Christmas Eve Eve Concert

I'm supposed to be showcasing my writing on this blog, but since we're about to embark on the first of our Christian calendar's two holy-days, I wanted do something unique that celebrates the faith uniting us.

And I thought, why not create an online concert for you dear readers, who faithfully trudge through my essays with me day in and day out?  I could share with you some of my favorite Christmas music, and the stuff you may not like you can just skip, proceeding to the next entry in this order of worship.  Don't worry - this music isn't all from old, dead composers.  Two of the pieces are quite new, putting a delicious twist on the assumption that "contemporary" needs to be flaky.

Just be forewarned: you might find yourself enjoying some truly great musical masterpieces!

Indeed, I invite you to consider this a worshipful experience.  Consider taking out about an hour of your day sometime this weekend to work your way through this playlist in a contemplative, yet celebratory fashion.

So, without any further ado, let us proceed with our virtual concert.  Just click the link on each music title.  Please be sure all other communication devices are either turned to "mute" or "off," and allow me to also remind you that any recording or photography during this concert is not permitted.

(That was a joke!)

And now, would you please join me as we invite the Lord's blessing on this time:

Invocation
"Oh great God, Whose incarnation we commemorate this season, help your people to worship you in spirit and truth, not just as we join in these praises to you, but as we continue throughout this weekend of celebration for your many good gifts to us, not the least of which is our very reason to be joyful, even your dear Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ, in Whose name we pray.  Amen."


Opening Fanfare
J. S. Bach, "For the First Day of Christmas (Part 1)" from the Christmas Oratorio


Contemplation
"Of the Father's Love Begotten" Divinum Mysterium by Aurelius C. Prudentius, 413 A.D., translated by John. M. Neale and Henry W. Baker

1. Of the Father's love begotten, Ere the worlds began to be, He is Alpha and Omega, He the Source, the Ending He, Of the things that are, that have been, And that future years shall see Evermore and evermore.

2. Oh, that birth forever blessed, When the Virgin, full of grace, By the Holy Ghost conceiving, Bare the Savior of our race, And the Babe, the world's Redeemer, First revealed His sacred face Evermore and evermore.

3. O ye heights of heaven, adore Him; Angel hosts, His praises sing; Powers, dominions, bow before Him, And extol our God and King. Let no tongue on earth be silent, Every voice in concert ring Evermore and evermore.

4. (Not sung on this recording, unfortunately) This is He whom Heaven-taught singers Sang of old with one accord; Whom the Scriptures of the prophets Promised in their faithful word. Now He shines, the Long-expected; Let creation praise its Lord Evermore and evermore.

5. Christ, to Thee, with God the Father, And, O Holy Ghost, to Thee: Hymn and chant and high thanksgiving And unwearied praises be, Honor, glory, and dominion, And eternal victory Evermore and evermore!


Anticipation
"Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence"


Incarnation
"Once in Royal David's City"


The Narrative
"From the Squalor of a Borrowed Stable" by Stuart Townend

Despite its sub-par audio quality and quaint aesthetics, I chose this video because the girls who are singing come from an African orphanage, helping to represent the global breadth of God's salvific plans through the incarnation of His Son.


The Invitation
"O Come, All Ye Faithful"


An Affirmation
Hector Berlioz, "The Shepherd's Farewell" from L'enfance du Christ

Thou must leave thy lowly dwelling, The humble crib, the stable bare. Babe, all mortal babes excelling, Content our earthly lot to share. Loving father, Loving mother, Shelter thee with tender care!

Blessed Jesus, we implore thee With humble love and holy fear. In the land that lies before thee, Forget not us who linger here! May the shepherd's lowly calling, Ever to thy heart be dear!

Blest are ye beyond all measure, Thou happy father, mother mild! Guard ye well your heav'nly treasure, The Prince of Peace, The Holy Child! God go with you, God protect you, Guide you safely through the wild!


Awe
"O Magnum Mysterium" from the ancient Matins for Christmas; this version composed in 1994 by Morten Lauridsen of Los Angeles, California

Latin text:  O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, jacentem in praesepio!  Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Christum. Alleluia.

English translation:  O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the new-born Lord, lying in a manger!  Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear Christ the Lord. Alleluia!

The abrupt ending of this video cuts out the concluding prayer, so I took the liberty of crafting the last sentence:

"Eternal God, Who made this most holy night to shine with the brightness of Thy one true Light, bring us who have known the revelation of that Light on Earth to see the radiance of Thy heavenly glory through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever, Amen.

"Christ, Who by His incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly fill you with peace and goodwill, and make you partakers in the joy of His love; and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be upon you and remain with you always. Amen."


Exultation
J. S. Bach, "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" and "Et in Terra Pax" from the Mass in B Minor

Yes, we have South Koreans singing in Latin!  The Gospel isn't just for English speakers, is it?  I hope I don't need to translate, but just in case, "gloria in excelsis Deo" means "Glory to God in the highest," and "et in terra pax" means "and peace on earth."


Ascription
G. F. Handel, "Hallelujah Chorus" from Messiah

(And yes, tradition dictates that you now rise to stand in honor of the King of Kings - even if you're in your living room at home.)

I've chosen our new friends in South Korea to lead us in Handel's penultimate worship song - literally with tears in my eyes - as I rejoice with saints around our world who are celebrating the birth of our Savior this weekend along with us!  They sing the famous text from the Hallelujah Chorus in their native language, yet we don't need a translator to join along with them in joyous proclamation that He whose incarnation we commemorate will truly reign forever and ever!

Hallelujah!
_____

S'No Leadership Fabrication

What is the definition of "leadership?"

If leadership can be defined as the ability to get good people to do great work, despite your own inadequacies, then this story will show I might be a good leader.

Otherwise... not so much.

Many Christmases ago, while living in New York City, I attended historic Calvary Baptist Church on Manhattan's West 57th Street, a major crosstown boulevard.  Desperate for Christian fellowship in the big bad city, I had joined the volunteers at Calvary's primary outreach to the city's singles, a Friday night coffeehouse ministry featuring contemporary Christian music.

I know - I know!  Contemporary Christian music has never been my thing, but as I said, I was desperate to connect with Christians of my own "age and stage" in a meaningful way.  And the Solid Rock Cafe, as the ministry was called - after the famous Hard Rock Cafe restaurant down the street - needed volunteers.

Plucked from Obscurity

Calvary in general, and the Solid Rock Cafe in particular, were wonderful microcosms of the city's diversity.  We had Abraham, a college student of Indian descent, who set up the lighting.  A professional photographer who set up the sound equipment.  A bona-fide, svelte fashion model with the Ford Agency who ran the kitchen (yes, the irony was incredible, because nothing she ever cooked for us was low-cal!).  Plus various other believers of all backgrounds, professions, and skin colors who filled in wherever they were needed.  Surprisingly, perhaps, considering the evangelical wasteland most of America's Northeast has become, almost all of the musicians we auditioned lived in and around New York City.  And while some were obviously better than others, I don't really recall us ever having anyone who was downright awful.

As it happened, a few weeks after I joined this group, the woman who'd been leading the ministry announced she was pregnant and would be stepping aside.  Amy had been one of the few married volunteers.  She and her husband had purchased a house out on Long Island, and now they were starting their family.  So everything was great.

Except that most of the other long-time leaders in the ministry who could have stepped into her shoes had defected from Calvary to join Tim Keller's fledgling church, Redeemer Presbyterian.  And although Calvary didn't mind former church members volunteering at the Solid Rock Cafe, church leadership wanted a Calvary member in charge for accountability reasons. 

One evening, while still living with my aunt in Brooklyn, I got a call from Amy asking me to consider taking over for her.  I was floored - I hadn't yet joined Calvary as a member, and I was still learning the ropes - but since I was eager to get further involved, I accepted.  Calvary's pastor who oversaw the ministry, an associate pastor named Ken, met with me and agreed with Amy's selection.  And since nobody else already in the ministry wanted the additional responsibility, they welcomed my promotion with open arms.  And probably a fair amount of relief that somebody else was willing to take over instead of them.

Hey - I was young and naive.  I didn't know until later about all of the intricate church politics at Calvary that squeezed Ken through the ringer sometimes.  Music-wise, Sunday mornings were strictly classical and traditional at Calvary, and I loved that about the church.  Yet even though I'd come from a church here in Texas that had gone completely contemporary, I didn't fully appreciate how threatened some of Calvary's long-time members were by the rock music going on downstairs every other Friday evening.

Off-Off-Off-Off-Off-Broadway

On coffeehouse nights, we'd set out a sandwich board sign on the broad sidewalk along 57th Street outside Calvary's thick, wood sanctuary doors.  We'd bring up a table from the basement's fellowship hall and collect a modest $5 cover charge right there in the narthex, often with the doors wide open - until Calvary's deacons decided (wisely, probably) that having a cash box right by an open door along a major cross-street in Manhattan wasn't the safest idea.  We later moved our welcome table back downstairs, to a mezzanine below the sanctuary near the fellowship fall, our usual coffeehouse venue.

