You probably already know this, but just in case, let me refresh your memory. The month of February in our current Gregorian calendar got its name from the month of the same name in the Julian calendar. Its name is fashioned from the Latin term februum, which means purification. The prior Roman lunar calendar contained the purification ritual Februa to be held on the full moon in February, which in a lunar calendar landed on the 15th of the month. The festival was one common to many ancient cultures, one of spring cleaning. It dates back to near the time of the founding of Rome. Later, the festival was merged with Luypercalla, a festival observed from February 13 to 15 to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility. Unlike other months in the Julian calendar, then, February got its name not from a person, but from a ceremony.

If you take a short trip back in history, under the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar, February was like most of the other months in the calendar. It had 30 days. The Roman scheme of 12 months with 30 or 31 days didn’t quite work out and periodic corrections were necessary in order to sync the calendar with the seasons of the year. In order to make things work out they shortened the month following Julius’ month to 29 days. When Caesar Augustus became emperor, his ego needed expression in the calendar and so that month was named after him and received two extra days, making August equal in the number of days to July. February essentially lost out to the ego of Augustus.

The problem is that no matter how you configure the days, it won’t come out with the seasons in the long run because a complete orbit of the earth around the sun takes 365.2422 days com complete, not 365 days as is the case with the calendar. The Gregorian calendar was created to correct the mistake, and perhaps to exert the control of the Christian church over the secular calendar. At any rate, in Gregory’s calendar an extra day is added to the end of February every four years. The extra day has received the common name of “leap day” and the year in which it occurs is “leap year.”

“Ah!” you say, “but that doesn’t come out even either. It would work if an orbit of the earth were 365.25 days, but it isn’t. It is 365.2422 days!” And you are right. That is why leap year is skipped in three of every four years that is divisible by 100. So the years 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, but the year 2000 was. In this system, 2100, 2200, and 2300 won’t be leap years, but 2400 will be. So here is the complete rule: There is a leap year every year that is divisible by four, except for years that are both disable by 100 and not divisible by 400.

If you’ve got that, you’ll understand why today is February 29 instead of March 1. At least that is the system most of the world has been using since 1582 when the Gregorian calendar was introduced.

Of course, it still doesn’t synchronize perfectly, so leap seconds are periodically added to years to keep the clocks in line with the sunrise. And then there are additional variations, which require a more major adjustment every 10,000 years. So I’m not exactly sure how the calendar will be aligned after the year 2500.

For what it is worth no human calendar system has been devised that does not require leap years. The modern Iranian calendar is a solar calendar with eight leap days in each 33-year cycle. The Indian National Calendar and the Revised Bangla Calendar of Bangladesh arrange their leap years so that the leap day is always close to February 29 in the Gregorian calendar.

This, of course, brings about the problem of leaplings: the people who are born on February 29. If they only are allowed to celebrate their birthdays in years when there is a leap day, the count of their age is off by a significant factor. And, after all, everyone deserves a birthday every year. So the tradition has been formed that those born before noon on February 29 celebrate their birthdays on February 28 when it is not a leap year and those born after noon celebrate on March 1. I guess those born exactly at noon get to choose, or perhaps they are so rare that they ought to get two days of celebration. After all the chances of having a leap birthday are only on in 1,461. That means there are approximately 4.1 million people alive today with a February 29 birthday. The chances of being born precisely at noon are fairly slim and if you calculate in the chance of survival it comes out to something like 1 in 400,000,000,000 making it likely that there is no one alive today who was born precisely at noon on February 29.

If you are a fan of musicals, you know that Frederic, the key figure in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, was born on February 29. He is due to be released from his apprenticeship with a band of pirates on his 21st birthday. However, because his birthday comes only once every four years, he has to serve an additional 63 years before he is released and can join his love, Mabel. She agrees to wait faithfully until that day and that is sufficient plot for the entire musical.

The tradition is that women are only allowed to propose marriage on Leap Day. Lore reports that there was a law passed in Scotland in 1288 that allowed unmarried women to propose on leap year and subjected a man who refused to a fine. It was said to date all the way back to the 5th Century when St Bridget complained to St Patrick that women had to wait too long for their suitors to propose.

Something tells me that that particular tradition will not last until the next major revamping of the calendar.

At any rate, today is a unique day and a good time to celebrate. Enjoy!

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Along with a group of colleagues, I recently read Drew G. I. Hart’s book, “Trouble I’ve Seen,” about institutionalized racism, especially the ways in which racialized views continue to hold sway in the contemporary church. The book is well written and offers a perspective that we don’t often consider. Overcoming racism takes more than good will or acceptance of people who are different from ourselves. We need to take a serious look at embedded racism in our institutions, inequality in social systems and the imbalances in prison populations. Hart’s book is an offering by an educated Christian leader who truly loves the church. It is the voice of such a dedicated insider that is very effective in providing the basis for change.

One of the things that a critical view of our culture does is to reveal things about the heroes and leaders of the past that we had failed to see. The claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello, entered the public arena during Jefferson’s first term as president. That story, however, was not part of my education in the history of American and its leaders. I only came to know about it as an adult. Revelations about colonial era slave holders don’t lessen the contributions of the founders of this nation, but they do reveal that great leaders were also human and subject to human flaws. We’ve made plenty of statues and literally placed them of pedestals, but the truth is that our nation was built by humans who did bad things as well as good things.

Critical thinking demands that we look at history with an open mind and examine our past with a quest for the truth. At the same time it poses dilemmas for institutions that have done a lot of good and yet also have in their past leaders with views that were flawed.

A controversy that has come to the surface in recent months at the University of Oxford in England illustrates our mixed reactions to the leaders of previous generations. Cecil Rhodes is celebrated with statues. Buildings and rooms at the university are named after him. A prestigious scholarship program bears his name. Rhodes was committed to education and did make important contributions to the university system and programs of international study. He also was a proponent of some of the most extreme forms of colonialism that Britain spread around the world. The Rhodes Must Fall movement is a group of people who, after studying the history and Rhodes statements on race have decided that further celebration of Cecil Rhodes is an act of racism. They have asked for the removal of statues and the renaming of buildings.

The decisions about the statues and buildings are complex. First of all, Oxford University isn’t a single entity. Its chancellor doesn’t have unlimited authority. It is a system of 38 individual colleges each with autonomous powers. There is no one centralized authority that can make decisions for all of the colleges. From a university perspective, probably more important than decisions over the placement of statues is the conversation that has inspired students to engage in deep and critical investigations of the history of England and how contemporary attitudes have been shaped by the actions of those who have gone before.

Not all of the discussion is healthy. Back in December, Ntokozo Qwabe, a South African who is working for a master’s degree, was accused of “disgraceful hypocrisy” after revelations that he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship. The use of scholarships to promote education of all types of students, including those from Africa leads to wider understanding and a decrease in racism. There may be institutional hypocrisy in the university system, but a single student accepting a scholarship to further his education should not be the subject of attack.

The controversy makes me wonder what practices we currently accept that will be abhorrent to students in a couple of centuries. How will we be judged by those who follow after us. Just as our forebears accepted attitudes towards other races without challenging them, we accept certain practices and ways of life without being critical of every aspect of our society and culture.

Will we be criticized for our part on global warming? Certainly our decisions affect the health of the plane that we will leave to future generations. And some of our consumptive ways will lead to problems and shortages in the future. The rate at which we are consuming fossil fuels will leave different options to future generations than would be the case if we had made different choices.

Perhaps future generations will ask why we didn’t speak out against some of the practices of corporate agriculture. Our demand for abundant food at the lowest possible prices has led to agricultural practices such as factory poultry farms, overuse of chemical fertilizers, and other ways of producing food that are not sustainable over long periods of time. The amount of food waste in our country far exceeds the need for food in parts of the world where there are shortages. Will future generations find our failure to feed the hungry people in the world to be barbaric?

I suspect that future generations will discover much better ways to engage in education than our current system of regimented schedules, long school days and extra-curricular activities that consume all of children’s time leaving virtually no time for free play and creative thinking. We already can see great creativity that comes from those who have not succeeded in traditional learning environments. As a society we allow politicians to attack teachers and blame them for perceived failure of children to learn while we do nothing to explore new ways of teaching and learning. We may discover that there are far better ways of allowing children to learn. Will we be judged for our lack of attention to educational systems and our failure to engage in the reform of our schools?

These are just a few examples. I’m sure it would be easy to compose a list of failings of our culture and our time. I understand the criticism that can be leveled at those who have gone before us, but I suspect that we will fare no better than our forebears if what is expected of us is perfection.

Rather than blame the ills of the present on the decisions of those who lived in times past, perhaps we ought to focus our attention on constructive changes that will lead to a brighter future.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I’ve attended several General Synods of the United Church of Christ. Every other year our denomination has a large gathering of delegates who vote on church budgets and policies and elect the leaders who guide our church in its national setting. As conventions go, it isn’t very large, but for us it is a big gathering. The meeting is usually held in a large urban convention center and there is a hall devoted to displays and vendors. Part of the fun of attending General Synod is spending time going through all of the booths in the display hall, looking at books and Christian Education resources, stoles and other liturgical vestments, mission projects and everything from fair trade coffee to serve at church functions to architectural services for building renovations and new buildings.

I even had the experience, along with many others, of having my credit card information stolen when it was used for a purchase at a General Synod bookseller. Fortunately, my credit card company noticed the fraud right away and I had no financial loss as a result of what was determined to be a security flaw in the convention center’s Internet service to vendors.

I enjoy going to other types of convention displays and have been known to wander the booths at the Sports Show, State Fair and other special events. There is, however, something particularly interesting about a group of vendors brought together with a specific church audience in mind.

General Synod, however, is nothing compared to the granddaddy of all religion fairs, the Koine expo in Vicenza, Italy. Last year the fair hosted 13,000 visitors from all over the world. It featured 347 vendors selling everything from lighting systems to communion ware to statues and figurines, crosses, and much more.

You could have, had you attended, purchased an electronic pray-along rosary, said to be useful for those suffering arthritis. You can hear a chorus of praying nuns as the yellow LEDs of the rosary light up. It even has an “auto mystery” button for a wide variety of prayers.

Photographer Louis De Belle has just released a new book, “Besides Faith,” with photos and vignettes of the expo. I found out about the book by reading a photo-packed essay on the Washington Post website. The pictures make me think I might enjoy wandering through the expo, but that I wouldn’t make many purchases in such a visit.

We don’t particularly need expensive chalices made out of valuable metals and polished to perfection. Matching crosses and candlesticks aren’t a priority for us either. I’m not a fan of glow-in-the-dark Jesus figures that don’t even look like Jesus to me and I don’t know what you would do with all of the plastic, resin and other cast figurines of popes, madonnas, and other religious people. You could get your figurines shrink wrapped for shipping at the event. Chances are the vestments and other clothing items are well beyond my budget. Electronic candles have made their way into our Christmas Eve services, but I don’t need to attend a fair to find items that are readily available over the internet.

Perhaps it is best for me to stay away from the expo. It might make me even more cynical about some of the trappings that one finds in the contemporary church.

We live in a time of a very quick change in religious practice. Churches of all denominations and theologies are experiencing declines, especially in the United States. Each generation has fewer people who attend church regularly. According to a 2014 Pew Research Center study, 51% of the “Greatest Generation,” attend religious services at least once a week. With baby boomers, the number slides to 37% and drops to just 27% of millennials. From half to a quarter in one lifetime is a dramatic shift.

Amidst all of this change, some churches are resorting to dramatic changes in order to preserve their worship attendance. Stained Glass windows are replaced with windowless rooms with elaborate projection systems. Organs are removed and rock bands appear in their place. Passing offering plates is replaced with appeals for cell phone and online donations.

I am fortunate to serve a stable congregation, but the changes are evident in our congregation. In order to maintain worship attendance, we have to increase the total number of participants in our church. Whereas Sunday services reflected the total number of church members a few decades ago, these days it takes a lot more members to fill the pews each week. We have people who consider themselves to be regular members of our congregation who attend only ten or fewer services each year. Families place church attendance somewhere behind soccer tournaments in their list of priorities. It takes a lot of innovation to design a confirmation class when more than half of the class is unwilling to commit to a regular meeting once a month. Weekly attendance, even for a short period of time, is out of the question for all but a very few individual middle and high school youth.

Still, there are limits to what I am comfortable with to promote church attendance. Don’t look for us to copy the 2010 Easter service at a Texas church that offered door prizes like flat-screen TVs, cars and skateboards. Don’t look for me to post a selfie of myself with an Ash Wednesday cross on my forehead. And I think our church will be using hymnals and will have a choir for years to come.

