April 18th, 2007
These past few days as details of the shootings at Virginia Tech have been unfolding, this song by U2 keeps coming into my head. It’s called Wake Up Dead Man. The verse starts out like this:
Jesus, Jesus help me
I’m alone in this world
And a fucked up world it is too
Tell me, tell me the story
The one about eternity
And the way it’s all gonna be
And the last verse:
Jesus, were you just around the corner?
Did you think to try and warn her?
Or are you working on something new?
If there’s an order in all of this disorder
Is it like a tape recorder?
Can we rewind it just once more?
The gritty distortion in the vocals and the uncharacteristic use of profanity communicate both a hard-edged accusation and yet desperate plea to God to intervene in world twisted by evil. It reminded me of the lament in Psalm 13:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Jen and I have some friends at Viriginia Tech, in fact whom we visited on our cross-country trip out to L’Abri last summer. Though relieved to find out that they were not among those who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on Monday, our hearts and our prayers go out to those who lost friends and family this week.
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January 23rd, 2007
So I’ve been doing some web consulting on the side to bring in some extra money while Jen’s on the job search again, and as a bit of a creative outlet. I’ve been doing several hours a week of web design for a guy by the name of Eliot who runs a consulting company in addition to his day job. I met Eliot through church at First Pres.
My recent project has been a ground-up design of a site for a new book that’s being published by a guy by the name of Dale McGowan who’s relationship with Eliot apparently goes back to their freshman year at Cal. Dale has edited a book called Parenting Beyond Belief, which is billed as a parenting manual for non-religious parents. Now I come from a religious background where your first reaction to a book title like this would be to scoff and dismiss it right out. And there was a time in my not too distant past where I would have towed that party line.
I’m sure that I don’t agree with everything he says, and he says up front that as the editor of a book with multiple contributors, he doesn’t neccessarily agree with each of the authors’ every position. But what struck me about Dale is that his tone is decidedly different from the stereotypical vocal secular/atheist writer. Read this quote from his FAQ on the book’s site:
Honest questioning is too often disallowed in religion, the word “values” turned on its head, and an “us-vs.-them” mentality reinforced. Many feel that fear—of God, sin, doubt, and difference—is more prevalent with religion than without, and that children often learn to obey authority rather than develop their own judgment.
Instead of in-your-face arrogance and an air of see-how-stupid-those-religious-people-are, Dale writes with a humble posture and the sincerity of an honest questioner or doubter (gasp!). Now he is clear that he’s already made up his mind that religion is a deception, and he and his wife have decided to raise their children in a non-religious home. But I have a lot of respect for parents that raise their kids to ask questions and encourage them to seriously wrestle with what they believe to be the true nature of things. Here’s one last quote from the FAQ:
So religion isn’t all bad?
Of course not. Like most human creations, it’s a mixture of good and bad. We should embrace the best elements while finding our way out of those that are undesirable. The most important freedom we can give our children is the freedom to think, to discern, to determine for themselves what’s good and what’s bad in anything. But when we place ideas beyond critique, the bad survives along with the good—and that’s not good for anyone. Only if we agree to put all of our ideas on the table can we work together to separate those ideas that are unworthy and life-destroying from those that are noble and life-affirming.
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November 16th, 2006
This being my first big-company job, I’m getting used to all sorts of big-company things. Like cubicles, helpdesks, lots of emails, and lots and lots of acronyms. In fact I like to say that if you picked three letters at random from the English alphabet and put them together, it would probably stand for something here at Wells Fargo.
When I’m sitting in my cube, and happen to not be listening to Jen’s iPod, I hear all sorts of things: phones ringing, my cube-neighbor crunching on her mid-morning snack, keyboards tapping, and someone jamming the refilled paper cartridge back into the printer. Then I catch bits of pieces of conversations: about budget savings, labor resources, and some guy talking about the FSD for tests on BSA in the PNI environment, which, given the intense tone in his voice, though I can’t understand what the heck he’s talking about, I get the sense that I’m evesdropping on something truly important.
So we had a fire-drill at work today. I was sitting in my cube, being my usual industrious self, and I was startled by this shrill siren that sounds like some obnoxious car alarm as gone off two cubes over. Then a tinny sounding woman’s voice blares through some hidden loudspeaker: “ATTENTION PLEASE. ATTENTION PLEASE. WE ARE CONDUCTING A DRILL OF OUR EMERGENCY RESPONSE PLAN. PLEASE EVACUATE THE BUILDING NOW. †I grab my backpack, because if this were a real emergency, I wouldn’t want my Nintendo DS or Jen’s iPod to get all burned up. Next thing I know I’m filing with a mass of people towards the stairwell. Apparently people know what to do in this kind of situation. We reach the outside door, and follow the horde of people who are walking down to the corner, then across the crosswalk to the what appears to be our destination between two buildings across the street.
There was this moment when the light turned yellow while dozens of people were still in the crosswalk, and someone wearing this reflective orange vest had to shout to the crowd, “Stop! You need to get out of the street!†Later when all thousand or two of us were at our destination in groups according to floor, I started thinking about what if this were a real disaster, like our building was on fire or there was an earthquake or something. And I don’t know, I just had this sense of how vulnerable we are. I mean the people crossing the street would have kept following the person in front of them, no matter if a bus was about to run through the crosswalk.
And while I’m sure many in that crowd had been through some sort of emergency preparedness training or meeting or something, what actually transpired was we just all followed the person in front of us. There was another moment when we were filing back into the building after the drill. The lobby was packed with people all trying to get on the elevators that would whisk them back to their respsective floors and back to work. The people traffic was at a stand still, and then I saw some people going through this doorway off to the side, and the woman at the security desk had just said that we could take the freight elevator, and so I just followed people into that adjoining room. And then when I got in there it turns out that no one in front of me knew where the freight elevator was, and after a moment standing there not knowing what to do, we just wandered back to the horde in the lobby.
So all of this made me think how we all do fine and dandy and feel in control and maybe even a little powerful as long as things happen as we expect them to. But throw some big curveball at us, and immediately we’re clueless. We’re no longer powerful and in control, and we’re in the crowd just following the person in front of us. Then we need someone to tell us what to do, and where to go, and when we get there, what to do next.
Standing there in the crowd, I found myself humming this song, by Rich Mullins. The message is about faith, but I found it was strangely appropriate:
Well, it took the hand of God Almighty
To part the waters of the sea
But it only took one little lie
To separate you and me
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
And they say that one day Joshua
Made the sun stand still in the sky
But I can’t even keep these thoughts
Of you from passing by
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are
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August 7th, 2005
Bono was featured in a recent World Magazine article, speaking rather candidly about his faith. Here’s a quote:
“At the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one,” explains Bono. “And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that. . . . Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.”
Check out the full article here.
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