When I say casual and understated, that's what our operation was.

One time, while sitting at the welcome table with the narthex doors opened to 57th Street, I watched as a few tourists strolled by (I knew they were tourists because they were strolling, not bustling).  They saw our sandwich board announcing "Solid Rock Cafe."  They stopped, shook their heads, and then lamented something about how even New York's Baptist churches were going to Hell in a handbasket.

That's why to this day, despite my strenuous objections regarding most contemporary Christian music, and my contention that "Christian rock" is an oxymoron, I try choose my words carefully.  During my tenure at the Solid Rock Cafe, I learned that there is a difference between the music and the hearts of its performers, even though sometimes that difference is difficult to discern.

At any rate, since I was in charge, I instituted a regular schedule of administrative meetings for the entire volunteer staff, so we'd all be on-board with what was taking place in the ministry.  Not that we did anything earth-shaking, but information is good for team-building, right?  I would draft agendas for our meetings, give everybody a copy, and we'd work through them at a steady clip.  In my youth and naivete, I thought that's how all church meetings ran, until Ken remarked that our meetings were about the quickest he'd ever endured during his years of church ministry.

And indeed, attendance at the meetings actually grew as more of our volunteers realized they were efficient and respected their time.  Somehow, we'd manage to address everybody's concerns and feedback without hopping onto a lot of rabbit trails - something I myself am woefully guilty of instigating during meetings for which I'm not in charge.

During one of these meetings, we came up with the idea of hosting a special Christmas concert for the Solid Rock Cafe, where we'd feature a catered meal and a major talent.  (That's show-biz lingo for a popular musician.)  We'd had large concerts before, with the likes of Kathy Troccoli and Scott Wesley Brown, but they were conventional productions in the sanctuary.  This time, we'd do something more intimate, with tablecloths and special lighting, making it more of an event than just a generic night out.

The first Christmas we sponsored this concert, featuring Calvary member and Broadway actor George Merritt, our concept was very well-received.  So the next year, we decided to take it a step further.

White Christmas in Fellowship Hall

Calvary's fellowship hall was like many Baptist fellowship halls - more functional than fancy.  To fix that, at least temporarily, we needed an inexpensive yet striking solution.

I learned that as a member of 57th Street's business association, which included such famous neighbors as the Russian Tea Room, Steinway Hall, and Carnegie Hall, Calvary had a standing offer for discounts from a fabric store down the block.  Apparently, 57th Street used to be part of New York's fabric district, and a few venerable shops remained nearby.

Remember, I was young and naive.  I came up with the wacky idea of completely covering our fellowship hall's drab off-white walls with yards and yards of white fabric, with maybe some silver thread in it to conjure up the idea of snowbanks with softly glistening flakes.  Ken's secretary went down to the fabric shop and selected what seemed like miles of white fabric with silver string woven into it, which the shop sold us for next to nothing(!).  No, it wasn't stylish fabric; I wouldn't have wanted to wear anything made out of it.  But it suited my idea, and the price was certainly right.  So the Thursday night before our Friday Christmas concert that year, I met with several volunteers after work to drape it around the room.

Except... all of the walls were concrete, covered by hotel-grade vinyl.  Duhh... it was a basement room, after all, and the walls were structural!  For some reason, I had assumed we could just tack the fabric discretely into the walls, but we quickly determined that we'd need a staple gun, or a hammer and nails.  But remember - this is New York City, a place where things like staple guns, hammers, and nails aren't necessarily in ready supply.  Fortunately, somebody with keys rummaged around in the locked janitor closets and found a huge hammer, and finally some small tacks.

We had a tall stepladder, which I, as the leader, proceeded to climb, so I could tack the cloth up against the cracks between the walls and the suspended ceiling.  Except, as you might imagine, the tacks wouldn't hold much weight for very long.  Oh, it was so frustrating, getting this shiny fabric put in place, only to have tacks fall out after you'd moved the stepladder along a few feet for another attachment job.

I've never been known for my patience.  I had a pounding headache and could barely breathe from an intense sinus infection.  I was tired, I hadn't had any dinner, since I'd rushed uptown to the church from my office downtown, needing to project an image of responsibility and authority by being early for the project.  For some reason, none of us expected this to be a complicated endeavor.  Yet we were making no progress at all.

How many times I dropped that hammer onto the floor while trying to nail those small tacks, I can't recall.  We had enormous, surprisingly heavy bolts of fabric that I didn't want to cut - even though doing so would have made our job easier - because I wanted seamless rolls of the glistening white fabric wrapping around the room.

Finally, I dropped the hammer one too many times - into my face, as I was looking up - and it fell into my left eye socket, popping my glasses off of my nose.  The falling hammer pushed my glasses awkwardly into my face, bending the metal frames, and cutting a small section of skin around my eye.  I could immediately feel it turning black and blue.

Of course, the tack bounced to the floor below, followed by the hammer, so I asked my friends to pick them up for me so we could continue.  But standing on the tiled floor, they all looked up at me on the ladder, and told me that enough was enough.  It had been a good idea to decorate the fellowship hall so elaborately, but we were wasting our time trying to make it work.  We didn't know what we were doing, and by now, we'd wasted so much time figuring out that we didn't know what we were doing, that we'd run out of time to do anything right.  It was late, I'd nearly gauged my eye out, fabric walls weren't essential to the concert, and we all had to go to work in the morning.

Their logic was irrefutable, so ruefully, I concurred.  We fixed up a few other minor details in preparation for the next evening's event, turned off the lights, and went to our respective apartments.

No Dreaming of This White Christmas

At work the next day, my sinus infection made me miserable physically, but my ineffectiveness at our decorating efforts the night before humiliated me - even though nobody at the office had any idea about it.  The scar around my eye didn't turn out to be as bad as it looked Thursday night, and my co-workers didn't pay it any attention.  That notorious New Yorker jadedness can sometimes benefit a person!  I managed to make it through the day, so bundling up my dented pride, I ventured back uptown to salvage that evening's concert.

Tired, with throbbing sinuses and another empty stomach, I trudged up the steps from the Subway at 7th Avenue, across from Carnegie Hall.  I turned the corner and made my way down a blustery 57th Street to the church.  I pulled open one of the sanctuary's heavy wood doors, and plodded down the corner stairs to the fellowship hall, where I could hear my volunteers already bustling about in preparation for the evening's program.

What a reliable group of hard-working people, I thought with a weary smile.

I made my way through the mezzanine towards the balcony overlooking the fellowship hall, and there was Ken.  With two of my volunteer staffers, Krista and Michelle, who had been helping Thursday evening as well. 

And behind them I could see... a beautifully-decorated fellowship hall, swathed with glistening white fabric from floor to ceiling!

Ken was beaming.  Krista and Michelle were, too.  The two women had each taken the afternoon off from their jobs - one a teacher at a Park Avenue private school, the other an accountant for a major cosmetics company - to come in and figure out how to hang the fabric. 

Stunned.

I was stunned.  Floored.  Embarrassed.  Immensely grateful.  And then, proud.  Proud to have such friends, fellow servants in Christ, who would do such a thing.  Not for me, necessarily, although they said they really felt sorry for me after that hammer fell onto my face.

But they wanted our Christmas concert to be what we had envisioned it to be during our planning meetings - something special and unique.

When I tell people today, "some of the best friends I've ever had, I made when I lived in New York City," this is the caliber of people I'm talking about.

Follow the Leader

Throughout that evening, I remember patron after patron telling me they couldn't believe they were in the bowels of Calvary's bland fellowship hall!  We dined on a full-course gourmet meal prepared by a church member who used to own an exclusive catering firm.  Then another member of the church, who ran both a public relations firm and a cabaret-style singing career, provided the lush music for our concert.  And the room glistened not only with people enjoying themselves and being ministered to, but the faint twinkles of what - if you squinted hard enough - could have been snowflakes sprinkled along the softly-lit floor-to-ceiling fabric.

To this day, I still don't know how Krista and Michelle managed to hang that fabric and keep it on the walls without causing permanent damage.  I'm sure they told me, but I was too stunned and humbled for it to register.  Today, I thought of e-mailing Michelle, with whom I'm a Facebook friend, and asking her again, but I think I like keeping this part of the story a little mystery.  I have no recollection whatsoever of who took it down, either.  Usually, we were responsible for leaving fellowship hall looking like the Solid Rock Cafe had never taken place.

Actually, these days, I've become disenchanted with the incorporation of snow themes with Christmas.  Experts tell us that even though we don't know the exact time of year in which Christ was born, it most likely wasn't anytime in December.  Or even the winter.  And Israel rarely gets snow, even if it was.

