Did you see Sneakers? In this 1992 movie, Robert Redford plays the head of a private security company. He and his team are brainstorming to figure out whether the name of a firm they are investigating, Seatec Astronomy, has some hidden significance.
They spread out some Scrabble tiles and start anagramming the company's name, stopping when they are able to rearrange the letters to spell "too many secrets." I'll leave the significance of the decrypted name to your viewing of the movie, along with a warning that the IMDB site and several others blithely give away way too much of the plot.
I will reveal, however, that the movie centers on whether a device that can automatically decrypt classified government secrets should be allowed to exist. This seems more relevant than ever all these years after the film's release, with the WikiLeaks controversy in the news. Leaving aside the movie's focus on cryptography, the question remains as to what legitmate function secrecy plays in government, and how much should be considered secret.
Some weeks before I became aware of WikiLeaks, I came across a book called Code Names, by William M. Arkin of The Washington Post. I was surprised to learn that a book with such content could be published, but on looking further I found that this was not even Arkin's debut foray into uncovering supposedly classified information. His previous books gave locations of US nuclear weapons installations, which I would have thought was so highly sensitive that it could not possibly have appeared.
What I learned was that everything in both Arkin books was in the public record. I also read his assertion that even though it was all publicly available, he considered what to include and what to omit with painstaking care.
My shot at Code Names was too brief for me to read more than the introduction and the first couple of chapters. This is oddly parallel to a more recent experience with a book by Ray Kurzweil, described in the post just ahead of this one. What I read turned out to be plenty, as most of the rest of the book was simply a reference list of code names as they have been used.
The first part summed it up nicely, however, and my own summary of the summary would be that since 9/11, our government and its intelligence agencies have used that terrible tragedy as pretext to classify everything and anything. This has gone to extremes that would be ridiculous except that since real life and real issues are involved, outrageous is the better word.
I hadn't paid enough attention to Arkin's bio on the flyleaf but with a little online research quickly discovered that books are only part of his real work as investigative reporter for the Post. My take is that he is more a bulldog and journeyman than an ideologue, which I find a good thing. I naturally suspect people who take on causes with excessive zeal, much preferring a dogged determination to report what is there to the fervor that produces slanted coverage. Fair and balanced, forsooth!
To get to the point, where Arkin started plowing in 2005 with Code Names, a dozen The Washington Post journalists headed by Dana Priest harvested the crop in July 2010 with a series entitled Top Secret America. This investigative journalism project was two years in the making. The main link leads to many, many other links, including a list of articles and a summary of methodology.
Too many secrets? Even though the information is in the public record, mostly online, it is so insanely complicated that Arkin says he couldn't do what he does without help from the inside. We can safely conclude that these are people outraged by what has happened in their workplace since 9/11.
A letter to the editor from a retired intelligence professional says the current state of affairs bears little resemblance to the intelligence community he remembers. He seems outraged that these excesses have been allowed to flourish, but not upset at all that The Post is bringing them to light.
There is a real concern underlying all this outrage and zeal, and that is the enormous expense incurred when too much is made too secret. The money wasted in this process is breathtaking even by government standards. Even if you think you don't especially care whether government is using secrecy excessively, once you get a glimpse of how much money is being flushed down this particular gold-plated toilet you may be reminded of the historic advice from Deep Throat to Post reporters of an earlier time, "follow the money."
Aug 29, 2010
History of the future
Somewhere along the breadcrumb trail I must have decided I didn't need to keep my copy of Marshall McLuhan's book The Medium Is the Massage, because it's no longer on my shelves. I would have liked to consult it today when I came home from a weekend jaunt visiting a friend who introduced me to a book I had never heard of by a writer I thought I knew.
The writer is Ray Kurzweil. I knew him as the inventor of the Kurzweil keyboard, regarded as an ultra-high-quality electronic musical instrument since its introduction in 1984. What I didn't know was that this was only one of many inventions by a man who has been compared to Thomas Edison, nor that his writings on the future of technology and society put him in the exalted ranks of McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, and the like.
The book was The Singularity Is Near. It's fantastic to visit a friend and discover a book so unexpected and so profound, a long way from the beach fodder one might be content to find.
