Old-fashioned

Tonight I was tired.

We'd been entertaining, which I don't do as often as I'd like to do, because it requires being organized, cleaning up, and cooking.

SLACKER, I can hear you whispering.

Fact is, none of these are my first gift. But it was a really nice party.  So it pays for me to bestir myself now and again.

Be that as it may, the couch, a book, and the pellet stove called me.  Thus I didn't protest too much when I watched my daughter entertain what Tennessee Williams might have termed a "gentleman caller" while texting friends on her iPhone.

Normally I'd say something sharp to her.  Tonight, I just called it to her attention.

He didn't seem to mind too much. But he might have expected something a little closer to civilized discourse.

At times like this, I hate technological innovations like cell phones. (Of course, there are many times when I use them promiscuously, but we're not talking about THOSE moments).

It bothers me when guys I've never met think I'm the cat's pajamas on the basis of a few well-chosen words -- or when dialogue with potential dates or friends is interrupted.

Someone is randomly pissed off.

Maybe they are just having a bad day.

One of us gets snarky, and bam...a relationship is imperiled.

I think it's because so much of the social pillars that once upheld relationships are either weakened or don't exist anymore.

The church social.

The ladies' sewing circle. (Though I'd have to sit outside the circle and watch).

Time spent side by side doing chores on the farm.

A dependable calendar of events shared by a community, ones in which people saw each other over and over again.

Of course, these all have their downsides.   If you didn't belong to the church, you weren't included.  Men sew, too.  Farm chores could be dangerous.  Most of us haven't lived agricultural lives for more than a century.

Maybe such a predictable social life was also bit tedious -- but it reinforced social norms that don't seem to exist as much anymore.

I watch my daughter struggle.

Wonder as potential dates fall by the wayside.

Hope and pray that something dumb I spouted online didn't wreck a friendship.

And I wonder how we can move forward in a way that builds communities and relationships, rather than putting them at risk.

To be so hidden -- and so exposed...isn't healthy.

Andrea's story

About a month ago, my editor and I were talking Christmas stories. Frankly, after a while, searching for unusual ones is a challenge.

 I asked him if I could try to find someone who has grappled with something like the loss of a family member or a job, and still come out with faith, determined to celebrate Christmas with a "bigger-picture" point of view (something I'm not sure I'd have if I had these major losses).

After calling a few churches, I almost gave up. Then a very nice administrator at Victory Church connected me with...Andrea and Jimmy.

Frankly, I was humbled to be able to tell her story. But when you read it , think of the thousands of women who are struggling with a breast cancer diasgnosis, and continue to fight to get healthy. Think of their family members, by their side all the way -- and their own battle to remain optimistic as they watch their wives, sisters and girlfriends go through radiation, chemotherapy and surgery.

You might want to reach over and give someone a hug...or say a prayer. And keep Andrea and Jimmy in your prayers, too, please, while you are at it.

 http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/796389_Battle-with-cancer-changes-Manheim-Township-couple-s-perspective-on-life.html

On blessing the darkness

This is how He comes to us
When the tears cannot cease
Voice of evil seems to overwhelm
Glimmer seen in distance
Like water in a desert place
When loss is our adagio and andante
Hey presto
He is here
Not with trumpets and fine clothes
Still alone where his mother swaddled him
On a cold, bright night in Bethlehem....


http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/794936_Column--The-world-he-came-to-save.html

Moos from the farm

"Would you like to come in to talk to Dad?" asked the slender teenager.

You bet,  I said.

It was freezing outside,  night had fallen, and even the trees were swaying in the wind.  Having finally gotten my head wrapped around the idea that Christmas was happening on Tuesday, whether I had a tree or not, I'd gotten in the car and driven to Bethany Farm.

Now Bethany, as I've written before, isn't miles away. In fact, it's about a mile down main road (if anything in Glenmoore can be called a main road). The farm just happens to need a right turn, when most of the time I go left (no snark, people).

Having written my last book review of the year, with no work to do next week, I was (mentally, finally free to ponder buying a tree. Most of my neighbors have had theirs up since a bit after Thanksgiving, by the way.

As have most of you, probably (those of you who have trees).

When I got to the farm, no one was visible. Usually I get a live tree, and then ask a friend if he has time to plant it.  But as I was leaving Farmer Dan a note and a check in the little office where he sells raw milk, apples and other foodstuffs, his daughter emerged from the brightly lit barn.

I get to see the cows! I was excited. Farmer Dan has a lot of dairy cattle. I didn't know what other animals spent their evenings in the large structure, but I was eager to find out.

I know. I sound like a darned Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms, don't I?  What can I tell you? To a city girl, an opportunity to scope out farmers milking cows and see goats is about as cool as it gets.

It was a little fragrant inside, but these baby cows were about as adorable as you get in animal territory.
Farmer Dan said that he allows them to roam around, so that they can be close to their mother.  He pointed to one who was chewing her cud, reminding me of the Biblical roots of cud-chewing.

After exchanging some news with Farmer Dan (who had been in the hospital last year when I got my tree, and was now doing a lot better, but has been through a lot),  I walked back out, past  the goats and Farmer Dan's daughter, sitting by the door with the barn cat.

What if I'd gotten my tree three weeks ago when really organized folk were buying trees? Would I have gotten to see the barn when the family was out helping customers?

This procrastinator says no. Leave her to her delusions.  They've worked for her so far!

Spiritual crisis, yes. Spiritual opportunity? Perhaps

As the daughter of a historian, without my dad's historical knowledge (miss you so much, dad), I know just enough to be dangerous.

I have been reflecting on the messy and often violent arc of American history, the ways in which the pendulum can swing towards injustice and cruelty, and then be moved back, closer to center.