Not only may European traditions of Christmas corrupt the historical integrity of Christ's birth, they may be getting increasingly irrelevant as more and more people in warmer climes around the globe learn about the Son of God.  People who have never even seen snow.  And have no idea how or why it figures into the Nativity.

Nevertheless, to me now, it's not so much that the fabric with the silver threads looked like snow on the walls of Calvary Baptist Church's fellowship hall.  It's that my friends thought it was a cool-enough idea to try and create the effect by quietly, willingly taking time off from work, and figuring out how to make it happen.

A really good leader might have forced themself to think up a way to make that happen on their own.  Or at least have done a bit more reconnaissance around the venue before determining an effective course of action.  Or maybe even pressured church maintenance workers to hang the fabric themselves, since they're the facility experts.

Ultimately, however, I'm satisfied with appreciating the fact that volunteer staffers, without being asked, were willing to make extraordinary efforts out of kindness, and with no guarantee of reward.

After all, that's what God wants in all of His true servants, right?

Whether we're called leaders or not.

And Abraham, my friend who quietly set up and took down the lighting for each coffeehouse?  After getting his doctorate from Dallas Theological Seminary, he's now the senior pastor at... Calvary Baptist, which is constructing a brand-new building on the same 57th Street site (this update written in 2024).

As if the caliber of our coffeehouse team needed any further embellishment!

I do wonder, however, what the walls of their new fellowship hall will be like.

_____

Logic Escapes Rogue Pro-Lifers

Logic.

It's something about which I write a lot.  Because it's incredibly important in life.

Yet apparently, logic can also be an inconvenient fact of life.  As the abortion war heats up again, some conservative activists seem to be using less logic than raw emotion.

Probably because emotion makes them feel like they're doing something, even when they're not.

First we had the Personhood Movement that voters in Colorado and Mississippi have thankfully defeated three times.  Personhood advocates hoped that declaring a fertilized egg as a legal person would force an end to abortions in those two states.  And that the inevitable legal wrangling between the poorly-worded Personhood legislation and federal laws stemming from Roe v. Wade would magically align on the side of life.

It wouldn't.

Now we have a Heartbeat Bill in Ohio that rogue pro-lifers insist will accomplish what the Personhood Movement could not.

But still, they're fighting the right battle in the wrong place.

Righteous Impatience or Impertinence?

I call them "rogue" pro-lifers because several of their leaders have splintered from the venerable National Right to Life campaign that has been working with the United States Council of Catholic Bishops for over four decades to eliminate legalized abortion.  These rogue pro-lifers have become frustrated with the slow pace of legislative action on the national front, so they've got it into their heads that attacking the abortion scourge will go faster if they trigger a legislative crisis on the state level.  And to do that, they've got to find a state that can pass some sort of bold pro-life law that flies in the face of an over-ruling federal amnesty for abortion.

The hope - and it's a long-shot kind of hope - is that the quandary created by conflicting state and federal laws on abortion will lob the issue up to the Supreme Court for a victorious defeat of Roe v. Wade.  But there's hope, and then there's logic.  Hope is one thing; getting a group of judges to rule in your favor is quite another.

Of course, this isn't the first time right-wing evangelicals have worked themselves into a lather over the pace of change in the United States.  Witness the Tea Party movement, which has scored some significant victories at the ballot box with the help of hefty numbers of evangelicals, but has pretty much only managed to foment one of the most intransigent, unproductive, and bitterly-divided governments in American history.

Granted, the Heartbeat Bill has better logic behind it than the Personhood Movement.  Banning abortions upon the detection of a fetal heartbeat is a more conventional legal approach, it doesn't tinker with the legal definition of a "person," and it's far more definitive in terms of what it does and doesn't do.  In other words, prohibiting an abortion on a fetus with a heartbeat is pretty frank and uncomplicated, whereas the Personhood legislation left many associated laws in limbo.

In fact, if it weren't for the pesky little fact that state law doesn't trump federal law, I wouldn't have any problem with the Heartbeat Bill.

But state law does come second to federal law, and that's the critical flaw in Ohio's Heartbeat Bill.  Abortion is not a states rights issue, just as murder of people outside of the womb is not a states rights issue.

And because we haven't yet seen a miracle in the abortion war even as people of faith have been unified against it, I have a hard time understanding why God would bless rogue pro-lifers with a miracle after they force division in an otherwise rightly-focused campaign.

Abandoning Grace for Gusto

Frankly, I'm not aware of everything the National Right to Life committee and the Council of Catholic Bishops have been working on to weaken - and indeed, eliminate - Roe v. Wade.  Have they made bad decisions during these decades of methodical advocacy for the unborn?  Most likely.  Has the process been mercilessly slow?  Yes.  Do evangelicals have a right to be frustrated at the pace of progress?  Of course.

But welcome to reality, people.  How many times does it need to be said that we cannot legislate morality?  Wouldn't a better tactic be to approach the overthrow of Roe v. Wade through cogent, legally practical, and purposefully cohesive tactics?  Tactics that will create a solution that can withstand whatever further legal challenges pro-choicers will attack it with?  It seems as though Ohio's rogue pro-lifers think a miraculous Supreme Court victory is not only a fait accompli, but a final hearing on the matter.  In order for abortion to be abolished permanently, we need a solid legal argument; not something slapped together with legal cracks pro-choicers can turn around and wrench apart.

After all, it's not even like the pro-life movement is on its last leg.  The Gallup organization has numbers suggesting that Americans may be getting increasingly intolerant of abortion on demand.  Although pro-lifers now comprise about 51% of the population, and that's still too few to mount a Constitutional change, it's already a step in the right direction.  We may actually be winning this fight in the court of public opinion!  Might creating factions within the pro-life camp now simply risk the unity that's gotten us over the 50% hump?

Remember, no state law banning abortion will be effective as long as Roe v. Wade is the law of the country.  But just as rogue pro-lifers say hope is all they've got with these legal shots in the dark, progress on the federal level is not beyond hope, either.

Before threatening to undermine decades of diligent work to overturn Roe v. Wade, rogue pro-lifers must consider whether their petulance and arrogance is even Biblical.  Can they identify anything anybody at National Right to Life has done that has defamed the cause of Christ?  Anything that has irreparably set back the pro-life movement?  Anything that could spell the imminent demise of the many pro-life pregnancy centers across the country currently ministering to desperate women and their impregnators and sharing the Gospel of Christ with them?  After all, just making abortion illegal won't stop unwanted pregnancies, will it?  And the fact that we're having an epidemic of unwanted pregnancies is the real problem here, not just the fact that it's presently legal to kill those unborn unwanteds.

We have enough factions, infighting, hurt feelings, and ineffectiveness within evangelical Christianity already in the United States without balking now, causing schisms within a hardworking group like the National Right to Life, and seizing on illogical attempts to ramrod half-baked legislation through a Constitutional system like square pegs through round holes.

I don't have any loved ones working with the National Right to Life organization.  I'm not sure that if I knew everything they did - and how they did it - I would affirm it all, but I know they've been diligent servants on this issue longer than I've been alive.  If that makes National Right to Life too out of touch with how to get legislation done in Washington, then somebody besides short-term-thinking rogue pro-lifers needs to prove it.

Christ wants unborn lives protected even more than we do.  He also wants us to live in peace with each other.  As long as legitimate efforts at overturning Roe v. Wade on the federal level are proceeding, what right do we have at causing dissension over something that stands an overwhelming chance of not working in the long run?

Some rogue pro-lifers would probably counter that in order to capitalize on that small chance of the Supreme Court tightening access to abortions, we need to pray our socks off for the Lord to make that happen.  Yet I ask you:  do you think believers haven't already been praying their socks off for the sake of the unborn at the hands of Roe v. Wade?  Why do you think the Lord hasn't already answered those prayers?  What makes attempts at undermining years of diligent legal maneuvering a more righteous prayer request than those diligent legal maneuverings you're trying to undermine?

Might we need to remind ourselves Whose battle this is?  God knows the heart within each one of us.  He knows the hearts of those desiring to protect the unborn through prudent application of the law, and He knows the hearts of those desiring to protect the unborn through reckless applications of legal interpretations.  The former appear to have faith that God is in control, while the latter appear to have faith that God can fix their mistakes.

Trouble is, although God always forgives us, He doesn't always fix our mistakes so that we don't have to live with the consequences.  If the consequence of poorly-crafted attempts at subverting Roe v. Wade end up backfiring in the Supreme Court, do we really want to live with those consequences?

For that matter, could the unborn?
_____

Shall the Circle be Unbroken?

So much for the first Monday of Advent this year.

