Today, a new chapter in the book "Hurricane River" under the same name in the website.  The chapter is "The Law."  FK

Last night at about 10:30, I had just put my book down and was about to go downstairs to bed, when the phone rang.  A call that late usually meant it would be from one of two people, and it was: from my son, calling from college.  He was out of breath, as he was walking the mile to campus from where he has to park his car, and he was mad.  He had just been to a mandatory lecture for a mandatory class on Diversity, and he explained the situation: after a monologue on "white privilege," questions were asked from the audience.  As he got up to speak, he was told by the lecturer to "shut up and sit down and listen," and at that, only "minority" attendees were allowed to speak, talking about the harshness and unfairness of living in "white" America.  It was not so much what they said that made him mad, but the attitude - he, as a "privileged" person had no right to an opinion, for surely his opinion was tainted with white privilege and therefore worthless.

This is not a political blog, and I do not raise this issue for the sake of this issue.  Rather, it shows how often violence, whether current or historical, leads to violence (emotional or physical) - which leads to more violence and so on.  It is the greatest sorrow in the world.

I have often questioned the pacifist religions here in this blog - not to say that they are wrong, but to put forth their apparent paradox.  For instance, it is hard to deny that a pacifist people or nation will sooner or later become a slave people or nation.  Such has been the lesson of history, corroborated by personal examples: the bully will keep on bullying until the bullied fight back. How can one survive in this world as a pacifist? On the other hand, over the course of time, the aggressors are met by the growing ranks of the oppressed, and they, too, are annihilated or oppressed.  It may take a while - for Rome, it took about 800 years, but it does seem that what goes around comes around.  But that does not end violence; instead it changes the locus of violence to a new people or geography.  The cycle of violence never stops.  

So, how to end it?  As I know Christianity best, I will use this philosophy as an example, and its answer is simple: turn the other cheek.  Meet violence with peace and brotherhood.  Treat everyone as you would have yourself be treated. 

Madness.  But how else to stop the cycle?  That is why I have asked,"who will be brave enough take that first step?"  Certainly not me.  But we are forced to see the wisdom, for without taking that first step - a step that will most likely lead to martyrdom or worse - the misery will continue, and, as Thomas Merton said, the last man on earth with the last bomb will not be able to resist the temptation to blow it off.  We will be compelled to destroy ourselves.

If one were unusually gifted with divine insight, what other solution could one offer?  We do now certainly understand, as people before us did not, that we are all spiritual equals, each one deserving certain unalienable rights.  With a little more insight, many of us also understand that our enemies are more often than not our shadow - and that in fighting them, we are doing a type of violence to ourselves. And yet - certain people and nations are demonstrably evil.  Do we sit back and let them do their evil things, which inevitably will affect us all?  

Yet again, in this we do not stop the cycle.  Too often, as my son learned, the formerly oppressed do not seek peace after victory but revenge.  Christ and the great sages of the east understood this, and called for one or another form of passivity - or at the very least, victory without triumph, the end of oppression without more oppression.  

It is in the latter where it seems the best possibility lies, but can we do it? Can we, to rework the Lord's Prayer, forgive our trespassers (after the evil of hostile trespass has been stopped) so that they might forgive us?  Can we realize such equanimity? Or must we really go all the way, to complete pacifism and martyrdom, to save the world?   

Perhaps there is room for both, the one buttressing and keeping alive the other - the pacifists keeping the peace makers from turning to vengeance, giving us justice and real forgiveness and peace, all at once.  This approach walks the razor's edge, but it seems we are doing that already, with no end in sight.  FK                         

With daylight savings time, I woke late this morning, read the front page of the news with a cup of tea, and quietly went upstairs for a few minutes of meditation - when, halfway through, I realized that I had an appointment downtown, 10 minutes ago. Stopping everything, I rain downstairs, grabbed what I needed ( I was helping to move someone from an apartment), jumped in the car and hit a button for a radio station.  It was just as the half hour news program was on, and in my agitated state, what was being said made me more agitated - angry, in fact.  Simmering for about half a minute, I had the clarity to turn it off.  Why listen to the news if it serves only to "harsh my buzz"?  Calmness immediately began to seep in with the warming spring-like sun that was rising over the hill in a milky blue sky.  Ahhh!  