I knew "singularity" as the term used by physicists to denote the collapse of gravity at the center of a black hole. I learned that futurists have adopted it to mean a period of cultural change so rapid and so deep that human society will be irreversibly altered. They see technological advances as the agency of this change.
The rate of technological change is exponential, the way gravity increases exponentially as one gets closer to the center of a black hole. To demonstrate, Kurzweil plots crucial events in human history according to lists from 13 sources. These are an assortment of fellow futurists as well as traditional references like The Encyclopedia Britannica. The events vary somewhat, but most include the big bang, the first cells, the demise of dinosaurs, and the successive rise of railroads, telephones, computers, and the Internet.
Linear x-y plots of these events over time are too compressed to be useful, appearing as nearly-horizontal lines for most of the chart followed by multiple events crammed into a near-vertical section at the extreme right. Logarithmic plots, however, consistently appear as 45-degree lines for each of the sources and their varying lists. This is what one would expect from events occuring at exponentially increasing rates of change.
This was just a two-day house visit so I didn't get much past the introduction and the first chapter, but it was enough to give me the picture as Ray Kurzweil laid it out in this 2005 book. I'll get a copy so I can finish it, and rustle up McLuhan's book from 1967 for comparison.
Meanwhile I did find Our Posthuman Future on my shelves, which was to be expected since I only read it in the past year or two. Author Francis Fukuyama was famous for his 1989 pronouncement that history as we know it had reached its end, but it seems that he found more to think about and write about by the time Posthuman was published in 2002. The subtitle, Consequences of the Biotechnical Revolution, is an accurate summary of what the book contains, and utterly consistent with what Kurzweil would be publishing three years later.
I realized that I've been fascinated by futurism for a long time without realizing there was such a thing. I Googled "futurism" and found a good summary on the Wikipedia page. This explained that the term in its current use didn't really arise until the 1940s, with 50s and 60s writers like Toffler and McLuhan giving us plenty to think about. I followed a link to a Wikipedia list of futurists, and recommend it highly. I found Toffler, McLuhan and Kurzweil there as well as architect Buckminster Fuller, astronomer Carl Sagan, and a host of people cited by Kurzweil in Singularity.
Curiously, the list omits novelist Wiiliam Gibson (Neuromancer) as well as Fukuyama, but it's a terrific start on the subject. Michael Crichton is there, and so is Gene Roddenberry. Wikipedia critics may find plenty to chew on from those included or omitted, but we'll leave the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia for another time.
For now, I'll be busy thinking about the prospect of nanobots in my brain, the merging of virtual and real realities, and other possibilities I find somewhat disturbing but which may be inevitable just the same.
The writer is Ray Kurzweil. I knew him as the inventor of the Kurzweil keyboard, regarded as an ultra-high-quality electronic musical instrument since its introduction in 1984. What I didn't know was that this was only one of many inventions by a man who has been compared to Thomas Edison, nor that his writings on the future of technology and society put him in the exalted ranks of McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, and the like.
The book was The Singularity Is Near. It's fantastic to visit a friend and discover a book so unexpected and so profound, a long way from the beach fodder one might be content to find.
I knew "singularity" as the term used by physicists to denote the collapse of gravity at the center of a black hole. I learned that futurists have adopted it to mean a period of cultural change so rapid and so deep that human society will be irreversibly altered. They see technological advances as the agency of this change.
The rate of technological change is exponential, the way gravity increases exponentially as one gets closer to the center of a black hole. To demonstrate, Kurzweil plots crucial events in human history according to lists from 13 sources. These are an assortment of fellow futurists as well as traditional references like The Encyclopedia Britannica. The events vary somewhat, but most include the big bang, the first cells, the demise of dinosaurs, and the successive rise of railroads, telephones, computers, and the Internet.
Linear x-y plots of these events over time are too compressed to be useful, appearing as nearly-horizontal lines for most of the chart followed by multiple events crammed into a near-vertical section at the extreme right. Logarithmic plots, however, consistently appear as 45-degree lines for each of the sources and their varying lists. This is what one would expect from events occuring at exponentially increasing rates of change.