Change, however, is inevitable. We serve people as they are, not as we wish they might be. We are as affected by the advance of technology as are other institutions. Like it or not, cash and checks are being replaced by other payment systems. Each year we add more software and hardware to the church’s computer systems. Electronic distribution of newsletters and other documents has replaced the mail for many families in our church. Maintaining an effective website is a priority for our ministries.

Still, I don’t think we’ll order any laser-etched 3D figures of saints in glass blocks to install in our sanctuary anytime soon. I probably wouldn’t be a big customer were I to attend the expo.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Detroit, Michigan, hasn’t been getting a lot of good press lately. The departure of many automobile manufacturing plants has led to high unemployment, the collapse of the city’s financial structure, decreases in government programs, increases in unemployment, poverty, and a host of other problems. Flint, a city just over 60 miles away has been in the national headlines for its severe water problems. No one knows for sure what the impact of over two years of severe lead poisoning through the city water system will be. There is agreement that the crisis, which started in 2014, will have lasting negative impacts.

I could devote an entire blog to problems failures of urban infrastructure and poverty in Michigan, but there have been plenty of articles on the subject.

There is, however, program in Detroit that has been receiving a lot less press that is worthy of note. In 2001, the Henry Ford Health Care System instituted a series of changes aimed at decreasing the rate of suicide in the area. Granted, the suicide rate was already significantly lower in Detroit than in the nation as a whole. The population served by HFHCS had a suicide rate of 89 per 100,000 compared with a national average of 230 per 100,000. Still the program set its sights on achieving a zero suicide rate.

The program began with several innovative features. They established a consumer advisory panel to assist with program design, devised a protocol for screening all patients during the initial contact and assigning levels of suicide risk, and established new ways for patients to access care including drop-in, same day appointments and e-mail support. They also made suicide prevention training mandatory for all of the staff of the facility.

The results were dramatic. In the first four years of the program suicide rates in the area dropped from 89 per 100,000 to 22 per 100,000. In the past 15 years there have been periods of up to 30 months when there were zero suicides among patients who had contact with the program. The goal of zero suicides became an achievable target and has been the standard for the program in recent years.

The program has earned national and international recognition for its effectiveness. Programs in other cities and in countries around the world are being based on the success of the Detroit model.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about that model a great deal. I have been working with a couple of different individuals who are at risk for suicide. And obtaining any kind of care for them is a challenge. In one case, I could find no options for same day care in our city. The individual was known by those in the system and had been previously treated and was resistive to care. Still, it was frustrating to not be able to access care. In our city the combination of significant substance abuse with another diagnosable mental disorder makes treatment very difficult to obtain.

This is a life and death issue in our community. I am not involved in every suicide in our area, but I am aware of two deaths by suicide in our county this week. In one case all of the danger signs were present: prior suicide attempt; family history of mental disorder; substance abuse; family violence; and easy access to the means of suicide.

The suicide rate in our community is over double the national average. In general suicide rates increase from east to west in South Dakota, making our end of the state the site for well over half of the suicides in our state despite the population being greater at the other end of the state.

Accessing a full continuum of mental health and substance abuse services is difficult in our area. Still there are steps that could be taken by institutions in our area that could have a large impact. The Henry Ford Health Care System started with steps that could be taken by organizations of any size in any location such as the establishment of an advisory panel of consumers and mandatory suicide prevention training for all employees.

Working outside of the area’s regional health care system, however, it is difficult to determine where to start in the process of asking for change. Despite areas of excellence in care, the establishment of consumer advisory councils isn’t a priority for our system of hospitals and clinics. Despite a steady stream of suicide victims and victims of near suicides, suicide prevention training is not a priority for the employees of the system.

The emergency room of our hospital has a protocol for screening physical injury and illness and establishing priorities for care. No such system exists for assessing mental health status of patients to reach out to the hospital for care. Mental health services are delivered at a satellite facility across town and although we do have a crisis care facility, there is little consumer education on how to access that care.

Back to Detroit. The Henry Ford Health Care System has set the goal of eliminating suicide. They now screen every single patient for risk of suicide, not just those who present with mental health problems. Care is then tailored to the needs of patients identified as being at risk. Now, it is important to note that HFHCS is a private hospital used mainly by those with health insurance. Not every resident of Detroit has access to its services. Still the impact they have had on their own patient population has been enough to produce a dramatic decrease in overall suicide rates in the community.

Around the world a person dies by suicide every 40 seconds, according to the World Health Organization. Every death directly affects dozens of surviving individuals. Having someone close to you die by suicide increases the risk that you might also die by suicide. Proper treatment of those suffering trauma from the loss of a loved one to suicide is critical to preventing more death.

I stand with the people in Detroit. My goal is eliminating suicide in our community.

It is a cause worthy of our attention and energy. It is a topic about which I’ve blogged before and one about which I will blog again and again.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

In our culture it isn’t popular to talk about death and grief. It isn’t politic to speak of loss. Much of what we see portrayed in popular media is only part of the human story. When death occurs on television, which is frequently, it is soon past and the grief is short-lived if portrayed at all. A television story about lives permanently altered by grief wouldn’t sell many advertisements.

There are several problems with this approach. The first is simply that it isn’t realistic. For human beings, life is laced with loss and grief. Being alive means shadow as well as light. Good times come with bad times and triumphs are mingled with tragedies. You don’t need my blog to know that. You know it from your own experience.

Another problem with the failure to confront loss and grief openly and honestly is that such an approach misses the transformation that is possible. Human hearts transform suffering into new life. Resurrection comes from death. If you avoid suffering and death, you also cut yourself off from new life and resurrection.

Suffering that is not dealt with directly can cause a myriad of deeper pain and more complex problems. Parker Palmer has written “Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.” He also said, “Show me a person who makes others suffer and I’ll show you someone who’s ‘working out’ his or her suffering by passing along the pain.”

The failure of our society to directly deal with pain and suffering results in an increase in pain and suffering.

This is evident in the state of American politics today. Candidates are cautioned to never show weakness, to never admit defeat, to never expose their vulnerabilities. Advertisements are carefully edited to erase all of the flaws of the candidates. Campaign appearances are carefully orchestrated to always present the candidate in the best light. Winning an election, however, isn’t the same thing as effective governance. The skill set needed to win an election is vastly different from the skills needed to work effectively in elected office. Effective leaders share the pain of those they serve. They admit their mistakes and learn from them. They go to the places of pain and suffering to bring the hope of new life and recovery.

The ability of a leader to show compassion, however, is rarely considered in the election process.

My life and vocation has taught me not to run away from pain and suffering. I’ve spent hours in hospital waiting rooms and private homes and funeral homes and other places sitting with people who are in the midst of grief. I’ve walked with good people as they struggle with the ongoing pain of loss. I believe that I don’t need to mask my own grief and sadness. I prefer to reserve my most emotional displays for private moments rather than public ones, but I’ve broken into tears while officiating at a funeral and it wasn’t the end of the world.

We have been blessed with a capacity to connect deeply with people through the process of sharing suffering. Grief, when shared, can be a place of deep healing. A broken heart is an open heart. Experiences of pain and loss don’t have to lead to cruelty and violence. They can also lead to compassion and caring. Sitting with grief can lead one to become a light-bearer and life-giver in a world of too much darkness and death.

It isn’t easy. Like many important things in life, dealing well with grief requires practice.

It is because I know that I am not the only one who needs this practice, that I find Lent to be an opportunity not just for me, but for the whole world. When a group of faithful people learn to simply sit with grief, rather than push it aside; when we face problems that are too big to be solved with a sound byte or simple answer; when we enter weeks of endurance we discover a new depth of compassion for others and connection with hope that is not turned aside by suffering.

Don’t expect, however, for there to be many news stories about the candidates’ Lenten disciplines.

I know that the journey of Lent isn’t a popular one. I have colleagues who play down the season in their churches because they have discovered that people don’t like to talk about death. I hear the complaints about dreary Lenten hymns. I am aware that the attendance is higher in churches that don’t dwell on this season. I even notice a drop in attendance in our church at this time of the year. I am not insensitive to my own need to be perceived as popular.

The people I serve, however, need and deserve more than fluff. They need and deserve more than a puff of emotion that quickly fades. They are humans who have experienced grief and loss and will experience it again. They deserve an honest approach. They, like me, need to learn again and again that avoiding pain isn’t the way to embrace the fullness of life.

My job is to be there for my people in all of the seasons of their lives. Some of those seasons are long and filled with sadness.

Ellen Bass’ poem, “The Thing Is” explores the depths of grief:

"The Thing Is"
from Mules of Love

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

The thing is, we all need to delve deeply into the reality of grief in order to emerge into the power of love.

And so our Lenten journey continues.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

In the midst of the tumult of society, religious people often feel that they are pulled in multiple directions. On the one hand, we feel compelled to speak out on certain issues, especially those where the victims of violence are not able to speak out for themselves. On the other hand, most of us are drawn to quiet contemplation, knowing that words are not always effective and are easily misunderstood. Often it seems to me that would be prophets speak too quickly and confuse their own instincts with God’s calling. I’ve been known to bite my tongue rather than speak out on occasion because I am unsure of my role. All of the angry rhetoric that is being spoken in the current Presidential campaign in the United States has, on occasion, made me feel ashamed of the haste and lack of thoughtfulness of candidates. Their words have made me shutter at the possibility that someone who spouts such ignorance and hatred might become leader of the most powerful nation on the earth. But I have never been one to advise others on what they should think or how they should vote. I try to be honest with my thoughts and feelings, but hold back in many different arenas.

Biblical prophets are few and far between. They are endowed with poetic elegance and the capacity for powerful words that have lasting value. I’m not sure that I possess those gifts.

I have been inspired recently by looking at dramatic photographs that haver come out of Ukraine. If you do a Google search for “Priests in Ukraine violence” and click on “images” you will find some amazing scenes. Orthodox priests, often wearing stoles, carrying bibles or icons, stand amidst the rubble between riot police and protestors. There is a seven with a priest in gold and white stoles holding up a cross as an officer in riot gear points a rifle either at him or the crowd beyond him. In another picture, a priest is granting absolution to a penitent person kneeling in the snow, the priest’s blue stole draped over the head of the worshiper in the orthodox fashion as the priest reads from a prayer book. In another picture, a line of priests stand with dark smoke clouds blowing behind them. There are pictures of priests administering last rights over the bodies of the dead lying in the street and priest holding icons in the middle of streets lit by riot fires. In one picture the nave of a church has been transformed into a temporary mortuary with bodies lying on the floor covered by white sheets and a priest praying over those who have been killed.

The photographs are dramatic.

They also demonstrate a very important facet of faith and of how God works in this world. I am sure that the priests in the pictures have known fear. I’m sure that they have struggled over what behavior and words are appropriate. But they have, it seems to me, achieved a balance of prayer and contemplation with prophetic action and witness. They have literally taken their prayers into the places of conflict and violence and offered a witness. When others are striving to achieve more power to fight violence with increased violence, they stand in silent witness that there is another way.

I stare at the photographs and wonder if I would have the courage to walk into violent streets and place my life on the line. I do not know the answer.

I am not a part of the orthodox church. I have never been to the Ukraine. I don’t know more about the dynamics of the conflict that I can get from the Internet and other news sources. I do not possess a solution. But I have a bit of the sense of the balance of prayer and action. Christians are called to both and when they are combined they provide the seeds of transformation.

The power of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s arose from the churches. As important as were the strategies of protest and strategic boycott, were the tools of prayer and community worship. Nonviolent action supported by faith is more powerful than violence, though there will be those who have to pay an incredibly high price, even death itself, in the process. Sacrifice is required.

There are times when it seems that we need to be more public with our faith, taking it to the streets in demonstration of what we believe. I try to be public in small ways. I’m not often seen parading in vestments, nor do I seek podiums or opportunities to make speeches in public places. I prefer to speak to my congregation in the context of our worship services. But I am known to be a Christian pastor. I often wear a cross on my lapel and frequently carry a bible or prayer book. I offer public prayers when asked and am identified by the title “Reverend” when introduced. I even have vanity license plates on my truck that say “Rev Ted.”

I have not, however, spoken out in response to those who would deny healthcare to widows and orphans. I have been silent when others have argued for rejection instead of compassion for immigrants. I vote without even telling the members of my congregation how I have voted. I am reluctant to share my political opinions.

It may be that I lack courage.

It may also be that I believe more deeply in the power of prayer and faith. I understand the prayer and contemplation cannot be separated from activity and witness, but I also know that action that is not informed by openness, reconciliation, recollection and prayer can be hollow and meaningless. Genuine contemplation requires guarding against thoughtless activity and impulsive speaking.