I had hung our usual Christmas wreaths on our house last Friday.  One on the front door, one on the brick post between the garage doors, and a big one - about five feet wide - between two front windows.  The big one has about 400 white lights on it that look elegant at night.

Except that as I drove away to a dinner party Saturday evening, I noticed that one section of the lights on the big wreath were off.  Creating a black, gaping chunk in the circle of elegant white dots, like an incomplete "G".

Rats!

So this morning, assuming the fix would be as easy as replacing a burned-out bulb, I went out with some spares and found what I believed to be the miscreant bulb.  And replaced it.

No good.  Half of the strand still wouldn't light.

Two hours later, and about a dozen of those itty-bitty fuses that I'd popped in the process, I managed to get the lights working... as much as they had been before I started my little project.  Along the way, I'd managed to short out half of the wreath, and had to figure out what fuses I'd blown where to get back to the functionality I had two hours earlier.

I'd also cut wires around what I refused to admit might not even be the miscreant bulb - could some other short somewhere be the culprit? - and spliced together the wires in several combinations before managing to find something that wouldn't pop even more fuses.  In retrospect, I suppose I should be grateful that along the way, I didn't take my neighborhood off the grid for a little while, although I did touch live wires more often than was probably good for me.

But hey - they were only little jolts.

So after two hours and only just managing to salvage the project to the point where I'd begun, with only the short section not working, I figured that my only available option would be to unwind the section of lights from the wreath, buy a new strand at the hardware store, and replace the lights.

Except that when I started unwinding the existing strand, I discovered that little green clips were holding each light in place.  Did I mention that this wreath was pre-lit, or pre-strung, or whatever they call it?  Back when I'd been employed, several years ago, I'd paid about $100 for this pre-lit wreath, figuring it would save all the hassle of trying to string lights on a large wreath by hand.  Considering how planned obsolescence is built into everything these days, maybe the several years we've enjoyed this wreath has been longer than its manufacturers had hoped it would last anyway.

But getting back to those little green clips.  Each one was doing its noble job exceptionally well - keeping the wires for each light tightly bound to its fake evergreen branch.  Even though they were plastic, they were surprisingly sturdy, and before long, I realized I was stripping most of the flimsy, fire-retardant evergreen leaves off of the branches as I wrestled with removing the clips.

Who'd have thought de-lighting a wreath would be so destructive a process?

I ended up getting my clippers and snipping the electric wires around those lights I'd been working on, so as to minimize the overall damage to the wreath.  Forget the lights, I figured; we'll save money on electricity, and the wreath can still look nice for anybody who sees it during the day.

Plus, my father has never liked Christmas lights on houses.  Reminds him too much of tacky Coney Island, he says.  And quite frankly, from my many memories of Christmases spent in Brooklyn, I know what he's referring to.  Row houses boasting garish displays of blinking lights and cheap plastic illuminated ornaments in each window would line the streets, assaulting passers-by with a dizzying spectacle reminiscent of the midway at Coney Island or even Times Square.

Not that my one large wreath could mimic those gaudy Brooklyn displays.  In fact, compared with the light displays some people here in Arlington pay professionals to install each Christmas, it could almost be considered insignificant.  So, I guess this year, when darkness falls each evening, and my three wreaths become shrouded by night, passersby won't have a clue that they even exist.

That's not the worst thing in the world, is it? At least, with all the lights off, the circle is unbroken.

I was never interested in giving the legendary Clark Griswold any competition anyway.
_____

Tuesday Update: A neighbor with whom I shared my plight took it upon herself to purchase some new strands of white lights for me when she was at a hardware store last night! So yes, the circle will be unbroken yet again.

Over Rivers and Through Woods

The rivers were stern and steely.

The woods dark and bleak.

Over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house in Maine was never as enjoyable at Thanksgiving time as it was in the summertime.

Granted, we usually didn't visit Maine during the summers, since the weather then was conducive for my grandparents driving to upstate New York, where we lived when I was a boy.

And isn't there something genuinely American about spending this very New England of holidays in, well, New England?

So my parents would excuse my brother and me out of school on the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week, and we'd spend the day driving down the New York State Thruway from Oneida, across the Hudson River somewhere either above or below Albany, through the quaint New England countryside, to the sprawling Piscataqua River dividing New Hampshire from Maine, and on into the lonely, remote Pine Tree State.

By then we'd be approaching dusk. Maine's namesake trees, lining the state's Turnpike like weathered warriors standing at attention, would seem even taller when my father turned off of the freeway - our last link to modern civilization - and onto the even more rural roads leading to Sedgwick, along the rocky Atlantic Coast.

Those spindly, oblong triangles in their shadows of dark greens and grays rushed alongside our car as we bounced over narrow, poorly-maintained roads, pock-marked and rutted by freezing winters and incessantly wet summers.  My grandfather worked for the state's highway department, and it wasn't until I was an adult and I realized how poor Maine was, and how brutal its climate, that I appreciated how the hard work my family claimed he put into his job really was hard, dreary work.  Just to keep the roads as good as they were!

By the time we reached my grandparent's tidy, tiny house between Sedgwick and Sargentville, the sky was inky black.  There were no streetlights, and if there was no snow, the landscape would be as black as the sky, so you couldn't tell where earth ended and the heavens began.

Morning's light - what light there was at this dreary time of year - would reveal a splendid view of the reach, the wide body of water between the mainland and Deer Isle, a couple of miles away.  Even though my grandparents lived across the road and up a broad field from the shore, the view aways captivated me, the rhythmic lapping of the waves and tides almost soothing in their dependability.

Of course, my grandparents did have electricity, but otherwise, visiting them always seemed an exercise in Spartan living.  For years, they didn't have a television - not even a black-and white.  I remember they used to have a party line telephone, which meant than whenever somebody along their line got a call, everybody knew it.  One ring was so-and-so, two rings was Mrs. Somebody down the road, four rings was that family that ran the home heating oil company.  Grammie and Grampa's was three rings.  We had to wait and listen for the number of rings to know if you had to answer the phone, and everybody was on the honor system regarding each other's shared privacy.

We'd have a feast for sure on Thanksgiving day, even if my brother and I were quite bored with those early years of no television.  But then, my own parents didn't buy one until I entered Kindergarten and came home one day, asking them who Mr. Rogers was.

My grandfather had a large tool shed reeking of musty age, with virtually every board built into the place looking like it was older than Moses.  This being near the salty sea, all the iron - from nails to infrequently used tools - were rusty.  But he had fascinating stuff in there, illuminated only by ancient windows with wavy glass that people prize today for its historic aesthetic.  Some of his tools were certifiable antiques, stacked in corners in the dark, where even in the middle of a sunny afternoon, you couldn't really make out what lurked in the shadows.  There's a fine line between intrigue and spooky, and usually it didn't take me very long to let the latter win out over the former, and I'd leave my father and grandfather to their guy talk inside that shed.

A narrow, shallow brook came down from the hills behind their house and meandered over past the side yard, eventually ducking under the road and dipping down along the meadow across the road down to the reach.  Along its course through my grandparent's back yard, I could sometimes stand on its icy top while still watching the water run freely below me.  Every now and then, the ice really wasn't thick enough, and my foot would slush through, sinking to the sandy bottom of the brook, usually a mere six or ten inches down.  Enough to get my foot and leg wet up to my knee, yet without getting dirty enough to make my Mom really mad when I went indoors.  There was a simple bridge, of course, that I could have used to cross the brook, but what fun would that have been?

Relatives and family friends would stop by to see us, since back then, a lot of people in town knew my Mom and her family.  There were only about 500 people in an area almost the size of Brooklyn.  Nowadays, everybody except about a dozen people is a stranger to Mom, since most of the homes owned by the old-timers have been sold to summer residents and people "from away."

Since we'd be going to my Dad's side of the family at Christmastime in New York City, we'd celebrate Christmas with my grandparents on Thanksgiving night.  The presents my brother and I received from them were never tremendously exciting, contrary to the loot we'd haul in from my Dad's mother and sister in Gotham.  No, my grandparents not only had little money, they had little choice in terms of stores to shop. 

Back then, as now, Sedgwick managed with just a small village store for the bare essentials.  The next-closest town, Blue Hill, about fifteen minutes away, had a venerable dry goods shop, plus a drug store.  After Blue Hill came Ellsworth, another fifteen minutes away, which boasted a Dunkin' Donuts and a few medium-sized stores. Nevertheless, this being Maine, even their selection tended towards the practical, not the fun or luxurious.

One year, my brother and I each got a brand-new metal wastebasket.  Another year, we each got a used steel toolbox with some equally-used screwdrivers and wrenches in them.  Yet somehow, my brother and I never seemed too disappointed with the austerity of those Christmases.  Partly, probably, because we knew we'd be spoiled rotten the next month in Brooklyn.  But maybe also partly because my parents would give us a strict lecture at some point on that boring drive into Maine about understanding Grammie and Grampa weren't made of money and we need to be thankful for whatever we received.