Are we at one of those moments? What do you think? Feel free to comment, on my Reuters blog post or here.


http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2012/12/18/guestview-america-a-nation-in-spiritual-crisis/

To people who keep God out of our schools ( and those who want him back in)

I hear that God isn't allowed in our schools.

Apparently, that's why the tragedy in Newtown occurred -- because God is a "gentleman" who doesn't go where He's not wanted (in spite of a history of doing precisely this throughout the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures). 

Prayer is not an official part of the public school curriculum.

So God decided to leave -- and, by implication, to abandon children to the mercy of a crazed killer.

One can assume that it went down something like this.

God listened to the discussions of school boards all over America. He also sat in on courtrooms, where the "Establishment Clause" was debated.

The judges decided that while it was o.k. to have a Bible Study meet in a classroom after school, or an individual student pray, having an officially sanctioned or mandated prayer in the morning wasn't. It violated the Establishment Clause.

At which point, God said "if they don't want me, I don't want them", leaving public schools which disallow prayer and innocent students to their fate. 

In other words -- God is not all-powerful, or all-compassionate. He doesn't distinguish between good and evil. 

He takes our debates so seriously that if we put a foot wrong (assuming that one believes that not sanctioning state-sponsored prayer IS wrong), He's going to leave us to boil like a lobster in the waters of our own sin.

Those who fought for the establishment clause would be amazed that they were powerful enough to bar God from schools.  

I happen to believe that He can't be barred, in spite of all our puny human battles -- and the evil that stalked those halls that day.  

He was present in the classrooms of Newtown. 

He inspired the brave teachers and hero principal.

He comforts the grieving families.

He does, as our President said yesterday, bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted.

That's the God I believe in.

 He's so, so  so much bigger than we are.

Thank goodness.

America the violent

I went out for a walk this afternoon.

Having been working at my desk in the kitchen (with a perfectly excellent office upstairs, I wonder that I continue to do this), I crossed the street that divides us from the elementary school and walked towards it.

Parents drove past me to pick up their children at the kindergarten-fifth grade school, built around four years ago for the growing district.

I didn't look up too often, tuned as if hypnotized to the reporting on the massacre in Connecticut.

According to media accounts, Newtown is a bucolic, lovely, traditional New England exurb -- except for that it's the capital of the American firearm industry.

Aside from this fact it's a bit like Glenmoore.

Have you been to my little village?

Let me tell you about it.

There's no traffic light.

One store that sells pizzas,  pretzels and little else.

A few churches.

And our school, set back from the road, circled by a walking trail on which I am, often enough, the only one walking.

It is unthinkable that the kind of carnage that took 20 young lives and eight adult (including the gunman's) lives could happen here.

Or maybe it's just that we don't WANT to think about it.

The same way we don't want to consider how our slackening gun laws and assent to extraordinary First Amendment "freedoms" to peddle violence open the door to so much senseless killing.

Look at other civilized (yes, I know I'm being very politically incorrect) countries, and we are loss leaders, continuing to lower the bar on violence.

That's certainly true when it comes to gun control

The assault weapons ban expired in 2004, and in 2009 it became legal to carry guns in the national parks.

Some gun "rights" advocates are now pushing for open-carry laws where they hadn't been legal before.

And the gun lobby has the gall to talk about "politicizing" the discussion about sane gun  laws.  They politicize it every time they propose a state bill that weakens existing laws.

Apparently the guns used to kill kids in Newtown were legal.

But the question remains: why don't we regulate guns the way we regulate automobiles? Why aren't guns considered (note the nature of this question) dangerous weapons? Why aren't they treated as such?

One wonders why there were (at least) three guns in the house of the murdered mother, weapons that don't seem to have been used for hunting.

Why does a man shoot a Congresswoman and kill her aide and a nine-year-old girl, and some other innocent bystanders?

Why does a man shoot his own son because his sister sees him lurking outside her house, instead of calling the police?

Perhaps it's because, by loosening our laws and not speaking out against the enduring violence of  society, we all have given them permission.

So when IS the time to talk about gun control?

When the shock of the carnage of today, or of the Oregon shootings, or of Gabby Gifford's bullet to the brain is lessened?

When we go back to remembering how powerful the NRA is, and the stranglehold they seem to have on our Congress?

When we recall President Obama's lack of courage in standing up to the gun lobby?

Don't you see? If it were up to the well-financed merchants of violence who pull the strings in our House and Senate, there never WOULD be a good time.

Here's how British-born New Yorker writer John Cassidy put it after watching President Obama's emotional words to the public from the White House --

"They were only words, of course—words and tears. If we really want to persuade people overseas, people such as ones I grew up with, that what happened today was an aberration—a desecration of American values rather than a twisted display of them—more, much more, will be needed: a willingness to face down the N.R.A. and introduce proper gun control. Until such a display of national resolve materializes, the massacres will occur at intermittent intervals, the toll of needless deaths will climb, and our overseas friends will continue to shake their heads, saying, “It’s America, you know. That sort of thing happens there.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/12/after-the-newtown-shooting-americas-gun-shame.html#ixzz2F5DuL300

Coming back from my walk, I watched the bus drop off two children at their house across the street.  The little girl toted a guitar case, the boy a backpack.

Watching from a distance, I wanted to shout: "You're safe!" You're o.k.!"

But I didn't.

And couldn't.

When our children aren't safe in their schools,  we are in danger. Not solely our bodies, but also our souls.

Do those of us who call ourselves Christians and bear arms love our guns more than we love "our" Jesus, the nonviolent Prince of Peace?

When the blood of little children stains our national conscience, it's tough not to wonder.