I don’t know whether or not my life will call me into a face to face confrontation with evil, but if it does, I hope to be prepared by a lifetime of prayer. I pray that I might have the courage to love my enemy. I admire the priests in the Ukraine and I hope that when my time comes I will have the courage and wisdom to stand peaceably in the midst of the frenzy of hatred and strife as a witness for the power of love.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

The core of the Black Hills is granite, the result of volcanic uplift. The highest peak, near the center is 7,244 feet with the top being exposed granite. As the uplift occurred, layers of sedimentary rock were tipped on edge, dipping away from the center. Although the rocks seem hard and permanent, they are in the process of eroding. Billions of years from now, the hills will be very different. For the most part, however, the change is so gradual that we don’t notice it. When we walk through the hills, especially when we walk ridges and tops where the granite is exposed, it seems as if we are walking on very solid rock. There are a few edges and cliff faces, however, where we can see the rock chipping away and falling.

This process of change is a partnership between the rocks, the plants and the weather. The rocks have cracks within them where water can seep. In the winter the water freezes and expands, widening the cracks. The wind blows in bits of dirt and seed and plants begin to grow, their rots exerting pressure on the rocks as they search for water and nutrients to sustain the plant.

Among the most tenacious plants of the hills are the ponderosa pine trees. We have spruce, cedar, birch and even oak trees, but most of our trees prefer sheltered valleys and low places where the water pools. The pines, however, brave the high and exposed places in amazing ways. Walking around the high places in the hills we are continually amazed at the trees we find growing out of what appears to be solid rock. You wouldn’t think the tree could get its roots into enough nutrients to sustain life, but the tenacious little seedlings figure out how to grow into mighty trees. Along the way they weather some terrific storms, often being twisted and torn by the weather, yet somehow hanging on.

The animals of the hills, like the plants, tend to be of a hearty variety. Buffalo, deer, bighorn sheep and mountain lions all have adapted ways of survival in harsh weather. The prairie dogs, marmots and squirrels have learned to survive in harsh conditions. Many of our birds are tourists, visiting in the summer but heading south during the winter. Summer in the hills has its unique qualities, however, and we see birds in the hills that aren’t seen in the rest of South Dakota like pinion jays, three-toed woodpeckers, American dippers and ruffled grouse. Ou white-winged juncos hang out around the year and find enough food to make it through the storms.

the diversity and wonder of the hills was celebrated by indigenous people long before the arrival of settlers from other continents. The Lakota called the hills Ȟe Sápa or Paha Sápa. The Cheyenne called them Moʼȯhta-voʼhonáaeva. They are awaxaawi shiibisha in the language of the Hidatsa. Many generations ago the hills were considered to be sacred by several different tribes and were a place to be visited for hunting and religious ceremony. Permanent residences in the hills came after the discovery of gold and the mining boom at the end of the 19th century.

One of the lessons that the hills have to teach us is that things change. Mighty trees fall in wind storms and blizzards, they decay into the ground and provide nutrients for subsequent generations of plants. Periodically there are infestations of insects that kill hundreds of thousands of trees. The dead trees provide fuel for wildfires that can blacken hundreds of acres. The appearance of a whole vista can be transformed in a few hours of intense flame. Animals move in and out of areas. When the mountain lion population began to grow, the number of coyotes declined. Bighorn sheep populations go up and down with the cycles of disease. Fires reshape habitat and the creatures move from one place to another.

Even the rocks are in the process of changing. Wind and water and ice and plant growth break down even the hardest rocks. Large chunks of rocks fracture and fall off the faces of the cliffs.

We, who think we own a small patch of the hills, are also temporary. We are stewards of our little pieces of property for a time, a time that is very short indeed when considered in the light of geological time. We come and we go. Humans, however, bring with us powers of observation and of interpretation. We look at the hills and our curiosity is piqued. We draw theories out of our observations and conduct experiments to test our theories. We discover the stories that have been hidden in the rocks and plants for millennia. Not only do we become aware of our setting, but we find ways to share our insights with others. The stories of generations past are transferred to our children and grandchildren.

My mind wanders over the hills even more than my body these days. I love to take a hike and we find ways to get out into the hills most weeks. But I have also discovered that I can sit and stare at a single tree and imagine the storms that it has weathered and envision what the course of its life might be. Reflections on the tree bring to mind other aspects of life in the hills. Soon my mind is wandering all around the area. Perhaps those reflections are connected to the ideas of others. Maybe I can begin to sense the wonder and awe of those who came to the hills in search of a vision of their life’s path. Certainly I can understand why the hills were chosen for special ceremony.

The world is filled with interesting and inspiring places to live. These hills are only one of many places. For a little while, however, they are our place. Here in the hills I feel at home. I enjoy my neighbors, even the human ones. I find inspiration in those whose lives play out on the ridges and vistas.

And maybe, like the pine trees themselves, I’ll sink my roots into the soil and be nourished by the hills.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

When I think of cats, Egypt comes to mind. Cats were considered sacred in ancient Egyptian society. Researchers have found cats that received the same mummification after death as humans. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer uncovered a large tomb with mummified cats and kittens outside the town of Beni Hasan. It contained eighty thousand cat mummies. I don’t know the entire history, but have been told that cats were first domesticated in Egypt. Cats have the ability to control mice and rats and have been used to control snakes as well. Cats are noted for their grace and poise. In the Egyptian panoply of gods, at least two were cats. Mafdet was a goddess of justice. She also was the goddess of execution. Bast, also known as Bastet, was a more recent goddess representing protection, fertility and motherhood.

As is the case with many ancient beliefs, there are both truths and myths in the representation of cats in Egyptian lore. Chief among the myths is the myth of domestication. Cats may, at times, live in the homes of humans, but they aren’t domesticated in the same sense as other pets. They tolerate humans and become somewhat dependent on humans for food, but they maintain an independent streak and attitude. I think there is some accuracy in portraying cats both as gentle friends of people and as a bloody god of execution. I’ve known cats so friendly they rested in my lap every evening and a couple of cats so mean that they would draw blood just for entertainment.

I used to say I was not a cat person. Growing up our family’s pet cats always “belonged” to one of my siblings. One of my younger brothers was particularly fond of cats. His pet “Priscilla Mullens” was mother to countless litters of kittens most of whom took a distinct dislike to me. The feeling was mutual. When I became an adult, our daughter began campaigning for a pet cat when she was very young and over the years brought a parade of cats into our home. I ended up falling in love with every one of them. I’m not sure any of them ever considered me as their owners, but they tolerated my presence and provided much entertainment and companionship over the years.

When our children were in high school we became involved with our city’s sister city program with a community in Japan. We hosted exchange students and both of our children were able to travel to Japan with groups of exchange students. Somewhere in that process “Hello Kitty” items began to show up in our house. Purses and t shirts and all sorts of items sported the cartoon logo. Hello Kitty had been popular for a couple of decades before I discovered it. The character was created by Yuko Shimizu. There have been several animated television series featuring the white creature with the red bow. The logo can be found on school supplies and on every sort of consumer products, including expensive high end items such as diamond necklaces. According to Wikipedia, the brand is worth $7 billion a year.

Hello Kitty, however, is not a cat. She might look like a white Japanese Bobtail cat, but the Sanrio company is adamant that Hello Kitty is a British schoolgirl called Kitty White who lives just outside London. She has a whole life story and a family that includes a sister named Mimmy. Sanrio has a website dedicated to Kitty’s biography. She is never depicted on all fours, always walking as a two legged creature. Furthermore, she has a pet cat of her own called Charmmy Kitty. Who knew?

The Japanese, however, do have a special place in their hearts for cats, which is why I’m writing on this particular topic today. Yes, it is George Washington’s birthday, but we celebrated President’s Day last week. In Japan, however, today is Cat Day. Today is the 30th anniversary for the Japanese holiday. The web is filled with endless cat pictures and video clips. If you were in Japan today, you could get cat-shaped biscuits, cat-shaped rice balls and even cat donuts.

In Japanese, the date’s numerals, 2/22 (ni ni ni), are pronounced fairly closely to the sound a cat makes in Japanese (nyan nyan nyan). According to Derek Abbott’s animal noise page, Japanese is the only language in which the sound made by a cat begins with an “n” sound. Most places the sound begins with an “m”: Meow in English; miyau in Hebrew and German; miyav in Turkish and Danish; miauw in Dutch; and miao in Spanish.

In Japan today, there are plenty of people sporting cat ears. “Nekomimi” are popular fashion accessories for the day. Disney in Japan declared the day to be “Marie Day,” after the young female character from the Aristocats. The newspaper Asahi Shimbun printed a special report from one of Japan’s cat cafes. The institutions are popular places where you can dine in the company of numerous pampered felines. The sound of purring is said to enhance digestion.

A cat called Tama made headlines after becoming honorary stationmaster of a train station in Wakayama prefecture. Wearing a special cat-sized stationmaster’s hat, she was a popular tourist attraction until her death last year. She was inducted into the hall of fame for the station’s train this month.

A cat named Maru has been getting huge numbers of hits on YouTube. One of the clips has more than 21.7 million views. And the cartoon cat Nyancat, who can fly, has a video that has been viewed 131 million times.

The Japanese, however, have other plays on the sound of the number 2: “ni.” Not only does it sound like a cat to a Japanese ear, it also recalls to a Japanese ear the sound of Ninja. The elusive assassins are also popular in Japanese culture. So, if you are in Japan and you don’t happen to be a cat person, never fear. You can go to Koka city in Shinga prefecture where all of the staff in the town hall dress up in ninja costumes to promote ninja tourism.

Now there’s an idea! OK someone has already thought of a ninja Hello Kitty.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Growing up I had close friends who were Roman Catholic. I remember thinking that their brand of Christianity was a bit more harsh than ours. My friends had to find something to give up for Lent. I was unaware of a similar demand in our particular congregation. In fact, we didn’t make much of Lent in our church. The annual One Great Hour of Sharing offering took place in Lent. We had special services for Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Easter. There was a community service on Good Friday. For the most part, however, life went on as usual in our corner of the world.

My Catholic friends had special disciplines, however. In addition to selecting one thing to give up for Lent, which usually wasn’t much of a burden, they “fasted” on Fridays. Their fast wasn’t a day without food, but rather a day without red meat. Our friends always ate fish on Fridays. I like fish. I didn’t see it as giving up anything. In fact, in the middle of the winter when all of the fish in the freezer had been eaten, fish was a rare treat in our house. It was expensive to buy fish in the store and our family’s version of fish in the winter consisted of frozen fish sticks, tuna fish sandwiches and the occasional salmon loaf made from canned salmon. Over at our Catholic friends’ home there were some pretty nice filets served up. Frequently they had shrimp.

Traditions change and one of the things I have observed over the course of my career is an increased emphasis on the traditions in the church among mainline Protestant congregations. We pay more attention to the seasons of the year than was the case half a century ago.

I’m still not much on giving something up for Lent - at least in the sense of a temporary discipline that is adopted for six weeks only and abandoned on Easter.

Lent is, however, an opportunity to make changes in lifestyle. Six weeks is long enough to practice a new way of living that can stick. I have used Lent as a way of making some changes in my life. I try to take the opportunity to live more intentionally during the season. Most of the year I fall into a pattern. I don’t pay enough attention to what I am eating. I fail to sustain exercise disciplines. I go from activity to event to meeting to obligation without being as intentional about how I invest my time. Lent gives me a specific season for paying closer attention and making conscious decisions about how I want to be living my life. Then I have a time to make those changes.

The story of our people includes some very dramatic instances of God’s direct involvement in human history. There have been times when returning to life as usual simply was not an option. Those moments of intervention have challenged our people to look at the world from an entirely different perspective.

God called Moses to lead the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. As soon as they had crossed the Red Sea the people discovered that things had permanently changed. They no longer had the restrictions of slavery, but they also no longer had their food given to them by their overlords. They had to learn to take responsibility for a myriad of community decisions. They found themselves arguing and doubting. Forty years of wandering stood in stark contrast to the years of living in the same place in Egypt.

It is interesting to note how God brought about that change. God didn’t change things by appearing to the powerful leaders of the day. Pharaoh was among the last to learn of the dramatic transformation that was taking place. Moses wasn’t even one of the leaders of the Jewish community of his day. Although he had been raised in the halls of power, he had abandoned that part of his heritage. He wasn’t even able to live among the slaves, but had fled from Egypt entirely by the time that God called him. Outcast from the slaves, his response to God’s call contains a very good question: “Who am I to talk to Pharaoh?”