It wasn't like they gave us coal, either, was it?  I mean, a wastebasket isn't glamorous, but every time I threw something away in my bedroom back home, I'd remember my grandparents.  Sometimes I'd even second-guess whether what I was throwing away couldn't be repurposed somehow.  Like my grandparents themselves would do with a lot of things.  And I still have the toolbox, minus most of those original tools, here in Texas.  It was certainly one of the more masculine gifts I've ever been given, even if any hopes Grampa may have had that I would become a handy Mr. Fixit were wasted.

Demanding physical labor was a hallmark of my grandparents' generation, particularly in impoverished places like Maine. Neither men nor women there, even if their tasks fell along gender-specific lines, enjoyed many of the innovative employee benefits other Americans won from the Industrial Revolution.  What days off and vacations Mainers had were rarely filled with recreational pursuits.  In the spring, there were vegetable gardens to be planted, and then weeded in the summers.  In the fall, there was wood to be cut, and in the winters, snow to shovel. From the roof. Not to mention fishing, clamming, and hunting - not for sport, but for food. And that was for people who didn't own farms.  Farmers had even more work.

Nobody had new cars there except the summer people.  Store-bought clothes were status symbols.  Yet houses were usually crisply painted, yards neatly trimmed, and the food incredibly delicious.  Grammie made the only soup I've ever really liked - a chicken broth with rice and vegetables that my Mom, Grammie's daughter, has never been able to replicate.  Grammie finally got a gas stove, but she always relied on her old, black, cast-iron monster of a stove that squatted menacingly next to a well-worn dining table. Tiny squares of thick glass in its oven door glowed from orange fires that raged nearly constantly inside.

The warmth from that stove - heat, actually - could make you sweat even while a blizzard raged outside, with wind whipping snow and pellets of ice against the windows, and electricity - one of the few truly modern amenities in the house - flickering in fear of the maelstrom.

And my grandparents, well-worn Mainers seasoned by decades of such weather, serenely listening to music on the radio, playing board games with us, or waiting to hear from my grandfather's supervisor at the depot if roads needed to be plowed.  Three rings on the phone, and Grampa almost didn't need to pick it up to know his answer.  Grammie would instantly furnish a lunchbox with coffee and a hearty meal lovingly wrapped up inside, and off he'd go, into snow and ice and blackness, until the storm moved off to sea.

Grampa died during one of Maine's spectacular summer days, after he'd retired, sitting with Grammie in their set of hand-crafted Adirondack chairs, looking out across the road, down the meadow, and across the sparking reach.  The state's bitter winters are made tolerable by those few yet perfect summer days God bestows on the hardy folk of coastal Maine. Grammie had gone inside to get themselves something to drink, and she glanced out the kitchen window over the sink to the side yard, where she saw Grampa's head quietly, softly bow forwards.  And she knew he wasn't napping.

I still have those hand-crafted Adirondack chairs, still wearing their same old baby-blue-colored lead paint.  And whenever I see them, like whenever I saw that cheap metal wastebasket, I think of my grandparents.

I think of those dreary rides on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  I think of Grammie's delicious chicken soup, and that fearsome black stove on which she cooked it.  I think of my Grampa faithfully trudging off to plow deserted roads during yet another blizzard.

And I am thankful.
_____

Old Fashion Retailing

"There's no such thing as a short-sleeved dress shirt."

Years ago, I worked my way through college at an upscale mens' clothier called Jas. K. Wilson.  As you can tell, even its name was old-fashioned: "Jas" with a period is the old-English abbreviation for James. And it's not pronounced, as some people think, "jazz;" but voiced as the complete word, "James."

Being a traditional full-service store, we had such features as custom gift-wrapping, on-site tailoring, and full-time cashiers - things hardly any retailer offers today.  Our store staffed a full compliment of sales people on the floor, so customers didn't have to hunt for assistance.  We sent out thank-you cards to customers, and were expected to follow the old retailing mantra that "the customer is always right."

Even when they're wrong.

Okay, I added that last bit myself.  Except actually, when it came to the subject of short-sleeved dress shirts, we were allowed to point out the error of the customer's ways.  For years, when anyone erroneously assumed we'd carry such a garment as a dress shirt with short sleeves, we were allowed to politely advise him or her that truthfully, a dress shirt only comes with long sleeves.

Anything that looks like a dress shirt but has short sleeves isn't officially a dress shirt. Not even here, in our Texas heat.

Shopping is a Sport in Dallas

Jas. K. Wilson was eponymously named for a Dallas entrepreneur who'd built up a small chain of gentlemans' clothing shops, before selling them to Hart Schaffner and Marx, the Chicago-based manufacturer of handcrafted business suits.  Wilson rode an early wave of Dallas' population boom after World War II, and even though their original flagship location on Dallas' Main Street had long since closed before I started working for the firm, their location at north Dallas' NorthPark Center, one of the world's pioneering enclosed shopping malls, ran neck-and-neck consistently with the corporation's top stores in New York and Chicago.

In fact, when one CEO of Hartmarx, the corporate entity for Hart Schaffner and Marx, left to head luxury toy retailer FAO Schwarz, he contrived to boot the Jas. K. Wilson store at Northpark from one of the mall's most coveted spaces for FAO's new Dallas emporium.  At the time, it was a big scandal in our local retailing world.  I remember offering to help move the entire stock of our Northpark store from its prized, sprawling location to a hidden hole in another part of the mall - the only storefront available on such short notice.  What a ludicrous mess that was - trying to cram so much merchandise into so much smaller a space.

And such a slap in the face to a retailer with the legacy it had enjoyed for years in the Dallas area.

I started working in their Arlington store when I was still a junior in high school.  Back then, even though everybody else already had computerized cash registers, we wrote up every bill of sale by hand.  It could take forever!  And then we would turn around and peck the sale into a cumbersome, monstrous cash register. 

We had a dapper, elderly Black man who worked as the porter, making sure merchandise from our daily deliveries arrived onto the selling floor so we didn't have to get ourselves dirty in the stockroom.  When the gentleman retired, he was replaced by a part-time college student, just a few years older than myself.  But that didn't last long - the college student was a gregarious, fun-loving guy whose only flair for traditionalism was his frat house fraternizing.  And when he left, so did the position of porter in our store.  After that, we had to take turns wrestling with boxes and racks in the stockroom ourselves.

We all wore suits in those days - even the female employees.  Those were the heady days of newly-empowered career women, when ladies of the office began wearing stern black suits to announce the cracks in corporate America's glass ceiling.  We even had a small department off to the side of the store called "Corporate Woman," which featured grim, dark suits, tailored with the same craftsmanship as the suits we sold to men.  But we men weren't allowed to sell in the Corporate Woman boutique, although several female customers wanted one of our particularly handsome young salesmen to. 

Actually, that guy ended up dating country-western siren Tanya Tucker...

Mall Wars

Speaking of celebrities, I once got to utter those immortal words, "How may I help you?" to actor Charles Bronson when he wandered into our store one afternoon.  His wife was undergoing treatment at what had been an innovative cancer center here in town, and I guess he'd decided to see what our local mall looked like.  He didn't buy anything, but then again, when your spouse is suffering from cancer, clothes shopping is not especially a priority, especially for a husband.

(Store executives didn't like us to ask, "May I help you?"  That question can be answered with one word - usually in the negative - thus stifling further dialog.)

Our mall wasn't anything to wow an A-list Hollywood actor, anyway.  It was nice enough, for Arlington, as 1980's suburban malls went.  It was called "Six Flags Mall" after the six national governments Texas has had:  Spain, France, Mexico, the republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the United States.  It boasted all the national chain stores along one level, a subdued southwest design motif, and lots of palm trees and other plants that malls just don't spend the money on today.  We also had live plants throughout our store, professionally tended every week by a florist.  They added an appealing ambiance, nestled among racks of clothing, or decorating the opulent billiard table gracing the center of the store.

Unfortunately, as nice as Six Flags Mall was, it wasn't alluring.  So as Arlington continued to experience explosive growth, another mall was built several miles away.  And since new construction always draws a crowd, shoppers immediately flocked to the new mall from the day it opened.  Six Flags Mall's owners scrambled to construct a new wing and refurbish everything else, but it was too little too late.

Short-Sighted Selling

Our own store was caught in the fate that comes from failing to keep up with the new, too.  For all of the money Hartmarx spent on salaries for MBA-degreed buyers and executives, first at our divisional offices in Dallas, and then at our corporate headquarters in Chicago, they all failed to catch the increasingly popular business-casual phenomenon sweeping offices across America.

We salespeople heard about it from our customers, who were buying up our sportswear far faster than our suits, but our corporate bosses thought it was simply because suits cost more than khaki pants and golf shirts.  It was our fault for not pushing more suits.