This was just a two-day house visit so I didn't get much past the introduction and the first chapter, but it was enough to give me the picture as Ray Kurzweil laid it out in this 2005 book. I'll get a copy so I can finish it, and rustle up McLuhan's book from 1967 for comparison.
Meanwhile I did find Our Posthuman Future on my shelves, which was to be expected since I only read it in the past year or two. Author Francis Fukuyama was famous for his 1989 pronouncement that history as we know it had reached its end, but it seems that he found more to think about and write about by the time Posthuman was published in 2002. The subtitle, Consequences of the Biotechnical Revolution, is an accurate summary of what the book contains, and utterly consistent with what Kurzweil would be publishing three years later.
I realized that I've been fascinated by futurism for a long time without realizing there was such a thing. I Googled "futurism" and found a good summary on the Wikipedia page. This explained that the term in its current use didn't really arise until the 1940s, with 50s and 60s writers like Toffler and McLuhan giving us plenty to think about. I followed a link to a Wikipedia list of futurists, and recommend it highly. I found Toffler, McLuhan and Kurzweil there as well as architect Buckminster Fuller, astronomer Carl Sagan, and a host of people cited by Kurzweil in Singularity.
Curiously, the list omits novelist Wiiliam Gibson (Neuromancer) as well as Fukuyama, but it's a terrific start on the subject. Michael Crichton is there, and so is Gene Roddenberry. Wikipedia critics may find plenty to chew on from those included or omitted, but we'll leave the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia for another time.
For now, I'll be busy thinking about the prospect of nanobots in my brain, the merging of virtual and real realities, and other possibilities I find somewhat disturbing but which may be inevitable just the same.
Jul 27, 2010
Writer's Toolkit 1
First of a series. The trail of breadcrumbs goes way back...
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. The slimmest little volume you never heard of until you decided to try writing and somebody said you might want to check out this book. Eighty-five pages of dynamite, good to dislodge those stubborn bad habits. Of course, if your own writing mistakes are too stubborn for even Strunk & White, then go do Your Own Thing and leave us alone. It's the granddaddy (ou grandmère, s'il vous plait) of writing guides. Ignore it at your peril. By the way, did you hate being subjected to French just now? Kind of make you bristle? From p. 81 - "Some writers sprinkle...with foreign expressions...with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English." My bad! Their good, er, they're good!
We'll be right back after the break. I Love this expression from public radio. I often don't love what follows, especially if it's a promo for a station I don't like or a program I don't like, and too loud to boot. But the concept is excellent, a natural marker recognizing that thought can pause, that discourse need not be seamless to be good. The best of these refresh the mental palate, like a sorbet before the main course. Michael Feldman's program Whad'Ya Know does us the favor of using live jazz, piano and bass, throughout each broadcast. The breaks treat us to a minute or so of fine music before we get back to the comedy and quiz questions. At least, that is, when the big cheeses don't obliterate it with a promo for the Hockey Channel.
We're back.
Modern American Usage, by William Follett, revised by Erik Wensberg. Originally published 1966, revised edition 1998. Best I can remember, the original edition was a gift from my parents before I went off to college, which means the book had only been out a year or two when they laid it on me, as we used to say in those days. How did they know? I've often been guilty of thinking my parents were a lot like other parents, but with minor differences. Giving a brainy teenage boy Modern American Usage doesn't qualify as a minor difference...this is real Baby Einstein territory, I see now from my own adult perspective. The Baby Einstein reference suggests a kinship with those parents who play Mozart for their pre-verbal tykes, that sort of thing. In the case of my parents, it often took the form of not stopping me, simply getting out of the way while I strew breadcrumbs left and right in hopes of finding my way back...eventually. But active involvement was there, too. Just as when Dad gave me The Best of S.J. Perelman at the age of 10, or giving me a full-size Random House Dictionary at about the same time as the Follett, this was more major than minor.
An awful lot about what the gift of a book can mean, but precious little about the Follett in particular, I know, I know. Here goes.
Alphabetical entry makes it easy to use. Opening at random to antecedents, for example, leads to fully realized essays on nine types of antecedent problems and how to resolve them. The following essay on apostrophes tells you everything you need to know about the little buggers, no more and no less. This is the reference book every American writer should have at his or her fingertips.
