Why I indulge in 50 Shades of Gray

 I'm surrounded by partisans, fire-breathing men and women of strong convictions.

They know black from white (sorry if you thought I might be WHIPPING a dead horse in this post, or CHAINED to reviewing a certain novel).

They sleep well at night.  They aren't dogged by questions, don't wonder if they got it right, veer from ambiguity like a mediocre wine.

They are my friends, my colleagues, my sounding boards. I have many friends who would as soon agree with each other on political, religious or ethical matters as swim the English Channel. In winter. In a bikini.

I'm in the muddled middle -- which can be, and often is, a rather lonely place.

Part of my inability to commit stems, as I confessed to a friend recently, from my understanding of history as a playground, oftentimes a battleground, of competing ideas.

Men and women have behaved nobly in the past.  They have also treated one another with disdain, ignorance and violence.

Reforming movements have bred bad outcomes. Evil men and women have accidentally done good.

(I'm sure, at this point, I've ticked a few people off. After all, how can corruption breed anything but ill?).

Another element of my ambivalence? I have a family that includes a multitude of political viewpoints. We choose to live together and love each other, even when we drive one another crazy.

It's hard to think you have cornered the market on righteousness when your second cousin once removed has a very different point of view.

There are a few matters on which I am absolutely, some would say rigidly, convinced that science and reason are on my side.

Yet as a convert to Christian faith, I am also very much an outsider.  In some ways that is a gift -- but an equivocal gift indeed.

Belonging to any clan, or sect, is often an outgrowth of where, when and with whom you grew up.

I am a wanderer, a pilgrim, a jongleur, a curiosity.

If you allow, I'll sit down beside you, listen to your story, and ask if I can walk beside you for a while.

But whether by choice or by nature, I find, I cannot stay in one place for long.

I envy you who can.

What we lose when we lose Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving -- it really didn't begin with the Pilgrims.  Yes, they had days of thanksgiving for the harvest, for God's providence, and for their ability to survive in this new land.  (I don't know if they dealt with the moral complexity of surviving at the expense of native peoples. That's a fascinating question for those who have dug deep into early American literature).

But Thanksgiving, the holiday was institutionalized by President Lincoln in 1863. It became a reality during the Civil War, when we really probably could not have been more torn as a nation.

It was, and is, a day when families get together (and strangers are invited to share a meal). A time for celebration. A moment in the year when we take a Sabbath (broadly defined) from our divisions.

That's the ideal, anyway.  As I said in a previous post, the reality is that we are a very divided country right now -- and this Thanksgiving had, at least in the media, a distinct air of anxiety.

To my mind, opening the stores and besieging us with coupons and emails is a slap in the face of our traditions, and our sense of community.

Going shopping on Thanksgiving is so...Donald Trump.

Being behind a cash register on Thanksgiving because you have been coerced into it is so..."Brave New World."

From my perspective,  it's time to rebel against the ongoing onslaught of commerce that has infested every corner of our life.

For our health.

For our sanity.

For our brothers and sisters sake. That, in part, is what my column is about -- my attempt to rabblerouse and to stir you up a little bit.

What's your opinion? Have I overreacted?

Speak.



http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/925477_Holiday-s-loss-wears-away-fabric-of-society.html

The end of Thanksgiving as we know it?

If your nutty aunt Sally argues that the earth is flat tomorrow over the stuffing and gravy, I have some advice for ya.

Sip. Nod. Sip. Nod.

Thanksgiving has long been one of my favorite family celebrations.

But apparently a lot of us are concerned the celebration will be marred by battles over politics.

That's the media theme that started to erupt this week, like a pot just waiting to fly off the stove.

Thanksgiving could turn out to be a real brawl -- a knockdown drag-out fight.

In other words -- be scared. Be very scared.

Buy lots of wine. Keep the pills on hand.

Candidly, I was starting to get kind of nervous. And I'm a big fan, since childhood.

First my friend Mollie Hemingway and her husband Mark wrote an article for The Federalist about what would happen if your "crazy uncle" showed up on Thanksgiving primed to discussObamacare. He's a scary fellow.

Oh my gosh.  JUST as you are refuting your mixed-up relatives's goofy infatuation with the huge system fail that is government sponsored health care, who ELSE shows up but his most hated cousin Hank.

Hank hates the ACA as much as his cousin loves it.  Over at the Huffington Post, writers Ashtari and Grim have provided you a script for coping with his Obamacare and Obama libels.

At the Washington Post, Sarah Kliff constructed (nicely done) a guide for coming out of Thanksgiving Obamacare debates -- alive.