That's the way things typically went at Jas. K. Wilson.  If we had a good month, it was because corporate had done things right.  If we had a bad month, it was because the sales staff had gotten lazy.  Never mind the fact that nobody I ever met from corporate had ever worked on a retail sales floor in their life.  They all assumed that their college business classes provided better insight on how customers buy than actual, personal experience.

I vividly remember the Saturday one of our local executives, Mr. M., a short, brusque man who never smiled except in condescension, came to our store to show us how to sell.  We staffers all hovered around like cowed schoolboys after one of our spitwads had accidentally hit the teacher.  And Mr. M., with his gruff, no-nonsense voice and stiff mannerisms, aggressively pounced on each and every soul who had the misfortune of walking into our store that morning.

He spoke so fast that customers couldn't understand him.  And he was deaf in one ear, so when customers asked him to repeat what he'd just said, he'd scowl, cock his head, and shoot back, "What?"

Mr. M. may have sold a shirt or two that morning, but not nearly enough to prove that he knew more than we did about selling stuff.  He left quietly and quickly at lunchtime, and when we'd realized he'd gone, we staffers felt like running out into the mall to invite our scared customers back into the store so they could now shop in comfort!

Don't Worry, Be Happy

By the time corporate realized the tide in office apparel had turned, and that business-casual was here to stay, it was too late for Jas. K. Wilson.  Our once-mighty Northpark store had died an ignominious death in yet another shell of a space.  Our new mall in Arlington had pretty much decimated customer traffic at Six Flags Mall, and several of our sister stores in the area were closing because of demographic shifts, as affluent customers continued to move further out into newer suburbs.

To avoid filing for bankruptcy protection, Hartmarx put all of its stores up for liquidation, so its legacy suit manufacturing division could be salvaged.  By then, none of us were surprised at that development, and we resigned ourselves to our fate.  

In the end, I wound up being the store manager at Six Flags the day it officially shut forever, which was indeed a somber event.  What few staffers remained filed out of the back door, I followed behind them, and gave the keys to the representative of the liquidation firm handling the closing.  The liquidators would return later and finish removing whatever hadn't already been sold off.

The next day, I drove to another store nearby and helped do the same thing with their liquidation.

What an inauspicious way for the revered Jas. K. Wilson legacy to end.  Not that being a clothing salesperson would ever have been my dream job.  And it wasn't a waste.  I never earned much, but what I did earn got me through college.  I learned a certain amount of tenacity, the satisfaction one can get from simple hard work, and how to think on my feet. 

After standing and walking around during an eight-hour workday, that's especially important.

Some Things Don't Go Out of Fashion

One of the elderly gentlemen with whom I had the privilege of working, Coy Garrison, would repeat himself often, and was just as hard of hearing as the younger Mr. M.  He also didn't see very well, despite his extraordinarily thick glasses.  Even after a customer would make a decision on, say, a shirt and matching tie, Coy would linger beneath a nearby light, straining to check and see if the two items really did go together. 

Because of his age, Coy assumed the position of elder statesman on our sales floor, and when business was slow (and even when it wasn't), he'd hold court along the dress shirt wall, with its white stucco arches, and rows and rows of glass display cubes, sharing bits of wisdom from his years in the business.

Of all those bits of wisdom he'd share, he'd repeat his unwavering belief that if they hadn't done military service, every person should spend at least a year in retail before choosing their lifelong career.

In retail, Coy argued, you meet all sorts of people, both as customers and co-workers.  And especially managers.  You have to learn personal initiative, be willing to educate yourself on the merits of any product, and how to share what you've learned with a person who may have had, up until that point, no interest at all in what you wanted to sell them.

And, perhaps most importantly, Coy taught that you weren't going to sell everybody what you wanted to sell them.  Which means selling or not selling isn't as important as how you do it.  Whether you sold them or not, Coy would always preach that you should conduct yourself with enough integrity so that you could go home at the end of the day with a clear conscience, so that you could get a good night's sleep, so that you could get up the next day to do it all over again.

Maybe not the most profound words anybody's ever said.

But no less true than there being no such thing as a short-sleeved dress shirt.

The bottom of an old advertisement I found online.
Merritt Schaefer & Brown and Frank Bros. were sister Hartmarx stores in our division here in Texas.

Fabricating a God Complex?

Maybe it's not Nero and his fiddle.

But by all accounts, our proverbial Rome is burning.  Yet Christo still insists $50 million worth of fabric draping a river in Colorado is good art.

Christo is the flamboyant, mononymous artist who borrows his name from my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  So when I first learned of his audacious stunts, like ringing whole islands with fabric, and erecting fabric gates in Central Park, I confess to already having been somewhat prejudiced against him.

Yeah, sure, Christ's name has been incorporated into a lot of personal pronouns, but never in such a singular fashion as flaunted by this egocentric fabric foister from Bulgaria.  I've tried watching video of him - and his late wife, Jeanne-Claude - explain their artistic altruism, and his narcissism simply made me wince.

Not that I don't have my moments of egocentricity, but if I ever get to sounding like him, somebody please slap some sense into me.

Going Over the River and Through the Woods

Meanwhile, The Artist Whose Name Is Borrowed From Our Redeemer has managed to secure an essential authorization from the United States Department of the Interior to install a new project entitled "Over the River."

He wants to hang a fabric roof over southern Colorado's Arkansas River.

You'll likely remember Christo's 2005 exhibition in Manhattan's grand Central Park, in which orange fabric curtains (or, in Christo's parlance, "gates") marched along pathways through the world's most famous urban Eden.  My aunt, then living in Brooklyn, and a friend took a cab through the park to see what everybody in town was talking about.  Their cabbie had already driven other fares through the park for the very same purpose, and readily affirmed my aunt's disappointment and boredom with all of the orange sheets flapping in the winter breeze.

How Much Fabric Can $50 Mil Buy?

Okay, so maybe art appreciation doesn't run in my family.

But appreciating the value of $50 million does.

Granted, it's a drop in the bucket compared with our national debt.  Or what President Obama raised last month for his re-election campaign.  But with unemployment anchored to nine percent, America's standard of living losing ground, and Greece and Italy threatening to bankrupt our planet, does spending this kind of money on this kind of whim - the whole installation is temporary, after all - really give Christo any bona fides as a rational human being?

After all, draping $50 million worth of cloth along six miles of a remote river doesn't do a lot to feed the hungry in Somalia, promote literacy in Sierra Leone, or pipe in clean water throughout Bangladesh.

Six miles?  Is that all $50 million will get Christo?

So let's agree that Christo isn't a very logical human being.  But then, how many artists are?  Even Christo himself calls his work "irrational and absolutely unnecessary."

Still, since this isn't an argument about the definition of art, just because I don't see the artistic merit in this project, does that mean it's a waste of money?  Besides, the $50 million is coming out of Christo's own pocket, so who am I to complain that the guy seems to have more money that sense?

For all I know, Christo may give away that amount and more every year to charity.

Even though something tells me Christo can't raise the kind of money he's spending on "Over the River" by giving stuff away.

Don't Think You and I Aren't Paying for Some of It

And speaking of giving stuff away, what's up with all of the bureaucratic government cow-towing towards his artistic pursuits?  Christo professes to enjoy the grueling process of eliciting support for his wild schemes from government agencies that should have far better things to do than make sure miles of cloth get wrapped around the public domain.  Christo has said that the pursuit of bureaucratic approval and public support is part of his art.

And you thought this was all his money!  Who do you think pays for the resources our various government agencies expend on Christo's ideas?  Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is quoted in the New York Times gushing about the $121 million in tourism dollars they predict "Over the River" will generate. What he won't point out is that your tax dollars paid for a four-volume Draft Environmental Impact Statement, completed in July 2010 by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, in preparation for Salazar's ruling this week.

Four volumes.  Full of government-speak on the merits of stretching cloth over six miles of the Arkansas River.

This isn't the only Christo project that's demanded excessive government review.  For example, back in the 1980's, no fewer than eight local, state, and federal authorities had to conduct their own impact studies before Christo could wrap fabric around eleven islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay.

Perhaps the fact that Christo's team hauled off 40 tons of garbage from the islands before floating their fabric around them compensated as a public service effort.

But how much public service comes with Christo's drive to improve nature with... man-made fabrics?
Granted, his stunt of wrapping Berlin's famous Reichstag was kind of cool, and even somewhat symbolic, considering the building's bitter history. He's also wrapped a bridge, which helped give him the idea for his current Colorado exploits.  But isn't there a big difference between shrouding in white fabric a building that millions of Jews despised, and stringing fabric along a rugged waterway in the Rockies?