That pattern is repeated when God intervened in human history in the life, ministry, healing, death and resurrection of Jesus. There is no flash of insight in the halls of power. There is no special revelation for the Roman overlords. Herod has to ask foreign visitors to find out where the child was born. The baby wasn’t born to the leaders and people of power, but rather to a poor woman in an obscure village. The first to hear the news weren’t the community leaders, but shepherds who lived on the margins of Jewish society.

The experiences of our people teach us that God doesn’t work in a top-down fashion. If change is needed, it comes from the bottom up.

We need not look for huge and dramatic changes to experience the depth of Lent. Sometimes a small change is the beginning of something big. Just taking a few more minutes for prayer, or participating in a bit more of the life of the community, or making a small change in lifestyle can be deeply meaningful.

I’m not sure, but I seem to be experiencing a renewal of energy this Lent. It is my usual pattern to put in a few extra hours during the season. There are extra services to plan, extra classes to teach, and a host of special events. The schedule of the church is a bit more intense than some other times of the year. This year I seem ready for the activity and refreshed by the sense that we are doing meaningful work. I’m finding myself to be a little less tired and a little more energetic for the activities of my life.

So, I’m not giving anything up for Lent this year. There aren’t any external changes that you can observe. The small changes that come from within remind me that Lent is not an obligation. It is an opportunity.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

For most of my life I have enjoyed paronomasia. Rhetorical calisthenics are part and parcel of my vocation. Working with words is the craft of the preacher. However, long before I preached my first sermon, I enjoyed the reaction of folks when I found just the right combination of words to tickle the intellect.

Granted, there are plenty of folks who lack appreciation for the very thing that gives me so delight, among them my wife, at least in certain situations and settings. She is among the most practiced at simply not reacting to my wordplay.

Perhaps, however, I’m getting ahead of myself. Language is in a constant state of evolution. Words change. Cultures develop their own expressions, and occasionally a particular language will replace another. Languages borrow words from other languages. That is the case of the word paronomasia. English adapted the word from Latin. Latin adapted it from Greek. In Greek the word is an example of its own meaning. Not so in English. Paronomasia is the use of a word in different senses or the use of words similar in sound to achieve a specific effect, as humor or a dual meaning.

In common parlance, it is a pun.

It has been called the lowest form of humor. I’ll accept that definition if by lowest it is understood that puns are foundational. Puns are a basic element of alphabetic writing. Without examining the subtle similarities and differences of concepts, language fails to express the depth of human meaning. Scholars tell us that puns are more ancient than alphabetic languages, citing examples from Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, the development of alphabetic languages makes it far easier to exercise the subtle twists that make puns so much fun. Take, for example George Carlin’s classic pun: “Atheism is a non-prophet institution.” He could still get a laugh with the line by speaking it, but its written form is even better. In writing, the homophone prophet is put in place of its partner profit, altering the common phrase, “non-profit institution.”

Not all puns involve the use of homophones. Richard Whately crams four puns into one statement: “Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred.”

Puns are best when they are simply stated and allowed to sit. No explanation is necessary and, in fact, explaining detracts from the beauty of the pun. They are, then, best in a particular time and place. The setting and circumstances make the humor.

Some puns however, have to be explained in order to be understood. This is particularly evident when telling ancient puns. Shifts in language detract from understanding. Few contemporary English speakers and readers, for example, understand the puns of the names of the first humans in one of the creation stories of Genesis. In Hebrew, the word for dirt is “adamah.” Adam is scooped out of the adamah. His name is a pun on the elements of his body. the joke works in English if we translate it like this: “God scooped the humus and created a human.” Similarly, the word for breath is “ewa.” God breathed the ewa into the adamah to create Adam as a living soul. Then when, in search for a companion God decides to make a woman, a deep sleep comes over the human and one side or aspect of the human, usually translated rib, is taken. But if you don’t know that the word for that side, or rib, is “ewah” you don’t get the pun. God blows ewa in and takes ewah out as building material for the woman named Eve. Take my word for it, it is much funnier in Hebrew. But you wouldn’t even notice it if I didn’t explain it to you.

That not noticing is exactly what my high school English teacher was hoping for when teaching Shakespeare. Shakespeare loved puns and used them throughout his plays. However, evolution of the English language has rendered some of those puns less easily understood. I’m pretty sure that my English teacher didn’t want us giggling at some of those puns, however.

In “As You Like It,” Jacques announces that he laughed for an hour after hearing Touchstone declare: “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.” You are left scratching your head for the reason of Jacques’ laughter unless you know that in Elizabethan English “hour” sounded the same as “whore” and “ripe” was similar to “rape.” On he other hand, I understand the English teacher’s reluctance. In our modern world, rape is not an appropriate subject for jokes. It is serious violence and not something about which we should laugh. Apparently Jacques is a sexist.

With a good Shakespearian actor, Hamlet’s famous pun is easily interpreted to a modern audience: “Frailty, thy name is woman.” All the actor has to do is to imitate the Elizabethan custom of stretching out the “o” in woman to get it to sound as intended: “woe-man.”

As an aside, the changes in pronunciation are abundantly clear when reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. Many of the rhymes seem cheesy and a definite stretch with modern English pronunciation. Let’s face it, “love” does not rhyme with “prove” the way we speak, nor does “by” rhyme with “remedy” in our way of pronouncing.

I’m sure you would like an update on the guy who had the left side of his body torn off in the accident. He’s all right now.

I’d tell you a chemistry joke, but it wouldn’t get a reaction.

That book about anti-gravity is impossible to put down.

My father wanted me to be a banker, but I lost interest.

After the fire, the baker’s business was toast.

I kept wondering why the baseball was getting bigger and bigger. Then it hit me.

Don’t encourage me. I can go on like this for hours. My wife has learned that not reacting at all is the best course of action.

Go forth and engage in your own paronomasia. Just remember that old rule of grammar: double negatives are a no-no.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

News came yesterday that a friend of a friend, living in a distant city, who has been on my personal prayer chain for a couple of weeks, received devastating news from the doctors. After a surgical procedure a few days ago, he was told that he has stage four pancreatic cancer that has metastasized and spread to several other locations in his body. Doctors these days do not make time predictions, as they know that such predictions are rarely accurate and that individual differences are such that there is no way of knowing the pace of the spread of a disease. On the other hand, it seems likely that the advanced cancer and/or its complications will be the cause of the death of the patient and that the timeline will be relatively short.

Most of the time we live our lives with a decreased awareness of our mortality. We know that death is out there somewhere, but we focus on living our lives, knowing that there will be time for recovery from mistakes and second chances with relationships. For our friends, who asked that we pray for their friend, there is a new sense of urgency. They know that their time with their friend is limited. Each conversation has in its background the knowledge that there are precious few conversations left. It is a tough reality to face.

One of the blessings of reality, however, is that it allows us to set aside ideology. We humans can be stubborn when it comes to hanging on our ideological beliefs, even when (or perhaps especially when) they are misguided. We develop loyalties to politicians and parties. We stick to particular ideas and images of ourselves and others. We exaggerate once meaningful concepts until they take on new and different meanings.

Cancer doesn’t have ideologies. It doesn’t discriminate between political parties. It doesn’t ask if the person is good or bad. It doesn’t care about economic status. It simply is.

The differences that divide humans from one another are nothing in the face of the reality that we are all mortal.

As i sat in front of my computer, processing the information in the email, I immediately thought of the short journey that lies ahead for our friends. Their visits will demand that they witness pain. Their grief is already beginning. Some of the activities that they have enjoyed with their friends can never be done again. They will be attending a funeral before long and the body of one of them will be in the casket.

I know that my role is only to offer my sincere prayers to God. I know better than to try to direct God’s actions. I pray for peace and understanding and acceptance. But I also feel compelled to offer some words of hope to our friends.

Fortunately for me, before I read my email, as my day began yesterday, I went to a program at a local business called the garage. Periodically, supported by a grant from the Bush Foundation, the Numad Group brings speakers to downtown Rapid City and provides a platform for civil conversation and learning. Yesterday morning’s 7 am speaker was Rev. Dr. Robert “Bud” Grant, a Roman Catholic Priest, author, professor and expert on the new Papal Encyclical on the environment. What I had thought might be a discussion of some of the environmental issues of our day proved to be unexpectedly inspiring for me. The final question asked of Father Grant was about hope. He started his answer by speaking about our ideologies. He held up his right hand in a fist and said, “This is belief. It is what you do when you are grasping and trying to hang on with all you have.” Then he held up his left hand, palm open and raised up and said, “This is faith, it is letting go and trusting.”

He went on to say, in words more eloquent than I will be able to write, that we often use the word hope inaccurately. We say “hope” when we are talking about our wishes and selfish desires. “Hope,” he said, “isn’t found in expressing a desire to be protected from bad things. Hope is what happens when the worst thing imaginable occurs and you discover that you are not alone.”

He went on to speak of love and the relationship of faith, hope and love. I couldn’t have found a better way to start my day. His inspiring words stuck through my next meeting, some work on this Sunday’s worship service, a couple of conversations with church members and a response to an emergency in the lives of members of the congregation that delayed my looking at e-mail until after 2 pm.

They came back to me as I read the news of a family so far away’s anguish over a devastating illness. Hope wasn’t in the words I would type in response to the email. Hope wasn’t in my best wishes for everyone involved. But there was a great deal of hope knowing that we belong to a huge network of prayer. I didn’t have to find the right words for our friends. I needed to be reminded that there are circles of prayer surrounding them in many different locations. “Faith, hope and love abide, these three.”

The people I serve have had a really tough week of devastating diagnoses, destructive addictions, broken relationships. I’ve witnessed more pain this week than usual, though I’m not really sure what usual is. But I know that Father Grant is right. If you really want to draw close to the miracles of God, you will do well to let go of your possessions and walk among those who have none. You will do well to cast aside your ideologies and pursue meaningful relationships. You will do well to abandon your search for a flawless Christology and look for the resurrected Christ in the people in your own neighborhood.

Once, when he was late for a meeting at the Vatican, Father Grant burst through a doorway and nearly knocked over Mother Theresa. It wasn’t the meeting with the saint he had envisioned. It makes a pretty funny story the way he tells it these days. It is also a reminder that Christ walks in our midst every day and comes to us in the form of the people who surround us.

I pray I can learn to slow down and recognize what a gift this is.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

There are two things that I often say about prayer. The first is that prayer doesn’t require you to have the right words. It is, after all, a process of paying attention to the fact that God is always listening. From God’s point of view, there is no difference between praying and not praying. From ours, praying is reminding ourselves that God is listening. The second thing that I say is that when you don’t have words for your prayer, it really helps to know that you aren’t the only one who is praying.

I’ve been doing a lot of public praying lately.

To put that in context, a brief story from a long time ago. When I began to prepare for the ministry, back in the 1970’s, laity empowerment was a buzzword and a popular concept in the parts of the church that were familiar to me. Pastors were trying to encourage lay persons to assume responsibility for leadership in the church. As a result, there were frequent occasions when a pastor would be asked to say a prayer, for example before a meal, and the pastor would gently refuse, saying that others could lead prayer. That usually resulted in a whole room full of people awkwardly looking at their feet. In the interest of getting our food, I learned a few table graces and was quick to volunteer with a prayer. I also made a promise that I believe I have honored: I vowed that I would never refuse when asked to pray.

Saying prayers in public is a thing that I do. It is a part of my job. Public prayers range from simple table prayers to very carefully crafted pastoral prayers offered in formal worship services. I read prayers that have been written by others in the context of liturgy. I offer prayers at bedside in hospitals and care centers. I pray with people over the telephone and in my office.

My work, however, is varied. It is one of the things that I like about my job. The days are different from each other. There are days when most of what I do involves sitting in front of a computer preparing documents. We have a lot of reports that need to be produced. We produce a worship bulletin every week, and some weeks there are multiple bulletins. We produce a monthly newsletter. We update our web site regularly. I blog. There are all kinds of tasks that involve computers, which means that there are days when I am installing new software, updating network settings, and troubleshooting problems with the computers in the church. Then there are days that are intensely people focused. This week has been more of the latter. We are just a couple of weeks into a new lifestyle for a man who is wrestling with a serious addiction. There is no problem with his intentions or his resolve or his will, but keeping himself on track requires constant checking in. I speak with him nearly daily, usually over the phone. I was at the bedside of a patient who had just received from his doctor that the most important element in his recovery would need to be some serious lifestyle changes. I’ve been working with an emerging congregation that is tiny and cannot afford paid leadership as they struggle with what I think is their first funeral. At least they haven’t experienced another funeral in the years I’ve been working with them. February is the month when our newly-elected church Department and Board Members take office and begin serving. I’ve been trying to attend as many meetings as possible and frequently am asked to lead devotions or pray an invocation at meetings.