This may seem like a know-nothing attitude to take about the news - we must stay informed! - but I have had a revelatory experience with the news before.  I have told it here before, but I will briefly mention it again: while doing fieldwork in Venezuela, I was with a group of Indians in the far off backwaters, so far off that not even morning AM transmissions could come in on the radio. For 6 months, I had absolutely no knowledge of world happenings. Then we had to get a flight back to Caracas for goods and permits and the like.  Arriving in the incredible noise that is the underdeveloped world's city trademark (half of all vehicles apparently have no mufflers!), I first went to get a cafe con leche, and next bought a paper.  Oh, the strife! The world was coming to an end!  It would take me two days to understand, as a revelation, that this is what the news always did - create panic and noise.  That was in 1989.  The world has somehow managed to put on another 25 years since.

But not without the panic button permanently pressed.  Having grown up in the white-hot era of the cold war, there was never a time when the world was not about to end.  It is, again, about to end - let me NOT count the ways.  And it was this morning that I realized what happens in such a milieu, whether on purpose or not: the exciting controversies are given, people get angry and choose sides, and then those organizations who push for one side or the other get busy, selling THEIR side in the midst of our anger.  In short, we are manipulated.  In short, we are made to pay attention to what the News sees fit to print, and then are hustled into our respective corners for the fight, which seldom leads to a victory for the betterment of humankind, but rather for some organization's or individual's interests, often at humankind's expense.

In Thomas Merton's book, "The Sign of Jonas," he tells how he had to go to Louisville from his abbey for some official business. It was the first time in 7 years (!) that he had left the monastery, and he was mildly surprised at what he found in the greater world.  He thought, he said, that he would be disgusted with the ant-like hustle of our busy world, but instead found himself feeling a loving pity - for us.  Before he had left The World 7 years before, he had done so as a flight; 7 years later, he found that he had, instead, re-discovered the world - not its excitement and struggle, but rather the humanity behind the people he had once seen only as a confused crowd.  There were real people behind each and every face in the crowd, and he understood that, as one only can after one has become detached from the sometimes real, and other times manufactured, drama on the human stage.  With that, instead of seeing a stage of nations and races and ideologies pitted against one another, he found only humanity, what (as Merton understands it) is only one soul struggling for clarity, for reality, for God, one person at a time.

Not that he was unaware of doomsday.  He wrote from the late 1940's, after the USSR had obtained the A-bomb and begun to engage the USA for world dominance.  It was assumed then, so shortly after WWII, that we would most certainly go to war again, and this time with nuclear weapons.  As he writes: soon, the last human left after all the fire and death will find one more bomb which he will be unable to resist setting off, and we will all be gone.  This was not said in anguish; rather, for him, the world was always going to end in fire.  Such is man's nature, as long as he remains imperfect and detached from God.  This is not Merton's issue; rather, it is to become attached to God, to will only His will.  All else is small potatoes.  

I don't believe I could become so detached as Merton, but he is right in the long-haul.  All of us will face our Armageddon at the end of our lives, where we will be held accountable in some way for our lives in our death.  The News, whether big or small, is not the workings of our inner development, but rather a play of power and money and interests that should not detract from our individual inner improvement.  Truly we could save the world if all of us turned inward in such a way, but this might be only a Utopian dream.  Still, we are accountable to ourselves.  The world rages on, as always, but our first matter of business is in ourselves, and then in how our interior changes affect the exterior.  As Merton showed, the inner changes can make all the difference for the outer man.  These are what count.  All else, from his perspective, is just selling the news.  FK                              

Today, a new chapter in "Hurricane River", "Three Amigos," under "Hurricane River" in the website.  FK 

My father would often tell us a story when we were older about his Irish Catholic mother's dream - for her son to become a priest. She thought he was a shoe-in.  The only boy in the family, it was to him that they turned for most of the unpleasant jobs, and he always responded without complaint.  He was unerringly polite to his elders, a good student and athlete, and a regular attendant to the mandatory masses.  Or so she thought, but I believe it; and it would have been a tremendous feather in the family's cap to finally have a priest arise from among them.  

