. Other people live in them; I never have until now. And it’s not an ugly city like some I’ve seen, but also not so incredibly fast-paced and sleek that it’s scary. People seem very friendly — maybe it’s the warm winter.

I threw some crumbs from my scone to the pigeons, and they caught on right away. Others came, and there was a short but enthusiastic feeding session around my chair. When the scone was gone, I tried to signal the end to the good times to them by breaking off eye contact and taking in the street scene for a while. But when I turned back, one bold pigeon had alighted on the table in the hopes of a payoff. I told him ‘no way’ and tried to fan him away, but he thought he had a winning strategy. So he stood his ground looking hopeful, frightened, brash and stupid as only a pigeon can.

When he didn’t go away, I couldn’t help just looking at him. He was so close to me and the desert sun was lighting him up so brightly that he was in super-sharp focus, like an Ansel Adams photo. I could see his little knobbly feet and the iridescent sheen of his feathers. When a sparrow joined him a minute later, I could see the dusty matte finish of his body, and his bright, inquisitive eyes.

These days when things like that happen, I feel like I should try to capture it somehow, in a photo or drawing or something. I’ve got a much-anticipated gig coming up, illustrating a children’s book for Conciliar Press. So I’m always aware that I need to get better at drawing. I need to look more, I need to see more.

I’ve also got a Wacom tablet I got for Christmas. It’ll let me draw directly onto the computer, but I’ve found myself afraid of cranking it up and seeing what I could do with it.

I’ll give it a whirl later tonight, though. Somehow this all feels like it’s tied in together. I’ve got to stop being afraid of things and just … go.

“Anything that can be used to enhance Judaism is welcomed,” said Rabbi Chanoch Kesselman. “But like so many things there are uses and abuses.”

Rabbi Chanoch Kesselman represents the British rabbinate, the main Jewish authority in Britain. Kesselman said the Internet, for example, offers access to valuable religious texts and discussions. But the rabbi said it can also lead to immodesty. He said in the same way, cell phones can help people do business or help parents keep track of their children. But they also can lead children astray.

So they’ve come up with “kosher” phones that are just phones — no internet, no texting. And they note that the phones have become popular with non-Jews as well.

I like it. Why didn’t we think of that?

Before anyone starts to get too sad, let me hasten to say that Clementine didn’t die. But we will have to get along without her all the same. When we were moving here, it was too hot to ship her by air, and in the last few months, we’ve just been realizing that it wasn’t going to work out to have Clementine here. We’ve moved from a house in the country to an apartment in the city, and Phoenix is too hot for dogs to play outside much for months at a time. She’s a good dog, but it didn’t seem like it would be a fair thing to do to a farm dog.

And then, there was the better deal that she had in Missouri. I’ve been extremely thankful over the years that we had the best pet-sitter in the world to leave Clem with when we would go on vacations. Just five minutes away was a certified pet sitter, Laurie, with a farm full of the happiest dogs, horses, cats and chickens I’ve ever seen. And over the years, that came to be Clem’s home away from home. When Laurie and her husband adopted their two nieces, Clementine got to be the girls’ special best-dog and came in for more than her share of pets and hugs. When we found that we wouldn’t be able to ship Clementine until winter, Laurie volunteered to take Clem at no cost to us until then. And we had always mentioned that we might be talking about her staying with them.

We had been missing her and looking forward to her coming out. But it was becoming more obvious all the time that it would be a tough place for her to be happy in. And knowing that we had taken her away from her other home just really made it seem wrong.

So we gave Laurie a call, and as it turns out, she was just trying to figure out how to tell us that she really didn’t want to part with Clementine. She had really become a member of the family.

I miss Clementine. I think of how fun it would be to take her to the dog park or just have her here with me when I’m relaxing or working in my office. She was such a good dog — I wonder if I’ll ever find another one that good. But no matter how many times I go over it, I come up with the same conclusion: It wouldn’t have been right for us to make her come here; it would’ve been selfish.