And I have my own prayer disciplines that need my attention: a personal prayer journal with a lot of entries for persons who have asked for prayers, clergy groups that meet to support and extend our ministries, personal and small group bible study, and preparations for the Lenten classes that I will be teaching.

Which brings me to the point with which I began this blog: God is always listening. God is always paying attention. All real living is praying. Then, on occasion, we pay attention to that fact and make ourselves aware that God is there. We call those moments prayer.

One of the people with whom I have been working said to me yesterday that he finds himself repeating prayers from his childhood over and over as he thinks about his situation and the problems he is facing. I pointed out to him that this seems to be a very good sign. When we pray the ancient prayers, whether they be historic prayers of the church, or prayers we memorized as children, we are making a connection with others. When we pray “the Lord’s Prayer, we are literally joined with others who are praying it at the same time, but we are also joined with generations of Christians who have prayed it in other times and who will pray it in the future. To pray a prayer using words that have come from somewhere else is to subtly remind ourselves that we are not alone. And prayer often comes precisely at those moments when we need to acknowledge that we can’t get through this life alone. We need others. We need to belong. We are part of a community. And God delights in healthy relationships. What better way to pray than to share the words of others?

When I am alone, my prayers often have no need of words. I had to learn to be content with silence. I had to practice focusing my attention. It is a skill that I continue to refine after decades of conscious effort. God, I have found, is very comfortable with silence and has patience to wait a lifetime while I learn the art of silence. Too much silence, however, can make people uncomfortable in some settings. It may just be a need for more practice, it may be that they need a more tangible sign that I am with them in that moment.

So I have to pray even more, asking that I might find the right words to say that will help the people I serve to find God’s presence in their lives.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I occasionally find myself in conversations where I am not quite sure that I understand everything that is being said. Not long ago a colleague and I were have a discussion and the colleague kept making references to “the God of the Old Testament.” While on one level I can accept that there are theological differences between the two parts of the Bible, I have no way to understand a conversation that makes a distinction between two Gods. My understanding of Jesus is heavily dependent upon the whole of the Bible. I know that what was being expressed wasn’t some kind of departure from monotheism. I know that my colleague doesn’t believe in two different gods. Nonetheless, I had a momentary sense of “I don’t really know what you are talking about.”

We, who are caught up in the love of talking about our faith, employ a lot of symbolic language. Not infrequently we use words in a different manner than the everyday vocabulary of the popular media. I suspect that more often than we realize, we miscommunicate because of our choice of words.

Last night I led a brief devotion at a church meeting that focused on the prologue to the Gospel of John:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

The highly symbolic language of the Gospel is deeply meaningful to me. In the church we have come to talk about two aspects of Jesus Christ. On the one hand, when we refer to Jesus, we are talking about a historical figure - a man who lived in a particular time and place, who was born, raised by his parents, lived and taught and was crucified. At the same time, we are talking about a unique revelation of God. That particular human person is also fully God. We affirm that Jesus was present with God at creation and throughout all of history that predated his birth in Bethlehem. And we believe that since his death and resurrection, Jesus continues to be fully present in the world, though in a different way than he was for the brief span of his life.

For me, speaking of “word” and “flesh” is a helpful way of expressing the dual nature of Christ: fully human and fully divine.

As such, carefully studying the relationship between God and Israel as revealed in the books we call the Old Testament is important to my understanding of the fullness of Jesus Christ. I can’t separate that study from my studies of the New Testament. Nor can I separate those studies from the study of the history of the church after the resurrection of Jesus and my life today. All are aspects of a quest to draw closer to God.

They are also ways of figuring out what it means to be a human being. It isn’t just that we need to understand Jesus in the context of the generations of faith, we also need to understand ourselves in such a context.

I’m pretty sure that my devotion was not very well focused. I didn’t have much time to express my ideas and convictions. If those who listened got a sense of my passion for thinking of Jesus Christ as present in all of history, that is probably enough for one small meditation. As is often true, it is not the content of my meditation that is central to our gathering, but rather the prayers that we share.

In seminary, we all had to take a course in systematic theology. One of the critical papers we had to produce in the course of our education was an orderly, rational and coherent account of our Christian faith and beliefs. My attempts at putting everything together into a single paper were largely ineffective. My thoughts and passions are not very systematic at all. One idea may spring from a previous thought, but not in an orderly fashion. I’ve read the attempts of others at systematic theologies and I have learned a great deal, but I don’t have an orderly and well-organized comprehensive theological statement.

Part of the challenge for me was that I was in my early twenties when I attended theological seminary. There was a different mix of theory and experience in my life in those days. I’ve gathered a bit more experience these days, but the truth is that a single human life is too short a span to express the depth of human understanding about the nature of God. If I live many more decades, I will not have experienced the fullness of God.

So it is important for me to drawn on the experiences of others. I am no expert on God’s call to justice, but I know how our people have wrestled with that concept for generations. I have some information on the teachings of the prophets who used God’s words to call the people away from their ways. I know some of what our faith teaches about the treatment of immigrants and orphans and widows. I find a great deal in the experiences of our forebears that can inform the decisions that we face today.

In my unfocused and rambling way, I find myself standing in a long line of people who have sought God in the past and as a predecessor to generations yet to come who will add insight and meaning to the discoveries of God that have been and are being made.

I doubt whether it will ever be my calling to produce a comprehensive, systematic theology. My contribution to the world of Christian thought will more likely be a series of random essays that appear without an obvious pattern or order.

Perhaps I’ll just call it a “blog” and let that be good enough for now.

I suspect my colleagues are as puzzled by the things I say as I am by their words at times.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We married at the beginning of the summer between our junior and senior years of college. I turned 20 a week before the wedding and although I thought I was mature, there were still a lot of things that I had to learn. Just before my birthday, I moved into a tiny apartment that had been the RA apartment of a dormitory on campus. The building was no longer used as a dorm. The first floor, except for our apartment was devoted to offices of the Montana Association of Churches, the Montana Conference of the United Methodist Church and the Montana Conference of the United Church of Christ. the basement had a meeting room where a new Presbyterian Church met on Sundays. The second floor had bedrooms that could be used for conferences. There was a fair amount of janitorial services needed in the building and we arranged to trade those services for the apartment for the school year. Our landlady and boss was the director of adult education/continuing education programs of the college, Margaret Ping.

We knew Margaret from church and she was a friend of both sets of our parents. Susan had known Margaret from her childhood, when Margaret had led the “Adventure Club” at her church. She was well known in the community for a wide variety of projects and programs. She was in her early sixties and recently retired from nearly 40 years working for the YWCA all across the United States and in Mexico and Peru. She had wonderful stories of her travels and was a delight when our busy lives afforded a few minutes to visit.

Nearly every weekend she drove the 50 miles to Hardin where she grew up and where her father was living. He was in his nineties and still in reasonably good health. She must have told him a little bit about the young couple living in here building because he started to send groceries our way. Towards the end of the summer we received some delicious cherries. Later in the fall there were apples. Many Mondays there’d be some small treat from either Margaret or her father.

The year sped by, we received our acceptance letters to graduate school in Chicago, graduated from college and went on with our lives. Margaret continued to be very interested in what was going on with us and trips home to Montana often included an opportunity to visit with her. She helped establish Global Village, a nonprofit Fair Trade organization dedicated to the support of low income artisans and farmers. The organization is much more than a retail store, it is also a place with a lot of educational activities teaching cultural appreciation, tolerance and understanding.

During our years in Boise, Margaret and I often touched base regarding Habitat for Humanity. We were both involved in establishing Habitat Affiliates in our community and Margaret was full of really good ideas about how to keep the organization growing and building.

A few years ago she made a trip to Rapid City and came to worship with our congregation and visit us. She was pleased with our church and, of course, asked about Habitat for Humanity and our involvement in that organization. Our congregation was active in building a duplex at the time, so it was fun to share with her some of our Habitat for Humanity stories. She was in her late 90’s at the time and still as active and engaged in life as ever. Buy then she had quit driving and told us that she had to arrange around a dozen rides each week to keep up with all of her organizations and volunteer activities.

We were recipients of her generosity, and it amazes me to think how many other people have benefitted from her graciousness and generosity over the years.

In May of 2013, the Billings Gazette Newspaper published an article about Margaret on the occasion of her 100th birthday. Two things remain with me from that article: First of all, she made a conscious decision, at the age of 21, in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, to dedicate her life to serving others. That meant that it was not only her 100th birthday, but also the 80th anniversary of her life of service to others. The second thing I remember about that article was her advice to the rest of us: “Don’t stop.”

She took here own advice.

Margaret died on Saturday, a few months shy of her 104th birthday. She had been having some health difficulties since November, but there were plenty who didn’t know about them. She made it to church every Sunday. She made a visit to the Big Horn County Historical Society in her home town on February 4, She continued to volunteer at the Museum every Wednesday until the last few weeks of her life. Thursday was Habitat for Humanity Day, where she volunteered through January.

Her memorial service, this coming Saturday, will draw too many people to fit in the sanctuary of her church - the church where we were married. The service will are held in the larger sanctuary of 1st Congregational United Church of Christ in Billings. I have no doubt that it will be packed for the occasion.

The list of awards that Margaret received is far too long to list here, but a couple bear mention. She was the second recipient of the Jeannette Rankin Peace Award and I have always suspected that she or one of her friends nominated my mother for the award which she received a few years later. Margaret was awarded the YWCA Meritorious Service Award, an honor that everyone agreed couldn’t have ben made to a more worthy recipient.

When I received the news of her death, my first reaction was to say, “She certainly got it right! What a life!”

This spring, it will be 38 years since I graduated from seminary and began serving as pastor of a church. Some days I feel a little tired. Sometimes it seems like I’ve been doing this a long time. But I’ve got a ways to go, yet. After all, it will take another 45 years before I catch up with Margaret. I won’t forget her advice: “Don’t stop.”

For the rest of my life I will need no other sign of the presence of our Good and Gracious God than the memories of Margaret Ping. She got it right.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Walter Wink is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. He has written several books and is often published in theological journals. In an article for the Bible Society of the United Kingdom, he re-tells one of the oldest myths in the world, the Babylonian creation story called the “Enuma Elish.” The story dates from around 1250 BCE. In that myth, a mother god and a father god give birth to the rest of the gods. A dispute arises between the elder and younger gods and Tiamat, the mother god, plots the death of the younger generation. The younger gods uncover the plot before it is carried out. Marduk, the youngest god agrees to save them in exchange for being named the chief of all of the gods. They agree, Marduk catches Tiamat in a net and murders her. The myth contains a great deal of bloody detail about how she is murdered and how the bloody corpse is spread out. The body is formed into the cosmos. There are a lot more details that I am not reporting here. In the myth all of creation is an act of violence. The story was one of the dominant creation myths of the ancient near east.

Meanwhile, our ancestors in faith we on a journey in search for a homeland. The journey led them into Egypt and slavery from which they were freed under the leadership of Moses. Along the way they were developing a strong monotheistic theology: There is only one God, creator of all that is. The most ancient stories of our people tell of our beginnings in the journey of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. Perhaps the oldest version of a creation story in our Bible is in the 26th chapter of Deuteronomy. It is given as a memory prayer to be said when making an offering:

‘“A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. 6 And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” —Deuteronomy 10:5b-9

Much later, after the time of the rise of the united monarchy and the subsequent divisions in the leadership of Israel, Babylon launched a conquest of Judah in 598 BCE, resulting in the forced detention of Jews in Babylonia until 538 BCE when Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylonia and gave the Jews permission to return to Palestine. It was during that time of captivity that our people encountered the Enuma Elish and learned the Babylonian story of creation. This crisis in the lives of our people gave rise to the need to have a written story of creation that told an alternate story: the story of one God who is the God of all creation. The story of creation that was taught to Jewish children and which preserved our faith through the time of exile is now the beginning of our Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Genesis 1 is our people’s answer to the Babylonian creation myth.

Our story tells of God who is good and who forms a good creation. Chaos does not resist order. Good is prior to evil. Violence and evil are not essential parts of creation. They occur later and enter the world as a result of human sin. Our story - the one with which we stick to this day - is that violence is not a product of God, an essential part of creation, but rather a problem that requires a solution.

This is an important distinction. In the Babylonian myth, violence is not a problem. It is an accepted fact. The Babylonian myth is very simple. Ours is much more complex and nuanced. The Babylonian myth was easy to tell and spread as far as Syria, Phonecia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, Ireland, India and China. In the various versions there is usually a male god fighting a decisive battle with a female god, sometimes depicted as a monster or dragon and the cosmos is the result of the battle.