The only problem was, my father was appalled at the idea.  He wanted an active life, dating, the adventure of making it in the world on his own and so on.  Still his mother would look at him knowingly, knowing that God would certainly choose this wonderful son for His service, and she would often tell him so: just wait, my son, and you will get the Calling.  

And so my father anxiously spent his time in church or any such ecclesiastic endeavor trying his best NOT to hear God.  It was my theory that it was this that kept my father from having spiritual experiences, and helped turn him from religion to agnosticism in his later years, but that is just a theory.  The hard reality is, that he didn't want the Calling, as most do not.  The life of a Catholic priest is one of denial and obedience, not something that a good American boy, with prospects abounding all around him, would choose, as fewer and fewer do.

So in reading Thomas Merton's journal of life in a monastery, "The Sign of Jonas," I found myself wondering time and again: how could he do it?  This, a man born into a fairly well-off family, well educated and talented with prospects through the sky; why would he choose such a life?  For it was not just to the priesthood that he aspired, but a life as a contemplative in a Trappist monastery (Gethsemane) in Kentucky.  

His diary tells the story: rise and shine at 3AM to go to mass (vespers?) in an unheated church; hours more prayer, hours more writing (which he resented), 7 or 8 hours more in physical labor on the communal farm; minimal food, no vices, no parties, no conversation except with the spiritual advisers, no entertainment of any sort.  And to this, his complaint was that it wasn't hard enough!  That he had wanted complete isolation for contemplation, and the Trappists kept him too busy with other things and people!  It was only through his training in obedience, he claimed, that he did not run off to an austere hermitage, for his spiritual advisers claimed that he had another calling, with writing, although he did not want it.  

The world is grateful that Merton's superiors saw it that way, for he has left us with inspiring and very human accounts of struggles with the ego and will that prevented him, and by extension, prevents all of us, from union with God.  More than anything else, though, this shows the power of the Calling.  My father needn't have worried; if God had wanted him, he would have wanted God.  Merton makes it very clear that it is, at least in the end, that simple.

In reading the first 60 pages last night, I marveled at his convictions, but also was able to see a little of myself in him, as if I were, spiritually, Merton's Mini-Me.  I, too, have had moments when I have seen that being with God, that spiritual presence that goes far beyond the images made of IT, is all that matters; I, too, have had times when I have wished to get rid of everything and lead an absolutely simple life; and I, too, have wanted only peace and quiet at times, which I often get in the cabin up north, where I am left alone with only myself and the Presence.  But those moments quickly pass.  For many young men, the monastic life is most appalling because it denies sexual intimacy.  At age 60, I can now see past that, although it would still be a trial.  But because I can see past that most obvious omission in life now, I can also see that such a life is difficult for reasons that reach far beyond  abstinence.  To give one's life to Spirit as Merton did is to give over all desires, possessions, distractions and entertainment, and even external will, for the spiritual directors decide all, in the end.  

And yet Merton sought that and more.  In those moments of spiritual understanding, I understand; otherwise I look at his life as a waste (I know it wasn't, but it is an emotional thing.  No family, children, exciting vacations, and so on - doesn't it seem a waste from our normal perspective?)  But that is what most of us are up against: spirit or the world.  We cannot, as Jesus said, serve two masters, and yet we try.  The monks are called to try much more than the rest of us, and yet most would tell us in the end that they have mostly failed - that they were never able to blend perfectly their own will with the will of Divinity.  We are told that once we did, in the perfect world of Eden.  Now, it seems next to impossible.

It was said by one man that I read that someone who was truly in tune with God was worth hundreds of aid workers in the help done for humanity.  It is this that Merton, given his desire and need for humility, would not admit. But for every physical charity given, how many more people have been helped by the words of Merton?  For in the end, we come to see that life is not about anything beyond the most basic of necessary things; rather, it is about reuniting with God, and it is through such people as the Trappists that we learn it is possible, and wise.  And we learn this most through the strength of the Calling.  All should likely fear it, as my father did, for it is stronger than any worldly desire; but it also shows that there is something greater than the desires of the physical and social man - and also that something lies ahead for us that is far greater than anything we can want or posses in our daily lives.  FK           

   

Last week a big fuss was made over a striped dress: was it blue and black or gold and white (or some such combinations)?  In the full light of day, it was the darker colors, but in other light, most, including myself, saw it as white and gold.  Ophthalmologists weighed in - those who saw it in the darker colors in a certain light, even though those were correct, had a yellow-green color blindness.  Thus, in what I read, it was explicitly tied to the eye-brain physiological structure.