So Greg and I are dogless for right now. The place seems a little quiet. But somewhere in Missouri, a very happy coonhound is barking, and I can almost hear it. It makes my heart light.

Here’s a roundup of some of my favorite Adventures with Dog:

• Our rainy indoor day
• The time when she reminded me of a dog in a painting and I had to try to see if I could get it right
• The walk where I figured out that dogs have their own internet
• Our snow day HERE and White Christmas HERE
• The spring day where she helped me find some very agitated friends in our back yard
  

Goodbye from your First Family, Clementine. We’ll miss you always.

Our self-knowledge is amazingly superficial. By self-knowledge, I do not, of course, mean a gnawing self-analysis, nor a morbid self-flagellation, nor that concentration on ourselves which has its source in pride. I mean an attentive, calm survey of the soul, a gaze turned inward, a deliberate effort to build up our lives consciously, so that we are not carried away by every passing emotion and idea. We are not in the slightest degree our own masters. We need practice, the discipline of attentive and determined work upon ourselves.

FR. ALEXANDER ELCHANINOV
The Diary of a Russian Priest

Isn’t it the truth? I love reading these more contemporary Orthodox writers, because there are some of the sicknesses of the world that older Orthodox writers don’t address. Who would’ve foreseen that the world would become so obsessed with the idea of self–analysis, self-assessment, without any of the tools that the Orthodox Church has had in place for centuries? Self-help books are their own section in the bookstore, and all of them depend on exactly the kind of excess that Fr. Alexander mentions, resulting in pompous, self-absorbed beings who are no better for all their efforts.

Where in all those books is the concept of humility? The more time that goes on, the more I realize how utterly lacking I am in that single quality, and I can usually tell because of my lack of inner peace. I am often tempted into exactly the kind of “gnawing self-analysis” that he mentions, but apart from a truly Christian perspective, and apart from a proper sense of how little I actually know myself, my best efforts are always short rides that land me in absurd posturings.

Lord, have mercy.

I have to apologize (though as always when I’m blogging, I’m not exactly sure who I’m talking to). I have had a lot of things that occurred to me to say, some of which fit the profile for a bloggy thing … but for some reason, I have had less certainty than ever that I had anything of interest to add to the conversation. It’s a strange kind of shyness to suddenly get after you’ve been pontificating for years. Can I call it simple humility or wisdom, or is it more honest to just call it cowardice and laziness?

I don’t even know, and that’s another problem. I think it’s a good thing that magically at the age of 50-something, I finally understand that Idon’t know all that much. But that lack of confidence is a real hindrance when it comes to a blog entry — who wants to hear yet another waffling, completely indecisive individual pose questions without taking a crack at answers?

The long and short of it is that I’ve decided to start churning out this dreck again. I don’t think I have many answers left, if I ever had any at all. But what I’ve come to realize about myself is that I need help even to ask the right questions. And there’s something about sharing what’s in my head that helps me make sense out of things. And the comments and responses are more help than I can say, so if you’re at all inclined, please feel free.

PS: I know the picture is really primitive, even by my standards, but I was in a hurry to get this out before I thought better of it. So aesthetics had to wait.

Watched a fascinating History Channel program last night on the Kennedy assassination and the flurry of conspiracies that have persisted about it. I found this interesting, because I did get a little caught up in the study of the inconsistencies — courtesy of a silly little do-it-yourself JFK conspiracy “kit” I came across in the library one afternoon — and had figured, in the end, that there were some real problems with the idea of Lee Harvey Oswald as the only shooter, but that we’d probably never really know what happened. I was content to leave it at that, and hadn’t really thought about it for years.

This History Channel show — “The JFK Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy Theories” — takes on on the issues that I remembered from that “investigation”: The so-called magic bullet, the time-frame, Oswald’s marksmanship and so on. And, not to give spoilers, but they creditably lay each of them to rest and leave us with the very clear conclusion that, after all’s said and done, the simple answer is the most likely — that the president was shot down by one lonely and unbalanced young man.