It makes a very big difference which story you embrace. Our ancestors knew this when they lived in exile in Babylon so long ago.

The Babylonian myth asserts that human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin is violence. Killing is in our genes. Humans are not the originators of evil. They find evil already present and continue the divine ways.

Our story asserts a completely different perspective. God is good. There is one god. Creation is good. We are the product of that good creation. We ourselves have been pronounced good by God. As such, violence is to be resisted and overcome. Good will triumph over evil in the big picture.

Unfortunately the Babylonian myth persists in modern society. People, even those who claim to be Christian, hang on to the myth of redemptive violence. They believe that violence and only violence can solve the problem of suffering. They remain convinced that the way to solve the problems of the world is to take up arms and engage in violence. This version of the world has its roots in the Babylonian creation myth.

Once again, as has been the truth in every generation, we need to assert an alternative story. Ours is a story that good triumphs over evil, that forgiveness is possible, that reconciliation is worth every effort it takes. Our belief forms the basis of social contracts and democracy.

We reject the notion that might makes right, that violence is inevitable, that the response to violence must always be violence.

The old stories, however, persist. I hear traces of the Babylonian myth in the speeches of politicians.

Teaching our story is as critical today as it was during the exile.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I have a twitter account, but about the only thing I tweet is a monthly announcement that the church news letter is now available and give the location. If you read this blog, you’ll probably understand. I tend to think in essays, writing a thousand words or so with each blog entry. A tweet is 140 characters. That’s not much. I’ve already written more than that just to explain my attitude towards tweets.

I suppose that if Jesus had had a twitter account, he might have been quite good. Here are some examples of tweets that Jesus might have sent. Each is under the character count:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Of course the report we have is that Jesus put all of these together in a single sermon. And the last one is just a little bit too long:

“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

There is an analogue version of twitter that is easy to find if you drive around our community. It is a process that I call “ministry by aphorism:” the signs and digital letter boards that appear outside of churches. You can find the messages all over the Internet:

“Walmart is not the only saving place.”

“Forbidden fruit creates many jams.”

“Live simply, love generously, care deeply, speak kindly, leave the rest to God.”

“Baptism separates the tire kickers from the car buyers.”

“Stop posting made up quotes” — Mark Twain

I’m not sure whether or not that last one is a made up quote.

Fortunately, our church’s new sign has no letter board. I don’t have to figure out what to put up on the sign that might be both clever and honest. I don’t think there is much that can be said about the true nature of faith in such short phrases.

But, as I said, Jesus seemed to be better at it than I am:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

The problem with many short phrases is that it is quite possible for a casual reader to take them the wrong way. You might intend one meaning, but the reader might take away another. That can, of course, happen with longer forms of discourse. I’m frequently surprised when a church member tells me of something I said in a sermon that I don’t think I would have said.

Those who post a lot of tweets sooner or later find themselves swept up in controversy when their posts are misinterpreted, and just as frequently when they post something that they later wish they had not.

Recently the Church of England was the topic of much discussion in the world of twitter when they tweeted “Prayers for Prof Dawkins and his family”

Richard Dawkins is a biologist and prominent secularist. His book “The God Delusion” has become a favorite of atheists and others who criticize religion. On February 5, he fell ill while on a tour of Australia and New Zealand. He spent four days at John Radcliffe Hospital but appears to be recovering well.

Some people, however, saw the church’s post as “trolling” or mocking the professor. I suspect that they are wrong. I believe that church leaders who make the posts were genuinely wishing Professor Dawkins well. We are taught to pray at all times for all people. Prayer and compassion are not limited to those who are in our group, or those with whom we agree. And for those of us who believe, God’s grace is not limited to the people we find similar to ourselves. It is abundant and sufficient for all. I find nothing mocking or offensive in joining in prayer for a public figure.

But it does point out the problem of short phrases that are trying to express very nuanced ideas. Dawkins himself can’t be understood in 140 characters or less. His book is very complex and express views that have to be carefully examined to be understood. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I do sense his intelligence and feel that his ideas are worthy of conversation. I would never wish him ill or see him as an enemy.

There is a danger in all writing of being misunderstood or reduced to simple ideas. That danger seems more intense with the world of twitter.

But then, I’ve never been good at social media. I try to keep up, but I don’t find it to be a good way of pursuing relationships with others. I much prefer actual conversation to many of the things that are posted on the Internet. Even someone I know well, like my sister, occasionally posts something that leaves me scratching my head and wondering what was meant.

I’m thinking it might have been more meaningful for the Church of England to send a private card to Dawkins wishing him well. There was no particular need for a public statement in what might have been clear and meaningful as a private conversation.

Then, again, I’m the wrong person to offer any expertise on that subject. I’m no good at promotion and publicity. In that I think I’m following Jesus, who also didn’t worry about such things. That was left to the writers of the Gospels, whose works seem to have withstood the test of time.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We call it the “Great Schism.” In round numbers, for roughly half of the history of the Christian Church there was one church with many congregations. We have never seen eye to eye on all issues. There have always been disagreements among Christians. Some of those disagreements are evident in reading the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of our New Testament. Some people believed that Christians should follow Jewish dietary laws, others thought that those laws didn’t apply. Some people envisioned a “top down” structure with a rigid hierarchy, others envisioned autonomous local congregations. After a few centuries there were disputes over which language should be used for liturgy and for the scriptures. Some insisted that the original Greek, language of the New Testament should be used for all Christian worship. Others thought that Latin should be used. Still others argued that there should be a multiplicity of languages for faith and that the local language was best for interpreting the Gospel to people.

After the time of Constantine the Great, emperor of Rome from 306 to 337, the church became a center of political power throughout the regions of the world to which Christianity had spread. Leaders of the church began to be seen as political consultants and power brokers. Constantine did more for the Roman Empire than just recognize Christianity as an official religion. He make deep political changes in the attempt to establish Rome as the center of power for the entire known world. He established a new imperial residence at Byzantium and renamed the city Constantinople after himself. This dual capitol with residences in Rome and in Constantinople was eventually reflected in the structure of the church, with strong church leaders in both cities. Those leaders didn’t always agree.

Centuries passed and the disagreements built. The Pope at Rome was declared the patriarch of the entire church. The Patriarch in Constantinople was called the “Ecumenical Patriarch.” Tensions built between the two leaders and congregations began to take sides in the disagreement. In 1053, Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople, in response to the Greek churches in southern Italy having been forced to either close or conform to Latin practices. The next year the papal legal counsel was sent to Constantinople to insist that the patriarch recognize Rome’s claim to be the head and mother of churches. Things didn’t go so well. The result was mutual excommunications by Pope Leo in Rome and Patriarch Cerularius. Effectively there were two churches and two church hierarchies from that point forward.

After a couple of centuries an attempt was made in 1272 to hold a council to reconcile the church. On June 29, Pope Gregory X celebrated a Mass in St. John’s Church, where both sides took part. The council declared that the Roman church possessed “the supreme and full primacy and authority over the universal church.” The union effected was declared “a sham and a political gambit” by eastern church leaders.

There were no further talks until 1439, when the Council of Ferrara-Florence was held. An agreement was signed by all but one of the Eastern bishops who were present at the council. The union, however, was not affirmed by the people. When the eastern bishops returned to their homes, their congregations rejected the union. The schism continued.

That was the sum of church history about the great schism when I was formally studying the subject in seminary. The east and west remain divided. No further official talks had taken place.

Then, in 1997, it looked like a new council might take place. It was announced that Pope John Paul II would meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II. There was some excitement over the possibilities of such a meeting, but the meeting was cancelled and no talks took place.

Then, yesterday, history was made in the Christian Church. It was an event that will be talked about for centuries. Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill met at the airport in Havana. Pope Francis was on his way to Mexico for a five-day visit. Patriarch Kirill was on his way to Brazil and Paraguay. They embraced. "I'm happy to greet you, dear brother," the Russian Church leader said. "Finally," the pontiff said. They spoke for two hours and signed a joint declaration and held a press conference.

Unity has not been achieved. Back home Patriarch Kirill will have to face the anger of conservatives who still consider Catholicism a deviation from true Christianity. When he is in the Vatican, Pope Francis will face criticism about theological and practical compromises. Neither would have had sufficient support for a meeting to take place in either Rome or Moscow.

It is one thing to sign a document calling on the world to defend Christians, who are facing extreme persecution in many countries of the Middle East and North Africa. It is an entirely different matter to establish deep and lasting ties between two sides of the church that have been divided for nearly a thousand years.

Even if the two were to somehow reach an agreement, it would not erase the Protestant Reformation during which the western church split. Deep divisions over theological issues as well as disagreements over the authority and structure of the church remain.

It seems likely that the process set in motion by Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis will require centuries if not more time for the schism to heal. There will be setbacks and divisions and challenges. The meeting nonetheless, is significant. In terms of the history of the church is may be the most important event of our lifetimes.

The story of our faith is one with a long timeline. Most of the important revelations of Christianity have taken generations to become accepted. The story of the church is about far more than the span of a single lifetime. It is humbling to recognize how small an individual Christian is in the scope of the great flow of history.

Still, we were alive to witness a significant event in the story of the church. It is worth noting and worthy of a prayer of gratitude to God. I agree wth the pope’s sentiment: “Finally.”

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

When our children were in elementary school, I volunteered regularly in their classrooms. It gave me a way to observe my children in school, meet their peers, learn about the teaching methods used in their classrooms, and work with them to make connections between home and school. I have a passion for teaching and enjoyed working with our children’s teachers. One day as I was assisting with an art project, the regular classroom teacher stepped out of the room temporarily. This was a common occurrence. I was known to the students, understood the project at hand and could give the teacher a few minutes to gather supplies or do other functions that took her out of the classroom. I was walking down the rows of students, chatting with them about their projects. When I reached one little boy his face erupted in anger. He yelled at me, tipped over his table, picked up a chair and sung it at another student.

I had never witnessed an outburst quite like that. The only thing I could think of to do was to pick up the child so that I could keep him from hurting another child. He was obviously angry and striking at me, so I had to hold him at arm’s length to keep him from hitting my face. Not knowing what else to do, I carried him towards the doorway that led to the hall. Fortunately, for my sake, the principal was exiting her office into the hall at the same moment, heard the commotion and came to my rescue. She took the student from behind allowing me to release my grip and slowly lowered him to the floor as I backed into the classroom to assist the other children who were upset by the incident. I could tell as I returned to the room that the principal had already succeeded in calming and quieting the student, but he did not return to the classroom until my volunteer time had ended.

Later I discussed the incident with the principal who told me that during the lunch break just before the class in which I volunteered, the child’s father had taken him to lunch and delivered the news that the parents were divorcing. He then returned the child to the school. The child was angry at his father and I was the first adult male he encountered after receiving the news.

Since that experience, I have had lots of opportunities to try to figure out what is going on in the lives of the children and youth with whom I work. I remember a child who constantly disrupted every activity I tried to lead with his class in Vacation Bible School. I tried to separate him from the group, which made things worse. I tried giving him extra attention and finding special roles for him in the classroom. By the third day of Vacation Bible School, I had made lists on a sheet of paper of “things that work,” and “things that don’t work.” I didn’t achieve much success with that child during that week, but I started to pay attention to him and his interactions with others as the years progressed. By the time he was in youth group, I had learned enough to enable him to participate in the group without disruption most of the time. Both of us had matured in the process. I had gained a great deal of ability to tell what was going on with him by observing his facial expressions.

Another student who was a particular challenge to me needed to have something in his hands in order to be able to participate in group activities. I started collecting small balls of various textures and devising classroom games that involved handling the balls. I created an arts exercise involving clay. I engaged the group in making posters. I made lists of activities that would engage their minds while their hands were busy. That student helped me develop a whole new set of resources to use in working with children and youth, many of which I employ without really having to think about them.

I was thinking of those students and my experiences with them over the decades yesterday. There was a family night at the church on Wednesday. Participants made valentine cards for shut-in members of the church. After the event, Susan was getting the cards into envelopes and preparing them to be mailed. She found one that had been addressed to me and delivered it to my office.

The card opened from left to right instead of the usual way, so I had to look at what seemed like the back to find my name written in block letters. When I opened the card the inside says, “You are a good churcheer.” It was signed by a boy whom I’ve failed to get to know very well. He is often disruptive in activities, has been known to hide in the building causing his mother worries, plays inappropriately with church equipment. I’ve had to discipline him for swinging pool cues, running in the sanctuary, being a bit too loud for the present activity and a host of other infractions.