However, the event sparked other comments, the most notable (for me) discussing the color blue.  Blue, said many experts quoted in the piece, was never mentioned in early texts such as the the Odyssey (instead, we had the "bright" sky and the "wine dark" sea), nor in all but a few instances, if I remember correctly, in the Old Testament.  Ethnographic accounts were used to back this up, showing us that many primitive peoples, and some tribal peoples today, do not have a word for "blue." More importantly, and astonishingly, they did or do not even recognize the color blue.

The idea is an old one.  The Sapir and Whorf hypothesis, brought forth in the 1930's, stated that words and syntax showed what people recognized, and people recognized what they had words and linguistic structure for.  Other properties or ideas, then, were either poorly understood or absent entirely from the conscious mind.  What Sapir and Whorf had in mind, after studying the Indians of the American South West, was even more far-reaching than colors; for instance, even the notion of  time was locked into a language, and the language locked people into that notion of time.  To the Zuni, time was not sequential but circular.  It was in their syntax, and affected how they led their lives.  The 9 to 5 world we live in was a  wonder and a puzzle to them, just as their's was to us.   Volition was also different - they would not say that a donkey kicked someone, but that a kick happened from the donkey - and so on.  Subtle but very meaningful differences affecting the nature of morality and nature itself.

These concepts might have even greater implications - for our own trajectory, or evolution as a species that reach beyond words to fundamental concepts.  For instance, for all but a spiritual elite, the idea of one god - or monotheism - was a wrenching concept, one that did not match with the more obvious idea of a world filled with separate qualities, with each having its own spirit.  Yet the one-god concept was necessary - essential, I believe - to create the notion of universal (spiritual) equality of men and women. This, too, was a wrenching concept, even for those of the monotheistic religions.  And yet one led to the other, as a matter of deep inner logic - if we were all of one God, we were all of a piece, and equally worthy.  Today, regardless of one's overall beliefs, the idea of this type of equality is taken for granted by much of the contemporary world.  Many might not know that it took eons to develop this thought that brought about the American Declaration of Independence, the United Nations, and at least the idea that all humans have basic rights.  Such a notion only a century ago would have been met with astonishment or peals of laughter by much of the world, which lived in groups almost universally called - by themselves that is - "The People," or the chosen ones.

The greater question is: are we being led as a species to expand our grasp of reality, or is our reality expanding only in one direction in response to an increasingly interdependent world? On the side of the latter, we can see that we have lost as much as we have gained in modernity - who among us can track a deer over rock and through water?  Who can intuit a tsunami or great storm hours before it happens without meteorological instruments, as many traditional people can do today?  And who can steer a canoe across thousands of miles of ocean by the feel of the waves, as the Polynesians once did?

On the other hand, these lost abilities also point to a more unified world - if those who had them could understand that, which they often did not.  If one knows that all is connected, one can tell from some things that other things are about to happen; and yet, the concept of human unity in a real sense was missing.  We might then say that these abilities were expanded to a universal moral level - and in that, we have positive evolution, for greater knowledge might be tracked best by how we understand the relationship between more and more things and processes - until we reach the hypothetical gold standard of the Theory of Everything; and not just every THING, but everything, including concepts of god, humans, and morality. For as the color blue shows, and Sapir and Whorf hypothesized, it is the concepts themselves that give us what we know of our reality.  And once we know that, our ability to transform the world into a desired reality is expanded almost infinitely.  FK                
       

Today, a new chapter in "Hurricane River" under the same name in the website.  It is "The Law" after "Dereck."   

Perhaps it is because of the time of year.  It is late February and the only sign of spring to come is the increasing strength of the sun and its length in the sky.  The snow from last December is still on the ground, crusty and pock-marked by animals feet and hooves, and the fields stretch out as white and forlorn as ever. The cold is unmoving, relentless, as if it will have no end. Perhaps that is why these old memories are stirring, ones that have not been felt for decades - memories of cold and snow going back to the beginning time, when all was new.

