Values

Okay, values are like opinions, everyone has them. Some of them are not helpful for living among people. Some are not helpful for preserving the earth. Some are downright destructive. But, most values have both positive and negative sides. For instance, financial values: The love of money is the root of all evil...the Bible says. Having money means having enough food, clothing, shelter, safety. Money can buy a lot of good things. If you don't have enough money, you beg for used clothing, you apply for Section 8 or government housing, you hit the food pantries regularly, and you are not even close to having personal safety. Short of a disaster (natural or created), money can produce safety, good food, new clothing, houses, recreational toys, etc.

If you work and save your money, you can provide for yourself - usually. If you have capital investments, then you need to make sound decisions about your money. We are all concerned about money. For most of us, the question is, "How much is enough?" Divorce attorneys make a lot of money helping people decide that question.

If you only have enough to provide the major needs in a bare way or even a halfway decent way, you know exactly how much is "enough". If you have made a lot of money or inherited a lot of money, you have a vaguer idea of how much is "enough". That's a value decision. Anything that comes along more than that "enough" requires a decision, and that's where values are important.

We humans tend to congregate with and marry persons who have similar values - values about money, being on time, eating meals together, respect, violence, animals, and what is "enough". When we step outside that group with similar values, we tread on dangerous ground. Racism, ageism, sexism and most of the "isms" are generated when we meet and interact with people who have different (but equally valid, good and useful) values.

Now, that's what I want to consider - who judges what is equally valid, good and useful in values. What happens when two people marry who have different values? They either learn from one another or the marriage ends quickly in divorce. Even when they learn from one another, the marriage may still end in divorce. Counseling may help or not.

Love transcends values. Sometimes love is a conscious decision. Sometimes love is a chemical reaction. Sometimes love draws opposites. But, love pays little attention to values. Sex pays even less attention to values. Mixed marriages - those of people of differing values - are harder to maintain and more frequently end in divorce. That's why we have premarital counseling. Of course, pre-love counseling would be better.

How much is "enough" changes with how much you have. How much is "enough" changes with your chosen group. How much is "enough" changes throughout our lives. The values behind that decision of how much is "enough" don't often change. We may acquiesce to another's value decision(s), but changing values is as difficult as changing our beliefs in a higher power or lack of belief. The change requires being "born again", a mountain-top experience, or being broken - a startling event that causes us to look at life differently.

I pray that we will all have those startling events to change our unhealthy values, that we will delve more deeply into the values we have that promote peace and earthly goodness. And, I pray that we will look carefully and consider with love all those people whose values differ from ours.

Geometrically increasing pace

The pace of life and of new things increases geometrically. One new piece of technological hardware begats hundreds of new software applications - not only for that piece but for other pieces. And, the competitor has to keep up or lose business; so two or three or five new similar hardware items pop up - and each one has a different operating system with different programs to do the same thing. After a few years some of the competitors have dropped out of business and their products become obsolete. This is a minor glitch in the geometrically increasing idea.

When I finally finished college at age 35, Cobol II could be used as your language requirement. You seldom hear about computer languages any longer - programs in some of these languages translate ordinary words and numbers and boxes and pictures into the ideas you don't write on paper with pencils. And, we called them lead pencils - they are carbon and you don't need a sharpener.

Inventions and discoveries are abounding. Take Windows 7 for instance. Some technology just doesn't excite me. I don't play X-Box games (and is Nintendo surging ahead?), but I do have a Wii - a gaming device that I use primarily for exercise. And, now Windows 7 has arrived after extensive testing. I spent two minutes with it in Staples last week - now I crave a new computer with Windows 7 so that I can figure out how it does the things I like to do - better - worse - quicker (quicker is always better, huh?) - easier?

My Prius Hybrid can now be adapted to run on electricity alone. A gasoline engine combined with an electric system that has evolved into a different kind of car - one that has been available for some time. However, the Prius has made the idea more popular. It was state of the art. Now, almost every manufacturer is copying its system, adapting it, making it better, going one more step.

International relations seem to work the same way - a new election or coup and we're friends with a country that was our enemy. And, other countries fall into line with that thinking - so for a while, peace is more likely in that part of the world. Hillary Clinton must be exhausted - trying to form coalitions that cause a domino effect for peace and prosperity for all. One domino falls to the side, and the set-up has to be redone.

In my life, this increasing pace is new combinations of fibers for yarns, new operating systems for computers, new exercises on the Wii, new formats for banking (what happened to cash and checks?), new cleaning products (when all I wanted was something for these wood floors), and what happened to that product that I used to help remove or cover up scratches on wooden tables (does the Vermont Country Store carry it now?)?

I don't envy the young people of today. They have to know so much more than I did - along with most everything I knew then, too. Pregnancy was the direst consequence of sex with your boyfriend - now it's a fatal disease. I'm not saying that the world is moving too fast; what I'm saying is that I don't keep up. I have chosen my areas of increasing knowledge, and they are few. I look interested when others talk about things outside those areas. My friend, David Keill regularly writes on Facebook in a lingo that is outside my knowledge. So, I admit my ignorance and go on reading it anyway - maybe someday it will all make sense.

Keep on truckin', kids. The pace is getting faster and the race is getting bigger.

Returning to Church

Some of you have read my story of non-ordination and the ensuing 20 years of ministry, and some of you know that I have not been a church-goer much less a participant in several years.