The card brought me up short. First of all it taught me something about the way the child thinks. The “backwards” card may reveal unconventional patterns and ways of thinking. Secondly, it reminded me that although my relationship with the child has been primarily about setting boundaries, I somehow am not perceived by the child as the “bad guy.” He sees me as a good part of the church community and made the effort to make a card to tell me so. The spelling and handwriting on the card lead me to believe that he was not being coached by an adult when he made it. It was a genuine gift and outreach to me.

It was a reminder that the most challenging children can be valuable members of the community and are definitely worth the effort to learn what works and what doesn’t work when engaging in learning with individual children.

Sunday is a busy day, with a lot of activities. I won’t have much time to spend with the children of the church. There is, however, one child whom I will seek out to express my gratitude for a special card that not only made my day, but also reminded me that with effort I can be a more effective teacher.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I don’t know how much fear of death is a part of people’s lives. What seems to be more prevalent is fear of talking about death. And then, I don’t know if it is fear. I often encounter people who are uncomfortable talking about death. The discomfort is revealed with silence and occasionally with joking and sometimes with a blatant move to change the subject.

Although yesterday was Ash Wednesday, a day to contemplate our mortality and be reminded of our own death, I was thinking of people’s discomfort with death in an entirely different context. I was noticing that some people in our community are made visibly uncomfortable when they are around people who live with disabilities. I wonder if there is something about another’s disability that makes us uneasy because we don’t like to think of the possibility of ourselves as disabled.

I suppose that had I been born in a different time, I might be considered disabled. I have nearsightedness and astigmatism. These days, those conditions are no big deal. A trip to the eye doctor and a set of glasses can be made that enable me to see well enough to engage in all of the activities I choose. In a hunter-gatherer society, without glasses, I wouldn’t have been much of a provider. I don’t see well enough to be able to hunt game. Of course in other epochs of time, my condition would be nearly invisible. Because I have reasonable close vision, I can read most text without my glasses. That isn’t much of an advantage in a preliterate society, which is the story of most of human history. I might have been forced to make more adaptations depending on the time in which I lived.

But I didn’t live in those times. My condition was recognized fairly early in my life and I’ve received excellent health care and have glasses and even a spare pair. It is hardly a disability.

Of course there are plenty of disabilities that are more obvious and evident in a person’s life. There are birth defects that result in skeletal and muscular abnormalities that give a person a different gate. Sometimes these conditions are addressed surgically or with adaptive devices such as shoes with lifts or braces that add rigidity to certain parts of the body. In times before such devices were invented those suffering from those conditions would be considered crippled and likely suffered social stigma as a result of their condition.

The Gospels are filled with people with disabilities that are described in the terms of the day, not in modern medical terms. We read about those who are blind or lame or possessed without knowing exactly what their conditions were. We know that some people healed by Jesus suffered from seizures, but whether or not the actual medical diagnosis would be epilepsy, for example, is speculation. What we do know from the Gospels and other independent sources is that those conditions often resulted in a person being excluded from a community, often forced to live outside the walls of the community. A hard life was made even more difficult by the reaction of the mainstream community.

I don’t know if such a reaction was caused by fear or not. I do know it happens with other animals. When a deer is injured, it will be picked on by other deer until it is separated from the clusters that stick together. Often we will see deer kicking another animal. In our neighborhood the injured animal usually leaves and we never know its story. I suppose some recover from their injuries and others die. I guess the process is a part of natural selection. By shoving the injured animal to the fringes of the community, those who are left are somehow less vulnerable to predators.

I am interested in how we react as humans because I feel called to remain engaged in forming community. I follow Jesus, but I do not have his ability to heal brokenness. My touch is no cure for blindness. So my role is to seek to understand the dynamics of the community in other ways. I watch our congregation. Many members are open and welcoming of those who live with disabilities. There is some discomfort when communication is strained by differences in speech patterns. There are some who don’t know exactly how to respond to some who have different ways of walking and talking. For the most part, however, I am proud of my congregation’s welcome for those who live with disabilities. We have invested resources in removing barriers from our physical building so that there is access for all. It is a relatively easy building to negotiate with a wheelchair or a walker.

Physical barriers, however, are only part of the story. Being a congregation that values education and has a strong tradition of clergy who have been academically successful, we don’t always know how to relate to those who have brain disorders or cognitive impairment. Most issues in our congregation are encountered with conversation. When someone doesn’t have language skills, we are a bit stymied about how to pursue that relationship.

Most of us, however, will one day experience disability. Some of those disabilities will result in isolation from the community. It isn’t at all uncommon for a church member who has been a dedicated and regular attender of church worship and functions, to lose the ability to be with the community when that person is no longer able to drive. Some physical limitations result in people needing to leave their homes for care centers and we often have a major shift in our relationship with them when that move occurs. Instead of them coming to us, we need to go to that person and our conversation becomes less frequent. We work hard to have a system of congregational connections with those who are homebound or shut in, but those connections aren’t the same as meting weekly for worship.

So I continue to think about these things and I continue to be aware that our response is less than perfect. I hope that I never become afraid to think and talk about disability and even death itself. After all, an organization dedicated to celebrating the resurrection shouldn’t be afraid to talk about death.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

“Live every day as if it were your last.” It is a bit of common wisdom gleaned from popular culture. It is a bit of advice often heard, and I suppose it isn’t a bad idea, though one seldom truly applied. The closest I can come to an actual source for the quote is one from Mahatma Gandi, who said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow,” and followed up with, “Learn as if you were to live forever.” The entire quote is certainly more complete advice than just the sentiment about being aware of the shortness and preciousness of life. The Roman poet Horace wrote, “Carpe diem,” though the aphorism is likely to have existed long before it showed up in Horace’s work, “Odes” in 23 BC. We usually translate the phrase “seize the day,” but it might also be translated “enjoy, use, or make use of.” The verb carpo means to “pick or pluck,” so it might be more literal to translate it “pluck the day (as it is ripe).” The way it gets used in contemporary society it has little more meaning than the ubiquitous “Have a nice day!”

For us, however, today is a day in which we are asked to contemplate our mortality. It isn’t quite the same thing as an admonition to live every day as if it were the last. It is rather a more simple reminder that we are mortal. We often quote the book of Genesis on Ash Wednesday, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” It is the end of a 6-verse judgement rendered by God against the snake following the discovery that the man and his wife had eaten fruit from the tree that was forbidden.

In many places throughout the Bible ashes were symbols of grief and mourning. In the book of Esther, Mordecai and many of the other Jews put on sackcloth and ashes when Haman was given authority to destroy them. When Jonah declared that God was going to destroy the people of Nineveh, everyone from the king down responded with repentance and fasting, donning sackcloth and ashes. The symbol showed up in Isaiah, 1 and 2 Kings, Lamentations, Daniel and even in the book of Revelation, where two witnesses don the symbolic garb.

It was an outward sign of an inward reality. People were demonstrating their commitment to making changes.

That symbol carries similar meaning for us. Matthew, Mark and Luke all report that Jesus spent 40 days fasting in the desert, where he was tempted. Lent arose as a period of imitating his spiritual journey, an official time of 40 days of preparation for Easter. It has become the common practice to begin this period on Ash Wednesday, 46 days before Easter, not counting the Sundays as fast days.

The ceremony of Ashes is very simple. People are invited to reflect on their own mortality and to consider what changes they want to make in this life. then an individual blessing is received. The Palm Branches, blessed as a part of the celebration of Palm Sunday the previous year, are burned to ash and a smudge of ashes is placed on the forehead or back of the had of each participant with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Some congregations use “Repent, and believe in the Gospel” for the blessing.

There are references to blessings with ashes as early as the third century, though it wasn’t an official order of the church until the 10th century when Pope Urban II, as the council of Benevento declared Ash Wednesday as an official day of repentance. There were some divisions over the practice during the Protestant reformation, with some communions refraining from the practice entirely, while other Protestants continued to observe the day. It remains common in many congregations to observe the day without the imposition of ashes, and in most Protestant congregations the ashes are offered as a symbolic gift and not as a requirement of faithful people.

For me, the day is largely symbolic. It is a day to remind myself of something that I already know. Life is precious and it does not go on forever. We are mortal and one day each of us will die from this life. But we are also endowed with great freedom to make choices. Remembering our mortality enables us to choose wisely, knowing that we cannot do everything and that we need to prioritize our actions and make the best choices we are able with the time that is ours.

I am fairly satisfied with my life. I doubt if I would make dramatic changes if I were to receive the diagnosis of a fatal illness and imminent death. But I frequently work with people who have the desire to make big changes. Those suffering from addictions often know in their minds the changes they want, but lack the ability to change their behavior without assistance and support from others. When your behavior is causing pain for others and yourself, it is clear that change is needed, but often people don’t know how to bring about those changes.

For those who want to “turn around” their lives, Ash Wednesday is a good starting point.

I don’t know all of the individual stories of the people who will come to me for blessing today. Because we distribute ashes in a community setting as well as in a service at our church it is likely that I will pray and bless those who are strangers to me. Of course there will be others whose lives I know well and whose struggles and difficulties have been shared with me. Each encounter is precious. The people come to me one at a time. I am granted the opportunity to look each in the eyes and pray individually for each. Most of the time I deal with groups of people. On Ash Wednesday, I am called to make individual connections.

And as I do, I am reminded how precious this day is. I will not always be a pastor in the position to have people come to me for a blessing. It is a privilege I am given for a part of my life. It is one I am determined to honor and not squander.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Yesterday we had the gift of time to take a drive in the hills. It always surprises us that we live in such a wonderful place and yet don’t get out to see the beauty of our surroundings as often as we might. We fill our lives with a sense of obligation about things that need to be done and use those “to do” lists as an excuse to stay in a rut between work and home. After a couple of days of high winds, it was still breezy, but less so than the previous days and the high temperatures in Rapid moved above the freezing temperature. The roads were clear and dry and so we headed up to Spearfish canyon to look at the sights, take a short walk, and have lunch.

Growing up alongside a river in country where it gets cold, I’m used to the special qualities of running water and ice. When the air temperature is below freezing, it is the motion of the water that provides the energy to keep it from freezing. Since heat rises, the water shares some of its energy with the surrounding area. Because ice is less dense than liquid water it floats on top of the water and, if there is enough ice, creates a barrier that slows the loss of heat from the liquid water.

Rivers and streams tend to freeze from the edges toward the center. If the water is moving fast enough it takes an extended period of very cold weather to freeze all the way across the surface of the water. Here in the hills, we have several streams that don’t freeze all the way across and continue to have areas of open water all winter long.

Up in the canyon, bridal veil falls has a fine mist that freezes solid and creates a wall of ice descending the rock face where the falls flows in warmer weather. It is a beautiful sight and a challenging place for ice climbers right beside the road and easy to see.

We took our walk alongside the creek from Latchstring Inn toward Roughlock falls, a place where one feels a bit less connection to the natural world in the winter because of the echoes of the snowmobile engines off of the narrow canyon walls. The lodge is a popular place for parking trailers and unloading snowmobiles for rides in the hills. We may have been the only people using the parking lot who weren’t there for the snowmobiling. Still the trail goes up the opposite side of the creek from the road where the snowmobiles run and there was space for us to enjoy a walk and take a look at the world around us.

No matter how often I see it, the phenomenon of water freezing is a fascination. With most substances the warmest strata is the top, but with water and ice, there is often a cooler layer above a warmer one. At the edge of the creek, these two areas keep trying to change place. The liquid water splashes up against the ice and some of it freezes extending icicles downward from the ice shelf. The running water warms the ice and some of it turns back to liquid and drops into the running water. There is a constant exchange of molecules and states of water accompanied by continually changing shapes for the ice. A layer of snow on top of the ice acts as insulation to keep the ice even colder. The ice crystals that make up the snow allow for air between them and static air is a fairly effective insulator.

The ducks, themselves well insulated with water repellant feathers and a healthy layer of fat, are equipped for winter living in the hills. They understand that the liquid water can be a lot warmer than the air temperature. Yesterday there was at least a ten degree variation in the shadows at the bottom of the valley. In the ponds there is plenty of vegetation to keep the ducks healthy. Ducks are omnivores and will eat small fish and fish eggs, snails and worms as well as grass, weeds and algae. In the summer they eat insects and they’ll eat a frog if they get the chance. There seemed to be plenty of foods for the duck buffet in the pond that is just upstream from the parking lot.

The bottom of the canyon is filled with birch trees that look stark against the winter sky with all of their leaves under the snow forming mulch for next year’s growth. A little higher in the canyon spruce are abundant, sharing the space with pine trees that seem to prefer the steeper areas and the space at the top of the canyon walls.