So score one for Occam’s Razor. That short maxim, loosely attributed to Franciscan friar William of Ockham, simply says that you shouldn’t “multiply entities needlessly.” Or, in its homespun paraphrasing, “The simplest answer is usually the best.”

I love this kind of everyman philosophy — it’s about the only kind I can handle. But of course, it’s a law that’s bound to be broken over and over. Not because it’s that difficult to keep to the simple path; by definition, it’s not. But because we’re fallen human beings, and those entities we multiply sometimes have all kinds of attractive qualities for us.

Take the Kennedy assassination, for example. Towards the end of the History Channel show, they criticized the 1991 Oliver Stone movie “JFK” for resurrecting the conspiracy, and offered the psychological explanations about people preferring to invent crazy scenarios about Soviet and mafia plots because it gave more gravitas to Kennedy’s death than the truth.

But I think there’s a regrettable human failing that plays a part — boredom. I remember in my youth how the “Paul McCartney is dead” rumors were swirling around, which in retrospect are bizarre and wildly implausible. At the time, I was ripe for this kind of nonsense. I was young, fairly idle, inclined toward bad science and lacking very structured beliefs or life experience. I don’t say I fell for the thing hook, line and sinker. In fact, if you’ve have forced me to, I would’ve admitted that I didn’t believe that the Beatles singer had died in a car crash and been secretly replaced by a lookalike. Because it’s just dumb to think that he did. But … it was more FUN to think it was true, because then you could go on poring over lyrics and album covers. Similarly, it’s so much more INTERESTING if Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t just a lone shooter, because then you can delve endlessly into a lot of morbid details, feel smarter than everyone else and let your mind wander into all kinds of weird places.

That’s the problem with Occam’s Razor — it doesn’t take into account the enormous draw that fantasy has for us, and how much we want to sculpt the truth so that it captures that salacious, self-centered quality, even if it means believing in wildly improbable things.

Take for example, the whole “DaVinci Code” brush-up a few years ago. I think that Christians were right to be alarmed at it all, and I was one of the crowd that couldn’t believe anyone would fall for such an idiotic mash-up of unrelated facts and complete supposition as thinking that Leonardo DaVinci was leaving secret codes in his paintings to hint to all that Jesus Christ had had children with Mary Magdalene and the descendents still survived. Of course it’s all blasphemous, but it’s also just crazy. But I think that’s why so many people did go for it. It was a way to believe in Jesus but not believe in Him at the same time. It was a way to tick off all the boring Christians but somehow leave the door open to the whole interesting possibility of the miraculous.

It may be pitiful to reflect on our inability to keep things simple, but this is how we are. So often, I’ve seen God extend His mercy to me when I was hopelessly off-track with what I had in mind. Sometimes, there’s a flash epiphany to show me the error of my ways, but more often, I am led along in baby steps until I’m ready to look back and realize the horrors of my own errors. I multiply entities so often, when God is, as St. John of Kronstadt so often puts it, an Incomplex Being.

Well, I’ve wandered from non-Orthodox to Orthodox considerations, as I tend to do. But I may not be totally off-topic here. I thought it was interesting to note in this Wikipedia entry about Occam’s Razor that William of Ockham thought there was only one fact that we needed to keep in mind:

For Ockham, the only truly necessary entity is God; everything else, the whole of creation, is radically contingent through and through.

Well, there’s a bit more simple theology that we can chew on over the holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

‘Tis the season to get tired of hearing “Tis the season”

I turned on one of radio stations and heard Josh Groban singing “O Holy Night,” which is one of my very favorite songs to hear … WHEN it’s within a lunar month of the actual Holy Night. I snapped the radio off faster (I’m embarrassed to admit) than I probably would’ve if I’d heard some offensive lyrics. But for goodness’ sake! I thought I had seen this mission creep of backdating the so-called Holiday Season go as far as it could reasonably go. And then, this year, all bets are off. There are cable channels that have already started marathons of (completely awful) holiday shows. And the advertisements make it look like December 25 is the day after tomorrow.