What the World Needs is Fabric

Christo constantly crows about aesthetics and art, even when he insists on foisting human foibles of fabric onto some of the prettiest natural environments on Earth.  In addition to the eleven islands near Miami, Christo has strung his orange cloth across a Colorado valley, along hilly fields in California, and against part of Australia's rocky coastline.

As if fabric makes the whole world prettier.  Natural topography is nothing without draperies.  And rugged shores Down Under need a bit of softening-up.

He may not believe this, but Christo's Namesake made these valleys, hills, and shorelines as elaborate testaments to His mastery of creativity.  Can they really be improved upon?

If Christo is so keen on aesthetics, why does the beauty of nature elude him so?  Or does his own ego - and the infatuation of his ardent fans - propel him on flights of fancy?  It wouldn't be the first time an artist becomes consumed by their own supposed importance.

Remember, this is not a debate about the definition of art.  In actuality, might this be a lesson in real time about the Tower of Babel, and mankind's insatiable desire to be their own god?

To the extent the lesson of our own hubris can be reflected in Christo's appetite for the absurd and belief that mortal confections trump natural grandeur, then perhaps his latest attempt at bridging reality with contrivance provides a provocative metaphor for human life.

I believe the term is called "gilding the lilly."

Which means that if I went down to Calloway's Nursery and bought a live lilly, and melted down some gold jewelry to use as paint, I could probably accomplish - for far less money - what Christo thinks he will.

Because after all, I feel pretty confident in saying that considering all the things our world genuinely needs right now, it won't be a better place with either my gilded lilly.

Or Christo's.

I wonder if he plays the violin?
_____

For All the Saints

Halloween I do not like.

We established that yesterday.

But All Saints Day is today. And it is indeed a commemoration worth observing. In fact, if believers in Christ observed All Saints Day as much as they observed Halloween, my suspicions of Christians being more interested in fun than principle would be far less raw.

Basically, the purpose of All Saints Day draws on the victory Christ secured over death by His resurrection, and how that victory translates to our own mortality. Since everyone who is saved will, upon their death, be automatically in the presence of our Lord for eternity, what fear should we hold about dying?

"Death, where is thy victory," remember? "Grave, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin, and sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord, Jesus Christ!" (1 Corinthians 15:55-57)

Granted, "how" we actually die is still something of which I'm apprehensive. And you'd be hard-pressed to find Scripture that tells us the process of dying is something we should anticipate, or we shouldn't fight against. Doctors and medical science have been gifted by God to honor life, and the advances in prolonging life our researchers have been able to achieve come not at the hubris of mankind, but the kindness of God in the form of Common Grace.

Still, when our time comes, I think we'd all prefer drifting away to heaven while in a deep sleep, although few of us can hope to die that way. Nevertheless, the point is that no matter how we die, where we end up is not in dispute, or a dreadful place. Even if the streets weren't paved with gold, simply spending eternity in God's presence would certainly be far better than anything we could possibly experience down here.

Which brings us back to All Saints Day, where the emphasis isn't on a morbid bunch of corpses, but on the reality that life is not confined to flesh. Life continues regardless of what happens to our bones, skin, and organs. That's another reason why giddiness over Halloween is so unBiblically tainted, in my opinion. It's not the residue from human expiration that should fascinate us, but the fact that just as the grave could not hold Christ, it has no hold on us, either!

So don't let the over-Catholicised term "saints" throw you. If you've been bought by the blood of Christ, you're a saint, whether you always act like one or not. Saints exist to worship God and enjoy Him forever, which is exactly what those saints who've gone before us are doing in real time right now, in Heaven.

Paradoxically, while we look back at the example of the "Church Triumphant," as dead saints are euphemistically called, we also look ahead to our own glorification with the end of our journey through sanctification to the feet of Christ. In heavenly bodies. Forever!

I have to admit, though, that I really don't understand how this will all work out. But I'm in good company, because nobody else down here really does, either. Which doesn't matter, because God hasn't told us everything about how we'll transition from earthly bodies to heavenly bodies because we're supposed to trust Him to accomplish it.

Faith. Remember?

That's why observing All Saints Day can be so helpful, since faith is "the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). Honoring those saints who've already won their battles against flesh and the principalities of evil here on Earth helps us put into perspective the merits of God's love for us and the sacrifice of His Son. And helps remind us of the eternal reward for us saints, and all who follow after us.

A common hymn at Presbyterian funerals is "For All the Saints," a wonderfully appropriate tribute to the life God provides each of His children in their walk towards their Heavenly home. Consider its text here, and think about the saints in your life and family who've gone on before you, and the example you're setting for your loved ones as you continue your life journey even now.

After all, if the Lord tarries, someday, the church may be singing this song, and thinking about you as they do.

For all the saints who from their labors rest,
who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy name, oh Jesus, be forever blest. Alleluia!

Thou wast their Rock, their Fortress, and their Might!
Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well-fought fight.
Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true Light. Alleluia!

O may Thy soldiers faithful, true, and bold,
fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
and win with them the victor's crown of gold. Alleluia!

The golden evening brightens in the west.
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest.
Sweet is the calm of paradise the blest. Alleluia!

But, lo! There breaks a yet more glorious day;
the saints triumphant rise in bright array;
the King of Glory passes on His way! Alleluia!

From Earth's wide bounds, from ocean's farthest coast,
through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
singing to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: Alleluia!

For All the Saints - text by William Walsham How, 1864
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Reading the Magnolia Leaves

Photo 1: At least 2 leaves have managed to make their way through another "host leaf."

Photo 2:  Note the puckering of the leaves as they've poked through the "host leaf."

I've never claimed to be a botanist, and I'm not about to start.

But I'm pretty confident when I say that these photos I took today of the magnolia tree in my back yard depict a pretty rare phenomenon.

At least two leaves have managed to grow their way through another leaf, which I've decided to call the "host leaf."

In case you're not familiar with the grande dame of southern evergreens, the magnolia tree, let me introduce you. They're more commonly found in wetter southern states east of Texas, but a hardy variety has managed to survive in our scorching summer heat and raw winter freezes. The healthiest specimens benefit from a full profusion of branches - no trimming! - and a deep blanket of dead magnolia leaves underneath, just like an ordinary pine tree usually does best with a thick pile of pine needles around its roots.

Unlike the conventional prickly needles of northern evergreens, however, the magnolia features broad, oval-shaped leaves with waxy green tops and a brownish fuzz underneath. And it's amongst these leaves that the phenomenon I noticed today has taken place.

As a new magnolia leaf grows, I've noticed in the past that if an abrasion occurs on its waxy surface, a dead spot can form, and even create a hole through the leaf. Apparently - and again, remember, I'm not an expert - an abrasion of some sort formed on this host leaf, which could have even been a result of the constant rubbing of the other leaves, since they are close together in a clump at the end of a branch. Over time, the constant rubbing of these leaves nestled perpendicular to each other seems to have worn an abrasion through the host leaf, which then yielded a hole, through which the other two leaves have grown!

Either that, or some bored squirrel chewed a hole in a leaf and pulled through a couple of other leaves, just to kill some time.

At any rate, I think it's an extraordinary occurrence. Don't you? No moral analogy. No sermonizing or doctrinal exposition.

Just nature doing its thing, even if it's not exactly part of God's ideal plan for leaves on His magnolia trees. Usually, they're splayed along buoyant, long branches in little tropical-looking umbrellas of verdant green, making the tree almost shine after a thunderstorm, and looking lush even in winter - a sure reminder, as all evergreens are, that spring will be here soon enough.

Perhaps even in this natural display of God's Creation, however, some rambunctious and stubborn leaves didn't want to play by the rulebook. One of them stayed in place, refusing to budge as two other leaves rubbed against it for so long that they wore a hole in it.

And proceeded to grow through it!

Hmmm... maybe there's a profound moral in here somewhere after all. At least enough to admire how God's Creation both accommodates (the host leaf) and persists (the two other ones)? And how they do it so they both survive?

I'm not even sure I'm wired to do that!
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Go Start With God

It all starts with God.

Everything. Not only the beginning of our world, in Creation. But the way we live our lives and view our personhood.

How you brush your teeth in the morning. Whether you brush your teeth every morning. The color of summertime grass. The density of structural concrete. How long your commute to work took this morning. And your commute home this evening. Whether you even have a job. Or not.

Remember, all of these things start with God. How they end up is, in some grand theological mystery, due in part to the decisions, mistakes, and wisdom that you and I bring to our little patches of reality.

Yet how often do we get seduced into thinking that our actions towards every event in life are more important that the One Who set it all in motion to begin with? Whose sovereignty keeps it all controlled even today, even if our definition of control isn't His?

It's about at this spot where reformed theology becomes important, because I don't believe that any of us chooses Christ. God chooses us. Otherwise, God wouldn't be sovereign, would He?