Thanks, Mom, thanks, Dad.
The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. The slimmest little volume you never heard of until you decided to try writing and somebody said you might want to check out this book. Eighty-five pages of dynamite, good to dislodge those stubborn bad habits. Of course, if your own writing mistakes are too stubborn for even Strunk & White, then go do Your Own Thing and leave us alone. It's the granddaddy (ou grandmère, s'il vous plait) of writing guides. Ignore it at your peril. By the way, did you hate being subjected to French just now? Kind of make you bristle? From p. 81 - "Some writers sprinkle...with foreign expressions...with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English." My bad! Their good, er, they're good!
We'll be right back after the break. I Love this expression from public radio. I often don't love what follows, especially if it's a promo for a station I don't like or a program I don't like, and too loud to boot. But the concept is excellent, a natural marker recognizing that thought can pause, that discourse need not be seamless to be good. The best of these refresh the mental palate, like a sorbet before the main course. Michael Feldman's program Whad'Ya Know does us the favor of using live jazz, piano and bass, throughout each broadcast. The breaks treat us to a minute or so of fine music before we get back to the comedy and quiz questions. At least, that is, when the big cheeses don't obliterate it with a promo for the Hockey Channel.
We're back.
Modern American Usage, by William Follett, revised by Erik Wensberg. Originally published 1966, revised edition 1998. Best I can remember, the original edition was a gift from my parents before I went off to college, which means the book had only been out a year or two when they laid it on me, as we used to say in those days. How did they know? I've often been guilty of thinking my parents were a lot like other parents, but with minor differences. Giving a brainy teenage boy Modern American Usage doesn't qualify as a minor difference...this is real Baby Einstein territory, I see now from my own adult perspective. The Baby Einstein reference suggests a kinship with those parents who play Mozart for their pre-verbal tykes, that sort of thing. In the case of my parents, it often took the form of not stopping me, simply getting out of the way while I strew breadcrumbs left and right in hopes of finding my way back...eventually. But active involvement was there, too. Just as when Dad gave me The Best of S.J. Perelman at the age of 10, or giving me a full-size Random House Dictionary at about the same time as the Follett, this was more major than minor.
An awful lot about what the gift of a book can mean, but precious little about the Follett in particular, I know, I know. Here goes.
Alphabetical entry makes it easy to use. Opening at random to antecedents, for example, leads to fully realized essays on nine types of antecedent problems and how to resolve them. The following essay on apostrophes tells you everything you need to know about the little buggers, no more and no less. This is the reference book every American writer should have at his or her fingertips.
Thanks, Mom, thanks, Dad.
Jun 22, 2010
Define your terms
I thought the phrase "First, define your terms" might have come from Plato but didn't know how to find out. Google to the rescue! Turns out it was from Voltaire, and actually went "If you would converse with me, define your terms."
Seems that we routinely insert "first" much the way we add "again" to that movie line from Casablanca, "Play it, Sam."
At any rate, a Wikipedia quote archive came up first in Google and I found it very interesting. It's informal even by Wiki standards, often in a question-and-answer collaborative process. Those who dislike the utter lack of centralized control endemic to Wikipedia should have nothing to complain about here, as it's obvious that no one is posing as an expert.
Not content to take this on faith, I Googled the phrase "Voltaire define terms" (without the quotation marks) and came immediately to quotations on http://www.thinkexist.com/. The relevant page not only confirmed the wording of the quote, but went on to list many other thought-provoking quotes from the French philosopher.
I had known he was responsible for saying he would defend to the death your right to say things he disagreed with, but hadn't thought about it in a long time. What I hadn't known was just how many wise and wonderful things he did say, and how well-collected and well-presented they are on this web site.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/420322 My Google search also yielded a good page from JSTOR, a scholarly repository I had visited before, but forget why. This article by Darius M. Rejali, a Reed College political scientist, is entitled Define Your terms! Dictionaries, Medievals, and Thinking About Concepts. Only the first page is available without logging in and I think that login is free, unlike some scholarly sites, but I didn't pursue it just now.
http://stackblog.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/define-your-terms-such-as-say-jesus/ Then there was this excellent blog post from John Stackhouse, a professor at Regent College, University of British Columbia. He explains that although most Canadians check the box for "Christian," most have an unclear picture at best of who Jesus was. This is discussed without religious fervor but in the academic sense, that in this instance as in any other, it makes no sense to try to discuss something without comprehension of principal salient points.