All the same, something in me just can’t judge the retail world too harshly this year. We do get it, right? As bizarre a twist as it is, this one feast of the Church calendar has become the occasion that generates a tremendous amount of the profits retailers need to stay open for the rest of the year. (According to this link Greg found for me, November and December sales account for 25% of annual profits — amazing.) I know that “profits” is a bit of a dirty word for us, but with the economy on life support, can I really blame merchandisers for pushing every button they’ve got?

Do your duty! Go into debt!

I don’t fault them for cranking up the machine this early. But I do worry about all this panic and how it’s affecting these guys. I’m starting to get the impression that the next threat to our free will may not be coming from dictators who demand our fealty but from a hungry marketing behemoth that comes closer all the time to demanding – not asking — that we buy too much and too often. I don’t think most of us really want to consider how much energy is directed toward controlling that most insignificant element of our life — our Buying Behavior. But increasingly, I’m hearing that it’s the most vital thing I’m doing for my country’s future. That’s just twisted.

That might just be me getting paranoid. But there’s a thin, high-pitched note of hysteria in all this forced good cheer, and it’s kind of disturbing.

That’s probably not the brightest note to sound at the very beginning of the wonderful season of Advent, but I suppose it’s the one to get out of the way. I’m looking forward to this time, to getting out my Advent calendar and beginning to see the benchmarks that tick off the days to the Feast. But for the next couple weeks, I’ll probably keep the radio off in my car and mute even more TV commercials than usual, not because the world ISN’T talking about Christmas, but because it IS. Or rather, they’re putting the Church’s vocabulary to use for a sales pitch. God, have mercy on this country and on the times we live in.

Blessed Advent, everyone.

While He was still speaking, some came from the ruler of the synagogue’s house who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” (Mark 5:35)

And the question was ‘How have you been like the men in v. 35?’

Interesting, no? I may have never even noticed those men before, or thought about their actions. From a human standpoint, it’s certainly understandable why a person would conclude that the death of Jairus’ daughter would end the need for any further request for help.

But why make the case right then, and in that way? Were they quietly rebelling against their synagogue leader’s reliance on this revolutionary new prophet? Was there a modicum of irony implicit in the word ‘Teacher’?

And what about my take on miracles? Reading this narrative, of course I know that Christ raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead. But in my own life, would I have had faith, as he did, to allow Christ to act? Or would I have wanted to be reasonable in my expectations and keep my little atom of faith safe and secure by “not troubling the Teacher”?

It seems to me that sometimes I want to make ready-made moments for the Holy Spirit to act in my life — prayer requests that are bound to happen, or Nice Moments that’ll make an inspiring story for someone (or, God help me, a good blog entry). I’ve come to refer to it as “knitting the Holy Spirit a nice sweater.” All you need for Him to do is step into it. I’m always secretly relieved when He doesn’t. But God meets me where I am; if that kind of pitiful self-conscious effort is all I have, sometimes those prayers are answered.

Other times, I know that I’m shielding God from the more audacious prayers — things that I just don’t think could ever happen. It brings to mind the wicked servant who hid his one talent in the ground and thought he was doing some kind of service to the frugal and hard-hearted master. The last thing I want to do is take my faith and put it on the line. And I imagine I’m doing God some kind of favor!

Were these leaders of the synagogue like that? Did they want to hold onto a precious appreciation for this gifted Teacher and not be disappointed by His limitations?

I wonder what prayers I’m holding back. I wonder what would happen if I wasn’t afraid to be just a little bit more of a bother.

So often the biggest limitation on what God can achieve lies with us. Lord, have mercy.