And tough.  One memory that came forth was of me at age 4.  I had followed the older boys to a  municipal building somewhere - it seems to be a school, but where could that one be, for none were close? - and we were involved in the most secret alchemy. Here, I was to learn from the cognoscenti, the first and second and third graders, how to make a wind-up Godzilla.  I had been forewarned and had brought  the necessary ingredients - an empty wooden thread spool, a pocket knife, a rubber band and a bobby pin.  Taking me out to the nearby woods, everything encased in old crusty snow, I was shown how to carve the all important "claws", or jagged tread marks in the spool before the real mystery began.  Then, the rubber band had to be threaded through the spool's center, and a stick, just the right size (thus the trip to the woods) to keep it in place on one side.  On the other, the bobby pin was put through the opening of the elastic, this resting in the loop at the end of the bobby pin, the pin's end to be used as a "tail."  Then one wound the elastic up and placed it carefully on the ground.  If all had been done right, the kinetic energy in the wound- up elastic would make the spool crawl across the ground (or hard snow) at a casual pace, self -fired.  It was a veritable Frankenstein, a living thing made with my own hands!  

And it was indeed alchemy, a mystic art as I understood it then, because I did not understand it.  How could this be?  How could an elastic unwind so slowly as to make my Godzilla crawl as if alive, menacing every ant that might crawl, if it had been summer and there were ants, and every tiny imagined mortal human as well?    

That it was beyond my understanding then is now hard to understand - how easy it is!  But, then again, I had a horrible time understanding division in the 4th grade, a tough time with Spanish in the 7th, difficulty understanding poetry and calculus in high school, and an impossible task in understanding the great European thinkers in philosophy class at college.  

There were other things that were tough in the past, too: how could one figure out how to get girls to go out on a date?  How to work oneself up the ladder in a job?  How to understand the even more arcane craziness of social thinkers while in grad school? But while all of these things, from thread spools to philosophy to math to girls, have not been entirely figured out, they at least do not appear as enormous obstacles.  If faced again, they would be fairly easy, in fact.  Instead, however, I have placed myself in the world of writing and getting that writing published, something that has so far eluded me for the most part.  It is alchemy, a mystery with which I continue to struggle.

We might see this as evolution, as survival of the fit, for if all were easy, there would be no competition and no need to work hard at all.  And yet, it's not as easy as that.  We are told by 19th century ethnologists that the Northwest Coast Indians, the Salish and Kwakiutl and others of the Oregon territory and western coastal Canada, that their life was fairly easy.  All that they needed was supplied in abundance, from the great rich forests to the never-ending supply of salmon that each year supplied them with enough fat-rich fish to dry and eat until the next spawning.  Yet they competed, so fiercely that they continually upped the ante in their annual potlatches.  Here, every big man of every clan would pile up more and more riches and burn them in an astounding waste of wealth to show everyone just how rich - and undisturbed by such richness - that they were.  Because of this, the people of the clan would have to work that much harder to buy the European goods that were flowing in so that they could burn most of them again the next year.  

Whether consciously or not, they made their lives much harder than they had to be.  Go figure.  

In fact, it seems that if we do not get the challenge from the natural world, we will invent it.  Few are in that position, however, as only necessity seems to cause invention.  If we had had the technical knowledge back in the early 19th century that we do now, with 700 million instead of 7 billion people on earth to keep alive, we would have been in fool's heaven.  But, as Malthus pointed out (and more correctly than many think), we will always press our boundaries, always catching up with need rather than outpacing it.  

It seems, then, a natural law that whatever point we are in life, we will be challenged to the point of anxiety.  Retired on a comfortable income?  Well, here comes your children's children in need, or here comes the unexpected pain or lump under the armpit.  Even the comfortably born are as often as not miserable - they cannot ever meet with dad's approval, or worse, they are so bored they get themselves into a mess with drugs and vices and, if all else fails, there come the suicide attempts and mental illness.  That we are always taxed and never complete for long rises from evolutionary competition to cultural competition to personal competition.  It is the nature of the world. 

Why?  Is it something simply inbred, just this product of natural evolution through competition, or something more?  