And if God isn't sovereign, He's not the center of our universe.

Not that many of us remember that He is anyway, while we go about our daily lives. How often to we try and hammer little nuggets of God and His truth into our lives only when it's convenient, or helpful, or absolutely necessary, like in times of crisis?

Instead, shouldn't our lives - every bit of them - be flowing from His truth, His laws, His provision for our salvation, His plan for our sanctification, His promise of the Holy Spirit, and His eternal Kingdom?

I'm not talking about simply trying to fit Sunday church into your schedule. Or volunteer service opportunities.

We know we're not supposed to plan stuff and then ask God to bless it. But don't we spend an awful lot of time and energy living life with our holy Savior being an afterthought, an addendum, a pesky prickler of conscience, or an ambivalent go-with-the-flow kinda fun-loving Guy?

"Oh sure, it's all good!"

The older I get, and the more I realize how ill-equipped I am to live my life despite a college education and an otherwise proper middle-class upbringing in the world's greatest nation, the more I value the perspective of self-denial (Luke 9:23) and a lifestyle of permeating worship.

Not the singing and praying and sermonizing of Sunday morning liturgies, but cultivating a God-centric action plan for the way I think and act that recognizes the His primacy and truth in all of Creation.

Not even in some big, heady intellectual exercise or browbeating no-fun asceticism. Granted, what God has purposed for our good won't always jive with what our culture says is good, and some onlookers to my life may figure I'm a pretty dull, bitter, deprived individual.

Yet to the extent that I don't focus my lifestyle on the culture around me, won't I be better able to remind myself of the things I know and am supposedly still learning about God and what His intentions and gifts are?

Something like "where my treasure is, there my heart will be also?"  (Matthew 6:21)

Don't think I'm pontificating on something I've mastered. Or that since I'm further along in this lifelong exercise than you might be, I figure I'm qualified enough to slap you upside your head for not doing as good a job at this as I'm doing.  None of us will master this before we get to Heaven, and after that, I'm not sure it will matter, since we'll physically be with God.  And who knows how much further along I am in this journey than you or anybody else - and how many other people are even much further along than both of us put together.

It's a race that we run, yes, but we're not competing against each other. We're competing against a culture that the Devil hopes will seep into our souls. Yet how often is it easier to just flow with the culture downstream, when we're supposed to be going upstream? Pegging our journey in sanctification to the culture around us doesn't give an accurate reading of our progress. We're supposed to be pegging our journey in sanctification on Christ and His perfection.

Which doesn't change, like our culture does.

Indeed, the more I read, watch, hear, and experience religious stuff at church, online, in books and magazines, and even those few times when I make a stab at sharing my faith, I become increasingly cognizant of how cluttered our thinking has become in North America's evangelical community. Cluttered, and distracted, and many times downright mis-directed. It's like we're looking back at God along this journey, when we're supposed to be looking forward to Him.

Which is another grand paradox to the Gospel, too, isn't it? Everything starts with God.

Yet He is our leader, the One to Whom we look towards.

Kinda reminds me of the old benediction, "Go with God."

Go! With God.
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Speaking of Confession Suppression

Call it the attack of the oral orifice.

Sometimes, I think that hole in the front of my face is my own worst enemy.

The Book of Proverbs contains repeated warnings about controlling our tongues, watching what we say, and making sure everything that comes out of our mouths is wholesome and edifying.

Our speech doesn't necessarily have to always be pretty, or flowery, or bright, or soothing, does it? But it does need to be truthful, beneficial, and loving. All three, all the time.

Sometimes "truthful" and "loving" cancel each other out, don't they, and we end up not really talking much about a particular subject, even if we think our comments might be beneficial. At least to our audience!

I'm Not Sick! (At least, not physically)

One morning several years ago, during my devotions before going off to work, the Lord struck me with how unloving and careless my talk had been recently in the office. So I decided to try and put into practice the old adage, "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." That afternoon, I overheard a couple of my co-workers commiserating about my health, wondering if I was under the weather, since I had said almost nothing that day!

Fact was, every time I'd gone to open my mouth, I'd realized that what I was about to say wasn't nice, so I'd ended up not talking much at all! When I informed my co-workers that physically, I was fine - I was just trying to watch my mouth - we all had a good laugh, realizing how much all of us contribute to the negative vibes at work when we complain more than we encourage as we talk.

But even when I do things like explaining my silence to my co-workers, I risk offending others, because our world - both at work and at church - isn't geared for gentle admonishments about sinful behavior.

Can't Reel it Back In

I was reminded of that unfortunate reality this past Friday evening at a casual dinner party with church friends. As five or six of us were chatting about people in our denomination, I blurted out a blatantly unloving opinion about somebody I hardly know, and was immediately chastised - both by a dinner companion, and my own conscience.

Why had I said that? My opinion lent nothing to the conversation, didn't encourage anybody, and maligned a fellow believer in Christ for no reason whatsoever.

I shut up - painfully aware through both the corrections of my friend and my own conscience - that I was out of line, but my silence was misinterpreted as lack of ammunition to defend my position. Which, granted, I didn't have, either. The conversation wobbled along for a couple more comments until lurching to a stop.

Yet I felt compelled to continue my silence, partly out of sheer embarrassment, but also because for some odd reason, it seemed if I apologized to the group, I would be sounding sanctimonious. Holier-than-thou. And rubbing their own noses in sin. After all, my unholy outburst merely followed a sequence of other gossip-tinged comments from other people, even though theirs were not nearly as uninformed and malicious as mine.

Which begs the question, incidentally: if what you're talking about is chock-full of facts and communicated in an unemotional tone, when does it become gossip?

Awkwardly, the conversation switched to something else entirely, and for all practical purposes, I was off the hook.

But was I? Although I felt as though I should have brought closure to my sin by apologizing for it, doing so seemed as though it would invite more consternation from my friends than genuine forgiveness. Plus, I rationalized, I didn't want to draw any more attention to what I'd said.

After all, none of us is innocent when it comes to talking our way into sin. It's just that some of us commit that sin more frequently and boldly than others, and socially, it's become relatively acceptable.

But my purpose, now as then, is not to confess any sins my friends may have committed, nor rebuke them for not doing that themselves.

Indeed, the very environment which inhibited me - however uncharitably, or conveniently - from blurting out my confession Friday night does, in fact, likely exist at other times when I'm part of the group of people observing somebody else's blatant sin behavior. No doubt there are times when I'm one of the people who inhibits the proper response from somebody who gets convicted of something they've done. Which, yes, I know it's hard for you to believe, but I'm not always a verbally rambunctious, unloving boor in public. Sometimes I'm the observer of bad behavior, not the perpetrator.

Which all combined, makes for that unhealthy social phenomenon I'll call suppression of confession and guilt.

Suppression of Confession

The suppression of confession and guilt has woven itself in the fabric of evangelical community because we often are fully aware of the sins we commit, yet we've heard so much teaching about spiritual modesty that it sounds like heresy when we actually call ourselves out on a particular sin that we ourselves commit. It's somewhere between bad interpretations of boasting in our weaknesses and trying to extract the log in our own eye while, at the same time, hoping other guilty people see the littler logs in their own eyes. And we all end up in some big confession-fest.

Which probably wouldn't be a bad idea, sometimes, particularly in communities of faith that have gotten woefully bogged-down in anti-social behaviors like false modesty, gossip, slander, judgmentalism, and - horrors! - legalism.

And perhaps this phenomenon is more acute here in the south, where social etiquette probably remains more prevalent than in, say, New York City, where people are more blunt and ambivalent towards austere aspects of group protocol.

But my question is this: at what point should we just freeze in our tracks when we realize we've said something sinful, and just let it wither and die on the flagpole of group disdain? If the conversation takes a twist and leaves us behind at the crossroads of our indiscretion, should we voluntarily dredge up the topic again when those who've heard our sin have mentally "forgiven" us already and moved on?

Or am I the only person to whom these things happen? Is it because I stick my foot in my mouth so many times, I've trained myself to try and close the proverbial barn door after the horse has bolted?

Either way, it's not so much my friends' duty to shake a confession out of me at my every verbal sin, as it is perhaps to come up alongside me in private and encourage me to rectify the situation, in whatever appropriate form that might take, based on the circumstance.

That's all well and good for me to expect that from my friends, but how much of that is a big cop-out on my part? And how often do I perform that service to them? When it's their time in the foot-in-mouth barn?

Yeah, well... maybe my lack of integrity in this area comes from my own aversion to practicing what I preach.

Perhaps this is one of those reasons why suppression of confession is so rampant in North American evangelicalism these days. Not an excuse, but a reason.

Those are times when instead of shutting my oral orifice, I should practice using it in a truthful, beneficial, and loving way.

After all, if your language is seasoned rightly, people might actually be glad when you have a big mouth.
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