Trust me, I know about eccentric uncles.

When they made appearances at our family birthday parties for elderly relatives, their most idle chatter would swiftly become the grist of legend.

Sadly, most of my uncles are gone. And I never really knew the crazy ones too well.

But I gotta be honest. I don't want to talk about Obamacare at Thanksgiving.

As the week went on, I began to develop a feeling of dread.

Let's just tally the number of media interventions we've had today.

Our local talk show, "Radio Times" had a whole hour on how to deal with conflicts at the dinner table.

"All Things Considered" did a segment with Amy of "Ask Amy" on how to deal with the nuances of Thanksgiving get together.

CNN had a segment on potential conflicts that can occur when good friends and family get together, but I honestly can't remember who spoke or what they said.  I was hiding under the elliptical.

 Is there some reason this holiday is morphing into a cross between an episode of "Crossfire" and a World Wrestling Federation match?

Perhaps we're on edge. Perhaps we're anxious. Possibly we live in a deeply divided, partisan country.

But let's not get so whooped up that we let those malign influences ruin what is a time for gratitude, family, friends and rest.

(No one, by the way, can convince me that large corporations bullying their employees into working on one of the few national holidays we all share is a good idea).

So if the conversation around your dining room threatens to become heated, take a stand for civility.

Remember that blood is thicker than water.

And for Pete's sake, find something else to talk about.

How about the latest episode of "The Hunger Games"?

What next for the United Methodists?

The story I did this week on reax to the sentencing of the Rev. Frank Schaefer for presiding at the marriage of his gay son (back in 2007 - yes, the timing of the complaint was strange) brought back many memories.

The Methodists are an international bodies, with approximately 12 million members around the world. But this was quite the local story.  Schaefer (who is on leave from his position) is a clergyman in Lebanon County, and his

As most of you know, if you follow religion news, the Episcopal Church was consumed, for more than a decade, with internal strife over the ordination of practicing homosexuals and whether or not clergy could officiate at gay unions.

Now we've straightened most of that out, as it were.  But we are a much smaller denomination, at least in the United States (the Anglican Communion is still one of the biggest Christian bodies in the world), with conservatives having decamped, either for other denominations, or new ones they created.

I couldn't include it in the story, because investigating it would have taken the article in a completely different direction but I heard concerns about outside bodies meddling in church affairs.

But there's a bigger concern among some clergy: that the internal battles over these issues are going to split the denomination... and repel those who already think Christians are out of touch.

Please read, and feel free to comment on where you think the UMC is going -- and what it means for Christian practice in the United States.

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/922635_United-Methodist-Church-trial-prompts-soul-searching-in-Lancaster-County.html

Monday morning heroes

WHY don't we get together and figure out some sane gun laws?

WHY don't the anti-abortion-rights and pro-abortion-rights advocates collaborate on an alternative choice for the shocking numbers of women who have abortions (one-in-three in the U.S.)?

WHY can't nations get together and figure out how to curb the greenhouse gases that promote climate change before we cause irreversible harm to this planet we claim to love?

There are moments when I think I'm gonna turn from a cynic into someone who is just maddening to be around -- 24/7.

But then I think of  people like Cathleen Falsani (a.k.a "godgrrl"), Keith Bradsher, and some dude named Mark in East Portland, Oregon -- and damned if I don't start to feel better about humanity.

Without men and women to inspire us, this world would be a bleak place indeed.

Sadly, we can't look to our Congress, or our President, or even our local leaders to do that for us (regardless of our veneration of the founding fathers, I don't know if even they lived up to our inflated and perhaps misguided ideas).

Men and women of faith are going to let us down at some point (though Pope Frances is giving us a good run for our money).

And while many of us believe that Jesus saves, or have faith in God or humanity, we all need some boots on the ground inspiration.

So let me tell you a bit about Cathleen, and Keith, and Mark of Portlandia.

I haven't met the God Grrl in the flesh, (not yet anyway).  Because we both write about religion, and have a set of mutual friends/acquaintances we started to follow each other on Twitter, and then "friended' each other on Facebook.

She just wrapped up the three-day "find a cure for breast cancer" walk.

That's very cool.

But what impresses me most about her, what I observe on Facebook, is how kind she is, to flesh-friend and relative stranger alike -- kind enough to adjust the lighting on my column photo to warm it up and humanize me a little bit.

Kind enough to share her enthusiasm with us.

Kind enough to have friends all over the country who reach out across the miles and engage her in conversation with reciprocal warmth.

(Not to mention smart and creative and an excellent writer).

Kindness has as big an impact as cruelty -- perhaps bigger, because it is, sadly, often rarer.

