Author Archives: Rob Harrison

The need for ritual

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Heather McDougal, who blogs at Cabinet of Wonders, has a brilliant post up on ritual and the reasons that drive us to create rituals—including, especially, why children do. I won’t even try to summarize it—I’ll just encourage you to go read it—but I will say that of the various points she makes, I think I appreciate this one most:

Mindfulness is not a bad thing, and making up rules to make one’s life more interesting can be a good thing. Eating your apple and raisin tart in small bites, and dividing each raisin in half to get at the sweet bit as you go, can be a way to help bring yourself into the present, to pay attention. It means you are tasting, exploring, nodding to each part of what you’re eating. Going through life like this can mean you are not gulping down experiences, not rushing yourself, but making a way to see things, feel things, notice things.

Responsibility

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“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us
and the light goes out.”—James BaldwinIn this world as we know it, that’s about it. God is fixed, and so as Christians we have hope of something better coming; but for now, we must live in this world as it is, without trying to pretend it’s anything different. Our call is simply to reflect God’s light in this shadowed world as brightly and clearly as possible.

Another poem for the week

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George Herbert is one of my favorite poets, and I think this is my favorite of all his poems. I thought about it last night going to prayer meeting.

Prayer (I)Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’Almighty, sinners’ tower,
Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear,
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Charity begins . . . where?

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Arthur Brooks, the academic who discovered that conservatives give more time and money to charity than liberals, has a thought-provoking piece up on NRO titled, “Barack as Scrooge?” Most of the attention I’ve seen in the blogosphere has been focused on the comparison he cites to make his point:

After Mr. and Mrs. Obama released their tax returns, the press quickly noticed that, between 2000 and 2004, they gave less than one percent of their income to charity, far lower than the national average. Their giving rose to a laudable five percent in 2005 and six percent in 2006, with the explosion of their annual income to near $1 million, and the advent of Mr. Obama’s national political aspirations (representing a rare case in which political ambition apparently led to social benefit).According to an Obama spokesman, the couple’s miserly charity until 2005 “was as generous as they could be at the time,” given their personal expenses. In other words, despite an annual average income over the period of about $244,000, they simply could not afford to give anything meaningful. . . .In 2006, another wealthy political couple with significant book royalties was Mr. and Mrs. Cheney, who had a combined income of $8.8 million, largely due to Mrs. Cheney’s books and the couple’s investment income. Just how much did the Cheneys give to charity from their bonanza? A measly 78 percent of their income, or $6.9 million. (No, that is not a misprint.)

Certainly, the comparison is interesting, but it really isn’t that surprising. All it really says is that the Obamas have the attitudes typical of upper-class liberals, which is what we should have expected of them, since that’s what they are. As such, I’m much more interested in where Dr. Brooks goes with this comparison:

This last fact does not generally square with the well-cultivated liberal trope of the blackhearted Cheneys. Unless, that is, you believe that private charity is not an important value that defines one’s character, compared with government taxation and welfare spending (which Mr. Cheney generally opposes, despite the profligate ways of the Bush White House). . . .[Many] political liberals simply don’t believe that redistribution is very effective at the voluntary level; rather, redistribution is so important that it should be undertaken at the large-group level as a matter of law.From this perspective, private charity, while a lovely thing, is still a dispensable extravagance. This might help explain the Obamas’ relatively meager giving before they got rich. . . . For many Americans, however, this view of charity as an expendable luxury is anathema. Giving is a necessity, not a luxury—a year-in and year-out necessity.Which view of giving is correct? The answer is the kind of values question we should hope to debate in this November’s election.

And all I can say is, may the best giver win.HT: Jared WilsonUpdate: by way of comparison, Hillary Clinton released her 2000-07 tax returns today, and they paint a rather different picture from Sen. Obama’s; of the $109 million she and her husband earned over those eight years (mostly from speaking fees and book royalties), they gave around ten percent to charity.HT: Power Line