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/02/define_your_ter.html
Caution: explicit language. My search also turned up this blog post at the other end of the spectrum, in a sense. Blogger Greta Christina observes that reports of a study on teenagers and oral sex fail to distinguish between fellatio and cunnilingus, and eventually decides that it is the former that is really being discussed but not the latter. This post elicited several interesting replies. The point is well-taken that without "defining terms," the study's conclusions are without much meaning.
All of this harks back to a question raised in my mind by the way we define words. The Meaning of Everything, as it described 70 years of writing for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary by volunteer conrtibutors, showed that it can be done, but that it requires consensus rather than submission to authority.
Which brings me full circle to the Wiki page on Voltaire's quote, and the following quote by John Locke added by one of the people responding to the initial question about defining terms:
The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition; the names of all complex ideas are. It has not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words are, and what are not, capable of being defined; the want whereof is (as I am apt to think) not seldom the occasion of great wrangling and obscurity in men's discourses, whilst some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined; and others think they ought not to rest satisfied in an explication made by a more general word, and its restriction, (or to speak in terms of art, by a genus and difference), when, even after such definition, made according to rule, those who hear it have often no more a clear conception of the meaning of the word than they had before.
Cited by Rowena Cherry from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Book III, chapter 4. She mentions that she has studied both Voltaire and Locke. I now remember having read Locke and Paine and many others while at Duke University, and thinking at the time that Locke must be one of the smartest people who ever lived. There's nothing in the above quote to make me change my mind.
Seems that we routinely insert "first" much the way we add "again" to that movie line from Casablanca, "Play it, Sam."
At any rate, a Wikipedia quote archive came up first in Google and I found it very interesting. It's informal even by Wiki standards, often in a question-and-answer collaborative process. Those who dislike the utter lack of centralized control endemic to Wikipedia should have nothing to complain about here, as it's obvious that no one is posing as an expert.
Not content to take this on faith, I Googled the phrase "Voltaire define terms" (without the quotation marks) and came immediately to quotations on http://www.thinkexist.com/. The relevant page not only confirmed the wording of the quote, but went on to list many other thought-provoking quotes from the French philosopher.
I had known he was responsible for saying he would defend to the death your right to say things he disagreed with, but hadn't thought about it in a long time. What I hadn't known was just how many wise and wonderful things he did say, and how well-collected and well-presented they are on this web site.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/420322 My Google search also yielded a good page from JSTOR, a scholarly repository I had visited before, but forget why. This article by Darius M. Rejali, a Reed College political scientist, is entitled Define Your terms! Dictionaries, Medievals, and Thinking About Concepts. Only the first page is available without logging in and I think that login is free, unlike some scholarly sites, but I didn't pursue it just now.
http://stackblog.wordpress.com/2007/01/19/define-your-terms-such-as-say-jesus/ Then there was this excellent blog post from John Stackhouse, a professor at Regent College, University of British Columbia. He explains that although most Canadians check the box for "Christian," most have an unclear picture at best of who Jesus was. This is discussed without religious fervor but in the academic sense, that in this instance as in any other, it makes no sense to try to discuss something without comprehension of principal salient points.
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/02/define_your_ter.html
Caution: explicit language. My search also turned up this blog post at the other end of the spectrum, in a sense. Blogger Greta Christina observes that reports of a study on teenagers and oral sex fail to distinguish between fellatio and cunnilingus, and eventually decides that it is the former that is really being discussed but not the latter. This post elicited several interesting replies. The point is well-taken that without "defining terms," the study's conclusions are without much meaning.
All of this harks back to a question raised in my mind by the way we define words. The Meaning of Everything, as it described 70 years of writing for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary by volunteer conrtibutors, showed that it can be done, but that it requires consensus rather than submission to authority.