I don't know where she learned such open-hearted generosity, but I'd like to be more like that.

And then there's someone I don't know at all (although we exchanged a few brief emails).  He's Keith Bradsher, the Hong Kong bureau chief for the New York Times.

Right now, Mr. Bradsher is in Tacloban. Actually, right  now, I have no idea where he is, but he's been covering the devastation in the Philippines.  In this story from the Times, he took questions from readers via Twitter and Facebook.  In this paragraph,. he answers a reader's question about how he and others are managing to do their work themselves amidst unimaginable disaster:

"This has been a tough story for logistics, starting with the Tacloban airport, which had been completely gutted by the storm surge. I slept outdoors next to a makeshift Filipino civil aviation command post on my first night here, lying in my clothes on a piece of plasterboard debris that I placed on the concrete slab. I was under a yardwide extended roof and chose the downwind side of the damaged concrete structure, which was fortunate as it rained very heavily that night, but I stayed dry. Security was a question mark, as hungry and thirsty refugees were milling around, even asking for paper from my notebook to write notes to missing loved ones, which I provided."

But it was Bradsher's story about the 27-year-old farmer who died from an untreated leg wound  that prompted me to shoot him an email.  

To call this story heartbreaking is a gross understatement. 

Hard to read.  But imagine sitting by this man's bedside, talking to him, day after day, and watching him die (he was the main breadwinner for his family) because of the chaos around him.
Even to step into that situation in virtual time feels dangerous, frightening.

Most of us will never walk the ruined streets of a city where, for hours that stretched into days, death seemed to have the last word.

Keith Bradsher did it for us.

And for that -- for all of the correspondents who risk their lives to bring us the story while people like me sit behind our monitors and pontificate -- I am profoundly indebted to him (and to them).

A toast to Keith Bradsher!

Finally, for tonight, anyway,  I present to you a Portland activist named Mark.  Featured on NPR's "State of the Union," Mark lives in a part of Portland that has been suffering from neglect, benign  or not, from city authorities, until pretty recently. (It only became part of the city in the 1980s, according to the report.)

So Mark didn't wait around for the government to pave all the streets and provide the basics the rest of town seems to get. Like sidewalks. Groceries. Even convenience stores.

In a neighborhood where they do have any retail shops within a mile and a half radius, he opened a food truck.

On his lawn.

He doesn't charge more than four dollars for anything.

Instead of waiting around for the authorities to get their act together, Mark is one big cog in the wheel,  the change he wants to see.

(Not that he's letting the city fathers and mothers get off that easy).

These stories warm my heart, and inspire me.  Next time my mood threatens to turn sour because there doesn't seem to be much good news out there,  I'm going to try to remind myself that those who make a difference  tend to deal with life the way it is, not the way they hope it would be -- one act of mercy, bravery, and compassion at a time.

Like Fred Rogers, I'm looking for the helpers.

Who are your Monday morning heroes?








 

When the darkness falls

When a global disaster occurs, Americans open up their checkbooks, put the cash into the offering plane, and punch the "donate" button on the charitable websites.

We're known for our generosity (disturbingly, I wonder whether that means that some other nations might not be).  Perhaps it's because, even in times of huge economic inequality, we are aware of how much more we have than some other countries.

Ten, twenty, who knows how many years ago, climate scientists predicted that countries like Bangladesh would be hugely affected by bigger storms, rising seas. Well, apparently, that country constructed stronger shelters for its population, thus reducing the terrible toll of the virulent storms.

I don't know if the strongest shelter would have protected Filipinos against the horrors of these winds.

But I do believe that we need to stand with them, with all poor nations, as they attempt to cope with the unnatural fury of a nature that we have had a part in inciting to such terrible passion. 

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/918078_Column--Helping-our-brothers-and-sisters-in-the-Philippines.html

Almost 100 years after massacre in Armenia: is there a global war on Christians

The facts are indisputable.

Christians in many countries are suffering.  Many are dying.  If they can, many are leaving the lands of their births as these countries are torn by internal conflict or repression from external powers.

Beyond that, there's a lot up for grabs.

Are Christians in Muslim majority nations targeted because of a violent strain within Islam itself? Are Christians being imprisoned and killed simply because they are believers -- or because they are seen as part of the degenerate West?

Does the media and/or the government underestimate or underplay it when Christians are targeted because (implication is) they don't want to offend Muslim sensibilities?

This is a genuine hot potato in media circles, with respected journalists and analysts weighing in on both or many sides.

Read what they say -- and judge for yourself.

http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/916403_Column--The-global-persecution-of-Christians.html