Hillary Clinton’s chickens coming home to roost

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When the Antoin “Tony” Rezko story broke, followed by the ABC News report on the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a number of pundits responded by saying, “This is why Hillary Clinton is still in the race—if she hangs in long enough, something may come up that knocks Barack Obama out of it.” Now, however, it looks like that might have backfired on her. Having first undermined her own credibility (and taken some of the heat off Sen. Obama) with her Tuzla story, which gave the Obama campaign a wonderful opportunity to call her a liar who can’t be trusted, now she’s facing an accusation from the past along the same lines. As a 27-year-old lawyer, thanks to a recommendation from one of her former law professors, Hillary Rodham was given a job on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, working on the Watergate investigation, under the supervision of that committee’s chief of staff and general counsel, a lifelong Democrat named Jerry Zeifman. When President Nixon’s resignation ended the investigation, Zeifman unceremoniously fired her and refused to give her a recommendation.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

The reason for her “unethical, dishonest” behavior was an attempt to deny President Nixon legal counsel during the investigation, a point which was ultimately rendered moot by his resignation. Whether it makes matters better or worse that her motives were political rather than personal, I’ll leave to others to decide; but as Ed Morrissey observes, “all of this forms a pattern of lies, obfuscations, deceit, and treachery.”And for anyone who might want to argue that it’s his word against hers, or that Zeifman is making stuff up, not so fast: he kept a diary at the time in which all this is recorded, and at the time, “he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.” Voters may well decide that this doesn’t really matter (especially since it was only Nixon, after all), and Sen. Clinton’s campaign may survive this; but there’s no honest way to pretend it didn’t happen, and to my way of thinking, it casts a truly ugly light on both her character and her judgment.HT: Power Line

The Dumbfounding

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(I’m just in a Margaret Avison mood all of a sudden, for whatever reason. For those not familiar with her work, she was a Canadian poet, whose Christian faith was a powerful force in her poetry. She died last July at the age of 89, having been lauded as one of Canada’s national treasures; the Globe and Mail rightly called her contribution to Canadian literature “incalculable.” This poem is the title piece of her second collection, which was the first one published after her conversion to Christianity in 1963. It seems an appropriate piece for the Easter season.)

The DumbfoundingWhen you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: “His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country?”

Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried “A ghost”
and only on our planks counted you fast.

Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.

The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.

You died.
We said,
“The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this.”

When you were seen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.

Now you have sought
and seek, in all our ways, all thoughts,
streets, musics—and we make of these a din
trying to lock you out, or in,
to be intent. And dying.

Yet you are
constant and sure,
the all-lovely, all-men’s way
to that far country.

Winning one, you again
all ways would begin
life: to make new
flesh, to empower
the weak in nature
to restore
or stay the sufferer;

lead through the garden to
trash, rubble, hill,
where, the outcast’s outcast, you
sound dark’s uttermost, strangely light-brimming, until
time be full.

Reason for optimism in Zimbabwe

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My thanks to everyone who has been praying for Zimbabwe (whether in response to my previous post or for any other reason)—it looks like God may be answering our prayers in the affirmative. According to the latest reports, Robert Mugabe and his aides are looking at the results and beginning to realize that accepting and admitting defeat is their only good option. Of course, they may resist that realization and refuse to do so—they may decide to fight to stay in power—but there’s reason to hope they won’t. There’s reason to hope. Keep praying.

April Fool!

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April Fool’s Day isn’t a Christian holiday, but the more I think about it, the more I think it ought to be. After all, while we tend to think of this as a day when people try to make fools of each other, it also reminds us of all the ways we make fools of ourselves, and the interesting fact that sometimes it’s the smartest people who are the biggest fools—both theologically quite important points. For instance, one of the smartest men who ever lived was the 17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon; this is a man who was interested in everything, who invented modern scientific method, and who was gifted enough that some people think he wrote Shakespeare’s plays on the side. Bacon died stuffing snow into a chicken. Honest.

One afternoon in 1625, Bacon was watching a snowstorm and was struck by the wondrous notion that maybe snow could be used to preserve meat in the same way that salt was used. Determined to find out, he purchased a chicken from a nearby village, killed it, and then, standing outside in the snow, attempted to stuff the chicken full of snow to freeze it. The chicken never froze, but Bacon did.