Which brings me full circle to the Wiki page on Voltaire's quote, and the following quote by John Locke added by one of the people responding to the initial question about defining terms:
The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition; the names of all complex ideas are. It has not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words are, and what are not, capable of being defined; the want whereof is (as I am apt to think) not seldom the occasion of great wrangling and obscurity in men's discourses, whilst some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined; and others think they ought not to rest satisfied in an explication made by a more general word, and its restriction, (or to speak in terms of art, by a genus and difference), when, even after such definition, made according to rule, those who hear it have often no more a clear conception of the meaning of the word than they had before.
Cited by Rowena Cherry from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Book III, chapter 4. She mentions that she has studied both Voltaire and Locke. I now remember having read Locke and Paine and many others while at Duke University, and thinking at the time that Locke must be one of the smartest people who ever lived. There's nothing in the above quote to make me change my mind.
May 21, 2010
Modern parables
It's one thing to follow the breadcrumb trail out of pure curiosity. It's another to look for The Meaning of Life. Gratuitous capitalization, I know, is a way to mask sincerity with apparent cuteness, the sort of post-modern affected emotional distance perfected by David Letterman. But the meaning of life, to drop the capitalized pose, is after all a trail worth following.
I've always been more attuned to spiritual friends than to religious institutions. More than 20 years ago, friend Jim Shanley gave me a copy of a book called Joshua, subtitled A Parable for Today. It's by Joseph F. Girzone, who is not identified as a Catholic priest on the cover itself although I am told he is one.
A modern parable it is, a modern telling of the return of Christ. No burning bushes nor thunder and lightning, but simply a quiet, humble man who appears in a smallish town and... I'll leave you to read it yourself if you like. Just to say that the author's plainspoken style and the lack of sturm und drang grabbed me more and better than any amount of fist-shaking or Bible-thumping.
Fast-forward to the recent present. I had never forgotten the powerful impression this book made, but somehow never got around to re-reading it. Some time in the past five years, after what I think of as my intellectual rebirth, I finally read it again and was delighted to see it had lost none of its appeal. Just last week I got from the library two other books by Girzone, and plan to read them as soon as I finish a couple of other things.
A couple of years ago, another long-time friend, Charleen Crean, lent me a short but wonderful book that turned out to be another modern parable. In it, a successful man of business receives a mysterious invitation to dinner. Even though he suspects a trick played by friends, he pursues it only to find himself seated at a nice restaurant opposite Jesus Christ, dressed in a business suit and very much a modern man of the world. I want to re-read this as well and will have to get with Charleen to remember the title. I seem to recall that like Girzone, this author also wrote sequels, so I should be busy for a while.
But wait, there's more! (The return of cuteness, as the sincerity gets to be a bit much after a while.) A third friend, Brian Douglas, has introduced me to a world of ideas about the ways we worship together, and what has been happening to traditional churches. In our conversation he mentioned a book called Kicking Habits, and I asked to borrow it. Unlike my usual pattern of plowing through books helter-skelter, I'm reading this one a page or two at a time and really absorbing what is there.
Author Thomas Bandy holds a post with UCC Canada and was formerly a Methodist clergy in Illinois. He compares the way traditional churches are bogged down in committees, endless talk and constant meetings to the way addicts persist in destructive behavior even while they know it's not working. This book is letting me take what I've learned about the relationship of recovery meetings to the groups that coalesce around them, and see an analogy with religions and congregations.
I'm not sure where this branching of the breadcrumb trail will lead, but recently I found myself attending Sunday worship for the first time in several years. It was serendipitious, meeting a new friend and being open to his no-strings offer to tell me about his church. Thanks to him I met Pastor Renwick Bell, who seems to be a person I was ready to meet at this point in my life. Your imagination may lead you to picture him one way or the other, but you might be very surprised at the reality. Suffice to say that he and his congregation appear to be right for me right now.
I have an opportunity to use my music in ministry, not as a paid professional (which I did for many years as an organist and choir director) but as an individual. This is consistent with what I'm reading in Kicking Habits and with the spirit of the modern parables. I'll never get preachy, and I may not mention this topic again, but I'm glad to find that my spiritual life is growing alongside my renewed intellect.