There is no answer that will satisfy everyone, I know.  While it is hard to prove, the pure evolutionist would say that the mind reflects nature, just as it is nature's product - or, as I have heard, that the human brain is an aberration, unnecessarily large for its purpose and given to unnecessary abstractions.  The latter I reject with ease - the brain is nothing like the appendix - its function is much too complex to have accidentally stumbled into the realm of the vestigial or excessive organ.  On the former, I believe it is correct, but this does not answer the question. Rather, in a world that came into existence by a random alchemy of its own - we know of no experiment that can reproduce it - why would it have such a "law?"  Why would evolution always push its limits, and move, as science has proven very recently, always towards the larger and more complex?  Why not have a limited eco system where limits are natural,and not caused by competition and feeding?  Why must the rabbit breed until it is overcrowded, or more to the point, why would that initial species of bacteria have to continue to divide?  Couldn't it just relax and live?  

Apparently not.  And if you are sitting cozy right now, you won't be for long.  You will have another "Godzilla" moment any day or month now.  You will be forced to understand, to stretch your current abilities.  That is how it was made, and "IT" certainly seems to have a point, a direction, at least to me.  FK                

Last Friday we went to the Chasen Museum in Madison for a viewing of the Illuminated Pages - a new Bible done the old way, "illuminated" by the presence of gold and platinum placed throughout the illustrations made on each page.  If one has never seen an old Bible - the type made before the Gutenberg Press changed everything about books - it is a revelation.  First, they are huge, about three feet tall, so that they can be read by several people at once.  There are two reasons for this: one, the price of a Bible before the printing press was enormous. Because of the work put into it, the entirety hand-printed by dozens of monks working day and well into the night, it was made to last, and for that, very specific paper and ink had to be used.  The "paper" was vellum, specially treated calf hide that is translucent and nearly immortal (because of its translucence, each line on one side had to be matched with a line on the other; the planning for such a Bible is extremely complex); and the ink was made from natural pigments that now can rarely be found (for this Bible, the makers were able to buy Chines ink made the old way, in the pre-communist era).  To buy such a thing for each and every monk would have been impossible.

And two: because it was a work of such magnitude, it was embellished with illustrations, this artistry naturally flowing to a work of such time and expense, and so the pages would best be broad for a greater canvass.  

We were given the tour, and were loaded with facts: it took nearly 20 years in the planning, and 13 years in the making; it cost 9 million dollars to produce, even though much of the work was donated by experts and monks; it is stacked into over 12 volumes, its depth being several feet thick; and, more interesting, it is steeped in symbolism, both the fairly readable (Adam and Eve in the new- old Bible were made to be Southern African, like the Kalahari Bushmen, because anthropologists have genetically traced the oldest human genomes to them) and obscure: for instance, in the Psalms, which were meant to be sung, the actual sound waves of Monks singing were woven throughout the text, as were religious songs from other traditions.  With that, an expert in the future could actually tell what the notes were that were being sung.  And so on and on, a regular DaVinci code for any future esoteric explorer.  

Aesthetically speaking, however, my reaction was mixed.  First, it attempted to be world inclusive and modern, showing that the Bible is a universal and living thing.  But illustrations of modern buildings and people, with modern artistry throughout, I found rankling, when stacked up against more traditional art.  This was not just because it affronted a feeling of tradition, but also because, as seemed obvious, modern architecture and artistic design are simply not meant to be holy or spiritual.  They are rather commercial or mathematical or psychological. However, this, too, might be important for future observers, for they captured for the ages, against the maker's wishes I believed, the spiritual sterility of our era. Ours is in fact a de-spiritualized time. The making of the Bible was an outreach to hope, to the continued relevancy of the Bible, but its modernistic touches seemed to belie that outlook.  Instead, it recorded the erosion of faith in our era, making of this book the museum piece it was, something of vague interest for the art connoisseur, but hardly something for the believer.  