Today I attended a small church in Jacksonville, NC, and felt as if I entered a place of blessing. One Sunday, one communion, but a changed attitude. I remember singing, "Just as I am......." ad infinitum in the Baptist Church, but always being moved by the simplicity of its message. The simplicity of getting in the car and driving to this church, walking in the door, and participating in the liturgy made me feel as if I had never been away.

God and I have been getting along rather well, but I suspect a new ministry is going to present itself to me soon. I've been having dreams of being in the wrong place but having to bide my time for the right place.

So, Baptist or otherwise, I continue to sing "Just as I am...." and "here I am, Lord"
and, if I can only touch the hem of the garment....

Why?

A good reporter always asks five questions (at least that's what I was taught in 1963): Who? What? When? Where? and Why? The first four are often easy to ascertain, but that fifth questions leads us into places that are unsafe - physically, mentally, emotionally, psychically. Often the places that Why? leads us are untrod ground.

Growing up on the farm, we called it new ground. First the trees would be cut, and the timber used in appropriate ways. Then the brush would be rooted up and piled into huge piles that were burned (remember this was in the 1940s and 1950s). Some of it was undoubtedly saved for kindling because we used a wood burning stove for heat in the winter. Stumps were included in this burning. Rocks were pushed and lugged out of the field. Only then could the tractor with it big turning plow get in there and make deep furrows in the land. The soil that turned up from below was black and wet. But, when it dried, it was as hard a brick...gumbo, it was called. The fields were turned and disked and harrowed. Then the rains came, and the ground was like black glue; it stuck to anything that touched it. When it dried, it cracked open in geometric shapes. Beautiful to a seven year old, but dreadful to our father farmers.

Except near the bayou, the soil would be turned, disked, and harrowed until it was black sandy loam - the stuff that farmers hold in their dreams. New ground. Lots of work went into creating new ground.

Lots of work often goes into answering Why? - the new ground of our minds...and lots of time. The answer doesn't always come. I will die never knowing why I like red so much or why I seem to need more...more of everything. Each time I answer a Why? question about myself, I change the answers to the other four questions. Who am I? Where am I? What am I? Yes, I realize that's only three of the questions: When? Time is so elusive for me. I understand God's time a little better as I remember the past and as I look to the future. I live in the present (most of the time), but When?

When am I in my life? Am I really a senior citizen? How do you measure years? Do miles count in that measurement? Does creativity count? How about love? When am I in the course of loving people? Near the beginning - the middle - the end or somewhere that I don't even really know? What I do know is that my computer (attuned to the atomic clock somewhere in the world) says that it is 8:13 pm on May 21, 2008.

My question then is So What? or Why does that matter?

He thinks too much

"Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much; such men are dangerous." Dangerous not only to others but also to themselves. Those of us who are alone so much tend to think too much. We live inside our minds, and minds are notoriously irrational. Just think about your dreams. Some dreams we can interpret easily - they relate to events of the day, concerns of the week, a recent happening or what you ate for dinner. Other dreams are bizarre and seem to have little relevance to anything. That's where we can go astray when we live in our minds.

Just thinking about God and praying silently in our own words can distort our perceptions of God until something jerks us back into the reality of The Other. We tend to anthromorphize God just as we do with animal stories. The reality of God is we don't know a whole lot about God. We do know more about how wishes us to act and live - and alone and in our own minds isn't it.

When I read the beginning of the "Big Book" in Alcoholics Anonymous, back when my father was trying to get sober and failed, I was amazed that the way to their "salvation" was to find another drunk and try to help. To seek out others, to put self behind the needs of others. Jesus said, "Inasmuch as you have done to the least of these, you have done to me." A maxim that's difficult to follow.

For the past three years, I have been living in my mind. Yes, I have contact with others on a regular basis, but not much. I am not "out there" doing things. In consideration, I have been quite ill. Now that I am better, I realize that I've been living in the mind of a crazy person, which is dangerous. My thinking is skewed to think only of me. And, I leave myself wide open for all the cantankerous and disturbing memories of bad events in my life. They were mostly in my childhood. I haven't acknowledged or taken responsibility for the bad events since then. Not my fault - all because I was emotionally abused as a child. Yeah. Right.

I've been depending on medicine and medication to lift me out of my quagmire of mind and body and deposit me on sane, happy and populated ground. Realizing this, I snort-laugh. How dumb can I be? How blind am I to all that I know and feel? This quagmire isn't going to get drier or smoother without my help. I can't sit here and knit and expect to be transported to another state of mind.

And, God. I've had what I thought were lots of conversations with God, times when I spoke, and times when I listened. It's possible that what I heard was my own voice from deep inside my mind telling me to wait, do nothing now. And, it's possible that God was working inside me to ready me for this moment of realization that now is the time to act. Not solve all the problems at once, but to inventory the situation and work toward resolution of the snags and peek through the doors that I've closed. I'm not ready to give up my isolation, yet. However, I think it's time I entered the world again...slowly. I'm fearful of doing anything too quickly...might be just my crazy mind steering me down the primrose path again.

Today is the first day of my new exercise program. I will get on the treadmill every day for at least 10 minutes. For me that's a quarter mile right now. I'm winded and breathing hard at the end.

Today is the first day that I will read prayers from a written prayer book every day.

Next week I may make more changes in my routine, but this is enough for today. Oh yeah, I recharged my iPod again, and music definitely helps. And, another thing - I just saw the osprey returning to the next across the creek as I was on the treadmill. Yahoo. Spring is here!