Bonus breadcrumb: The Mitford books by Jan Karon. Episcopal priest Father Tim finds love and fulfillment in the small town of Mitford, unsurprisingly a lot like Karon's beloved hometown of Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Charleen introduced me to them on a visit to her home, surprised I had not even heard of them. I've read all of them two or three times and recommend them readily. She writes entertainingly, her characters are true to life, it's wholesome but never preachy. These are the kind of books that would make appropriate gifts for anyone from a hardboiled prison inmate to your white-haired granny. By coincidence, my friend Charleen's husband John is an Episcopal priest remarkably similar to Father Tim. John, you can expect an email alerting you to this post and to my renewed interest in spirituality, so look out!
I've always been more attuned to spiritual friends than to religious institutions. More than 20 years ago, friend Jim Shanley gave me a copy of a book called Joshua, subtitled A Parable for Today. It's by Joseph F. Girzone, who is not identified as a Catholic priest on the cover itself although I am told he is one.
A modern parable it is, a modern telling of the return of Christ. No burning bushes nor thunder and lightning, but simply a quiet, humble man who appears in a smallish town and... I'll leave you to read it yourself if you like. Just to say that the author's plainspoken style and the lack of sturm und drang grabbed me more and better than any amount of fist-shaking or Bible-thumping.
Fast-forward to the recent present. I had never forgotten the powerful impression this book made, but somehow never got around to re-reading it. Some time in the past five years, after what I think of as my intellectual rebirth, I finally read it again and was delighted to see it had lost none of its appeal. Just last week I got from the library two other books by Girzone, and plan to read them as soon as I finish a couple of other things.
A couple of years ago, another long-time friend, Charleen Crean, lent me a short but wonderful book that turned out to be another modern parable. In it, a successful man of business receives a mysterious invitation to dinner. Even though he suspects a trick played by friends, he pursues it only to find himself seated at a nice restaurant opposite Jesus Christ, dressed in a business suit and very much a modern man of the world. I want to re-read this as well and will have to get with Charleen to remember the title. I seem to recall that like Girzone, this author also wrote sequels, so I should be busy for a while.
But wait, there's more! (The return of cuteness, as the sincerity gets to be a bit much after a while.) A third friend, Brian Douglas, has introduced me to a world of ideas about the ways we worship together, and what has been happening to traditional churches. In our conversation he mentioned a book called Kicking Habits, and I asked to borrow it. Unlike my usual pattern of plowing through books helter-skelter, I'm reading this one a page or two at a time and really absorbing what is there.
Author Thomas Bandy holds a post with UCC Canada and was formerly a Methodist clergy in Illinois. He compares the way traditional churches are bogged down in committees, endless talk and constant meetings to the way addicts persist in destructive behavior even while they know it's not working. This book is letting me take what I've learned about the relationship of recovery meetings to the groups that coalesce around them, and see an analogy with religions and congregations.
I'm not sure where this branching of the breadcrumb trail will lead, but recently I found myself attending Sunday worship for the first time in several years. It was serendipitious, meeting a new friend and being open to his no-strings offer to tell me about his church. Thanks to him I met Pastor Renwick Bell, who seems to be a person I was ready to meet at this point in my life. Your imagination may lead you to picture him one way or the other, but you might be very surprised at the reality. Suffice to say that he and his congregation appear to be right for me right now.
I have an opportunity to use my music in ministry, not as a paid professional (which I did for many years as an organist and choir director) but as an individual. This is consistent with what I'm reading in Kicking Habits and with the spirit of the modern parables. I'll never get preachy, and I may not mention this topic again, but I'm glad to find that my spiritual life is growing alongside my renewed intellect.
Bonus breadcrumb: The Mitford books by Jan Karon. Episcopal priest Father Tim finds love and fulfillment in the small town of Mitford, unsurprisingly a lot like Karon's beloved hometown of Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Charleen introduced me to them on a visit to her home, surprised I had not even heard of them. I've read all of them two or three times and recommend them readily. She writes entertainingly, her characters are true to life, it's wholesome but never preachy. These are the kind of books that would make appropriate gifts for anyone from a hardboiled prison inmate to your white-haired granny. By coincidence, my friend Charleen's husband John is an Episcopal priest remarkably similar to Father Tim. John, you can expect an email alerting you to this post and to my renewed interest in spirituality, so look out!
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