Or was it?  On second thought, I felt something deeper still than a mild cynical despair.  Instead, it came to me that this Bible worked to reclaim the sacredness of the holy text, in spite of its nod to modernity.  It was, after all, a work of monumental effort and expense, and in its viewing I slowly came to appreciate that fact.  In our era, we have made such things as books so cheap and available that we have marginalized their importance.  But this Bible spoke still of a time when such words, such meaning, had sacred significance.  It stood out, all of a sudden, in a way I had never experienced it before: that in these pages were the actual words of God as understood by the men of that age; that in this work was a holy wonder and a marvel beyond understanding - a near eternal presence of the presence of God, regardless of the alien cultures that had experienced it.  

That had to be the thought of the makers - that in the ugliness of modernity, there was still this connection to God that nothing could destroy.  And in this, they were right: there is hope, for we have before us, in the Bible, a document that connects the Nameless God, that which is beyond understanding, to us, to be understood at least in part.  In this we have a reason to believe that God cares enough to communicate, and that with our return to caring about this care, we might find redemption and a brighter future, regardless of current conditions.

A complex exhibition when one thinks about it, as I'm sure its makers did, for two decades.  Well worth the view when it comes to a city near you.  FK                           

Today, a new chapter in "Hurricane River" under the same name in website.  It is "Derek," after "Devil's Choice."  

The last blog ended on the question - who dare's not eat the apple first?  In this case, I was thinking about self-defense in a hard world, something that has become increasingly relevant with the rise of ISIS and violent Muslim fundamentalism.  Among Christians, however, it has long been a problem.  There is nowhere in the New Testament where Jesus tells us to fight back. Rather, we are to turn the other cheek.  This seems pretty clear, and yet we know that with such passivity, one's world would very quickly become "not of this world."  I have read examples of Quakers laying down their arms, only to be slaughtered by attacking Indians in old Pennsylvania, and of a Buddhist village (the same passivity preached in Buddhism) exterminated because it would not fight off an invasion.  In the movie "Black Robe" (based on fact), a Jesuit priest manages to convert an Indian tribe in Quebec - with that tribe being wiped out by their traditional enemies within a few years.  Pacifism works in some cases, but not in many or most instances of invasion.  For every Ghandi or MLK victory are several defeats of the weaker by the stronger.  Genghis Khan would find  such passivity a laugh riot.  

For that reason, most Christian sects have delineated the "Just War," where a non-violent nation is allowed - or even compelled - to actively fight "evil."  However, as we have seen in some of the Gulf wars, what is evil and a threat is often debatable.

During the last two nights, a TV opinion show had representatives of both factors - the first set, a Catholic priest and a Rabbi arguing for the active engagement of evil, and the second, a Quaker and a minister from the group, "Sojourners." The host, an engagement type of guy, gave little room for the pacifist argument, but it did indeed seem shallow, considering the topic concerned stopping ISIS.  The brunt was: get the nearby Muslim countries and their populace to condemn the group.  This would stop recruitment and dry the movement up, without the need for the use of force.  In all fairness, I do not see that working, at least not  fast enough.  With such lack of push-back, this ruthless group would have its Caliphate as fast as one can say, "Adolf Hitler."

Still, there is no Holy Voice to condone violence against violence in the New Testament.  In fact, everything points to martyrdom, including the Crucifixion.  It did work to change the Roman Empire from within, but the empire only continued, and poorly at that, with renewed violence "in the name of Christ."  This would not have stopped a powerful movement from without.  

This blog will not untie a knot that has been fumbled with for centuries.  In the aforementioned Buddhist village, the villagers knew that they would be wiped out.  It was their opinion that it would be better to go to eternity with a cleaner karma than to live for a few more years - and their children's, and their children's children's years - on this earthly plain.  Is that what Christ was demanding?  There are arguments to be made in favor of this, but the reality of it is something else.  We would, indeed, become slaves or simply be killed.  The bite of the apple would be the idea that we deserve to live at the expense of other's lives, even if those others were threatening us.  Are we not one?  Is this not the breaking of the second greatest of divine laws, to treat others as we would like to be treated (the first is to love God with all one's heart)?  Shouldn't we simply turn the other cheek? 

I can see the alternative arguments - that we are doing the world good by stopping evil, that we are protecting what life God has given us in natural defense and so on, but these are arguments. On the face of it, on the facts of the Gospel,  none of them seem to fly.  And in the end, it seems to all come down to that one phrase: who is brave - or foolish - enough to refuse the bite of the apple?  FK