In Bacon’s defense, of course, he was on to something there; it was the execution, not the idea, that was off. His foolishness came from the fact that he was too smart for his own good—he saw the possibilities, and didn’t stop to think about the downside. That’s often the way of it with us; which is why, as the saying goes, it’s not what we don’t know that hurts us, but what we do know that ain’t so. (I’ve seen that attributed, btw, to Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Josh Billings; I wouldn’t presume to know who said it first.) As I’ve said before, the root of the problem is that we’re neither as smart nor as wise as we think we are; when we come up against true wisdom, the wisdom of God, we cannot understand it without his help, because it contradicts everything the world teaches us to think is wise. By the world’s standards, God is a fool, and his wisdom is folly.That’s why, as Dr. Stackhouse wrote during Holy Week, Easter is subversive. The crowds wanted Jesus to come along and take the world’s pretensions seriously, play along with them, and win on their terms; they wanted him to be a military and political messiah, a great liberator and conqueror, who would capitalize on his popularity to drive out the Romans and re-establish Israel as a political entity, as a nation among the nations. Instead, he confronted those pretensions and tore them down, exposing the emptiness behind them. Where the crowds identified Rome as their enemy and their salvation as overthrowing Roman rule, the enemy he set out to destroy and the salvation he would offer were very, very different. Indeed, what he did, he did as much for the people of Rome as for the people of Israel—and while that made him the king they needed, he wasn’t the king they wanted; and so, within a few short days, the crowds went from shouting “Hosanna!” to shouting “Crucify him!”Where the world celebrates those who climb the ladder of success, praises Jesus as long as he seems to be heading toward an earthly throne, and is even willing to follow him when it looks like a good career move, we’re called to praise and follow him on the road of thorns; where the world glories in money and power, we’re called to glory in the cross. Which is foolish, from any human perspective; what glory is there in all that pain and blood and death? But that’s the faith to which God calls us—not a Palm Sunday faith, that celebrates Jesus when he’s popular and we’re riding high and everything’s going well, then turns on him when he starts making people mad and the road starts to look rough, but an Easter faith: a faith that understands that it was precisely by his defeat that Jesus conquered, that such a shameful and scandalous moment as a criminal’s execution on a cross was indeed the moment of God’s greatest glory, and that it’s only by going through that death and coming out the other side that Jesus brought about our salvation. To the world, the idea that a triumphal procession would lead not to a throne, but to that, is pure foolishness; but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God for us, in which we glory.

The fallacy of diagnosis

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Bill over at The Thinklings has a truly excellent post titled “I’ve Identified the Problem and it’s You”, which I strongly encourage you to read, challenging a tendency he’s seen among Christians to broadly blame pretty much all Christians but themselves for whatever problem they happen to be complaining about. (I would note that in my experience, this sort of approach is equally common among non-Christians.)

What particularly struck me here, and where I think Bill has expressed himself with particular aptness, was his use of the word “identified.” In family systems theory—the application of general systems theory to human relational systems, following the work of Murray Bowen and Edwin Friedman—this is an important word. When the relationships between a group of people are broken—which is to say, when the system is dysfunctional—the system will tend to blame the problem on one person, to say it’s that person’s fault that things aren’t going right. This is a form of scapegoating as a way of offloading responsibility (“There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m fine; you just need to fix him!”), and the person on whom the blame is set is referred to as the “identified patient.” The term used for this is “diagnosis”: someone “diagnoses” the “patient” as having the problem, thereby implicitly asserting that everyone else is just fine.

In counseling, the key in responding to this sort of situation is to recognize that the diagnosis is in fact false, and that the problem rests not in one person (even if that person is the one showing the symptoms) but in the relational system as a whole. That’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, even when you can get all the members of the family or group together in one room; what Bill has identified, though, is considerably harder to address, since it’s so much more diffuse. Indeed, I’m not sure how to address it, except that (obviously) we must begin by naming and identifying the problem, as Bill so ably has. Beyond that, I’m not sure what can be done except to gently, patiently, graciously call people back to grace and humility, and to remind them that they, too, are sinners.

In light of that, I particularly like where Bill ends his post:

It breaks my heart because Christ died for the church, His Bride. And if someone is truly saved, they are part of the Bride and part of our family, even if they don’t measure up to your definition of cool, even if they don’t line up with your cultural tastes or ecclesiology, Even if they say things sometimes that embarass you. Even if they disappoint you. There is a way to go, in grace, to specific people in your family and work out your problems. But what Christ never gave us the option of doing was drawing our own lines in the sand to determine which of his children we’ll call “brother” and which we won’t.

This is an important truth, and something we really need to hear.