The world of snow and ice is a world of great beauty for those who are willing to bundle up and go out to have a look. Going can be a bit more difficult and there are places where snowshoes or skis can help to get around. Yesterday’s walk required neither as we weren’t the first ones to walk the trail since the last snowfall and the main part of the trail was well packed. If you stepped off o the trail you’d sink nearly to your knees, but it was easy to get back to firm, if slightly slippery footing.

My psychological and emotional balance requires that I take time for regular contact with the natural world. When the lake is free of ice I find time to paddle. When winter grips the hills I’m a bit less likely to go out, preferring to take my exercise on the rowing machine in my basement. Each time I make the effort, however, I am reminded that there is a definite qualitative difference between outdoor and indoor exercise. And, as long as I am able, I need to take advantage of the outdoors.

Being blessed to live in such a beautiful place it would be a sin to fail to open my eyes and look at the world that surrounds me.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

A few months ago I was with a group of law enforcement chaplains and we were discussing the process of making death notifications to family members. I was telling about some specific resources that we use with situations when children need to be informed of the death of a family member and a colleague asked me how many death notifications I have made. I paused, uncertain of the answer. Actually, I don’t know the answer. I don’t count that way. I suppose there was a time in my life when I had the count because I could recall each scenario individually. But the years pass and memories become jumbled. In addition, part of my responsibilities include supporting families after they have received the news of the death of a loved one. There are many scenarios where family members make the discovery of the death. They don’t need to be notified. They know. But they need support after the trauma of their discovery. I’ve been involved in the classic notifications, when accompanied by an officer we knock on the door of a home in the middle of the night, wait for the occupants to wake and come to the door, ask to be invited in and deliver what may be the worst news of their lives.

I’ve stopped counting. And, for the most part, I don’t believe that the stories of the situations in which I have participated are mine to tell. They are the personal stories of families who have experienced sudden and traumatic loss and who are living lives that have more than their share of grief.

Recently I read an article by Lauren Small who, with Dr. Benjamin Oldfield directs AFterWards, a program in Narrative Medicine at the Charlotte Bloomberg Children’s Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Most major medical centers have programs of narrative medicine these days. Narrative medicine is an approach to the practice of medicine that recognizes the value of people’s narratives in clinical practice, research and education. Much of contemporary medicine teaches physicians to treat medical issues as problems to be solved without taking into account the unique psychological and personal stories of the patients involved. Surgeons are trained to be good at working on patients who are anesthetized, without considering the lives patients live when conscious.

We’ve all heard stories of “poor bedside manner.” Medical schools have recognized the problem and have documented differences in recovery rates and differences in medical progress when medical professionals are trained to treat the entire patient in the context of their personal and professional lives rather than simply treat disease as if it were somehow disembodied from its context.

Doctors are trained to be experts in the use of information to solve problems and they often have plenty of information.

They could learn a few lessons from those of us who serve in different professions. One of the things that I teach when working with new chaplains is that there are plenty of circumstances when people are not able to receive and process information. Once you have told someone that their loved one is dead, they don’t have the ability to remember the details that follow. They may participate in the conversation, they may even ask questions, but their brains are so engaged in processing the dramatic life change that has just occurred that they won’t remember the details of your conversation. We deliver information in small doses, use written materials when appropriate, and make ourselves available for additional conversations the next day, the next week, and on several other occasions throughout the grieving process. We connect people with support groups and professional counselors to give them the resources to process the information that we have delivered.

There are some doctors who don’t know that once you say the word “cancer” people are unable to process more information. The doctors retreat into their expertise and knowledge in the face of the discomfort of those receiving the news and are unaware that no one is being dazzled by their brilliance.

From the perspective of teaching, the art of delivering painful news to anyone is not a precise set of steps that can be memorized and then followed. Each situation is unique and requires more than scientific precision. It requires relationship and empathy. And I’m not sure that empathy is something that can be taught. At least it isn’t something that is acquired in a classroom. It comes from making genuine connections with other people.

Lauren Small, when working with doctors, often reads a poem written by Raymond Carver. Carver was only 50 years old when he learned that he had terminal cancer. He wrote this poem after receiving the news from his doctor:

He said it doesn’t look good he said it looks bad in fact real bad he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before I quit counting them . . .

Carver’s poem goes on with a stream of consciousness that powerfully captures the moment of the delivery of news of death. It expresses the process from the perspective of the one receiving the news in a powerful manner.

It may well be that the way to teach doctors and chaplains how to deal with painful situations and difficult news isn’t through lectures and seminars, but by encouraging them to engage in literature, music and the visual arts. There are plenty of life situations that require more than scientific facts.

We call it “bad news” but it is built into the process of living. Sooner or later every one of us will find ourselves in the place where we will have to absorb information that is painful. It may be news of an illness or a life-changing injury. It may be news of circumstances in the health of a loved one. It may be that the span of our lives is shorter than we had expected.

How that news is delivered can make all the difference in the world.

I don’t know if we can teach doctors or chaplains better skills in the art of delivering news, but I know it is worth the effort, even if our progress is tiny and the changes are small.

I’ve wondered if having invested time and energy in how such news is delivered will make a difference when the time comes for me to receive similar news in my life. Perhaps I will be able to recognize how difficult it is for the person delivering the news and remember to thank that person for courage and honesty. In the meantime, I pray I will never forget how precious the information I deliver is and how important it is that I deliver it with care and compassion.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I’m no poet. I’ve tried my hand at the art form, but as you can tell from reading my blogs, what I do most is write essays. That has been true for a long time. Back in the 1970’s poetry was all around. Publishers were selling small volumes of poetry and advances in color printing allowed less expensive production of books of color photographs and/or artwork with poems. These books were often chosen as gift items and sold relatively well. Not all of the poetry was of lasting value, but there were plenty of people trying their hand at poetry.

We had a teacher, in those days, who pushed his students to write poetry. “Trim down your words, empty and economy of language, eliminate the trivia, go for the essential.” He had at least two volumes of poetry that were published before we began studying with him. And his poetry was good. I still use his words, most commonly in wedding ceremonies. I tried to follow his advice. I’d roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter. (Yes we used a manual typewriter for all of our graduate school writing.) I’d eliminate articles and work hard to just make the few words on a page carry meaning. I survived the classes I took from that professor. I earned acceptable grades. But I never learned to write poetry.

I didn’t develop an appreciation for poetry until decades later. These days, however, poetry is an important part of my reading and seeking to understand the world. It is an art form for which my taste was slowly acquired. I think of poetry quite a bit these days. I still haven’t found it to be among my gifts when it comes to writing, however.

I have been slowly wandering my way through a compilation volume edited buy Jennifer Bartless, Sheila Blac and Michael Northen titled “Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.” The volume, in addition to being a collection of poems by poets living with disabilities, has a significant amount of commentary on poems and interpretation of the works printed.

I am not convinced that there is a separate genre of disability poetry. Like other arts that are created by persons with all kinds of differing abilities and disabilities, it is nearly impossible to determine how much of the art is defined by the limitations of the artist. I walk through the Suzie Cappa Art Center in our town and am struck not with disability, but with the ability of the artists. At the Suzie Cappa Art Center, I know many of the artists. It is obvious which ones use wheelchairs for mobility, which ones have challenge with speaking, and which ones live with disabilities that are easily visible. But I don’t see their artwork as a separate category. It is simply good artwork, deserving to be displayed in homes and salaries alongside the work of others whose abilities and disabilities are much less visible.

Part of me wants to declare, “Art is art.” Period. Poetry is poetry. I do not need to know the disability status of the poet to enjoy the poetry.

The editors of the book, however, assert that knowing about the poets’ disabilities can add to the meaning of the poetry, revealing hidden depths that might be missed by those who do not know the details of the lives of the poets. They have a point. But there are many poets whose work I appreciate without knowing much about the lives of the poets.

There are poets, such as Emily Dickinson, who are so famous that it is virtually impossible to avoid learning the details of their lives. Even if one never read any of the hundreds of books and essays about Emily Dickinson, it would be hard to avoid knowing something about her that doesn’t come directly from her poetry. The story of how her poems came to be published and gained their popularity is interesting. There are some poets, like Robert Lax, whose work came to me only because I learned about the author from another context. I discovered Lax through the back door, first reading about him in a book by Thomas Merton and later enjoying Michael McGregor’s excellent biography. But there are plenty of other poets whose work I have appreciated, but about whose lives I know little.

Disability status is such a wide spectrum affecting so many people that it is hard to view it as a single category. Virtually all of us will experience some form of disability at some point in our lives. If we are honest, most of us have some disabilities around which we work every day. It just takes one accident or illness to radically shift one’s disability status.

I’m not denying that there are those whose struggles with disabilities are more intense than the majority. I’m not denying that there is significant discrimination against those who suffer disabilities. I know that finding employment and suitable housing can be a significant challenge for persons with particular disabilities.

There may be a unique quality to poetry produced by those who have had disabilities that limit or create barriers to the use of language. There are particular brain disorders that make speaking difficult or impossible for some people. There are people whose minds are thinking complex and intricate thoughts that cannot be communicated to many people, especially those who don’t take the time to learn to listen. Perhaps there is something in the nature of a communication disorder that creates a unique ability in the use of language and enables a depth of poetry that might not be available to those for whom communication comes easily. I just don’t know for sure.

So I’ll continue to think about and enjoy poetry created by those living with disabilities. Who knows, It may contain keys to meaningful living for myself when at some future point I lose some of the abilities I currently possess.

Heck, I might even learn to write poetry before this life’s journey is complete. Don’t hold your breath, however, it still seems that I’m not likely to become a poet.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I don’t watch many movies, but somehow I did watch the 2007 movie “The Bucket List.” I’m sure you are familiar with the concept even if you didn’t see the movie. Essentially a bucket list is a set of goals that one wants to accomplish before the end of one’s life. The movie puts a strange twist on the list. The character played by Jack Nicholson is a billionaire, so when he and a car mechanic, played by Morgan Freeman, land in the same hospital room and begin to discuss what they have done with their lives and what they want to see and do before they die, they are able to set off of their adventures with no financial limits. They have a blank checkbook to do whatever they want, and their adventures carry some hefty price tags.

The movie inspired a lot of people to make their own buckets lists. Lists of goals to achieve, dreams to fulfill and experiences in which to become immersed were written in notebooks and entered into memories all across the country. I don’t know how many conversations I have had with people about their bucket lists in the years since the movie came out.

Personally, I didn’t find the movie to be all that inspiring. I simply don’t live in a world with unlimited budgets and I don’t desire to live in such a world. I find the challenge of figuring out what to do with limited resources to be one of life’s joys. I’ll leave the billionaire business to others. Another aspect of the movie with which I didn’t associate was that the bucket lists keep the two men traveling away from their families. If I received a diagnosis that gave me less time to live than I had expected, my instinct would be to spend as much time as possible with my family, not cook up adventures that took me away from them.

So I don’t have a bucket list.

There is one aspect of the movie that bears contemplation, however. The truth is that all of us have a limited amount of time left. We are all mortal. We will all one day die from this life. That means that each moment is precious and the decisions we make about how we invest our time are as critical as the decisions portrayed in the movie.

There is a thought, however, about the end of life that does inspire me. Recently I read a blog post by teacher and author Parker Palmer in which he quoted the poem, “The Almanac of Last Things” by Linda Pastan. The poem is simple and elegant and contains a few things that the author would chose as the things for her last moments. She chooses a spider lily, the words of the Song of Songs, the chill of January and the warmth of August, a swallow of red wine and perhaps another, and the evening. There is one more thing she chooses: “From the almanac of last things I choose you, as I have done before.”

“Me, too!” my soul shouts. “I choose the one I chose when I married if I could chose the last things of my time to live.” That is what I would most want.

So I try to honor that choice by honoring my mate. I value her health as I do my own. As precious as our marriage is, however, I know that we are not immune to the passage of time. I know that our love is a precious and limited thing. We are both mortal.

I spend significant time with people who don’t want to contemplate the end of life. The message of our faith, especially the mood and tone of the season of Lent is off-putting to some. There are those who don’t want to think of loss before life gives them no other choice. For them the present is somehow diminished by the thought of the future.

For me, however, taking time to contemplate loss before it occurs makes the present even more precious. Being reminded that there will be a last moment deepens my gratitude for this moment and helps me to focus my attention on what is most important right now.

I’ve reached the stage in my life where accumulating more things has no appeal. I have accumulated too much already. I need to continue the slow and sometimes frustrating process of sorting and getting rid of things. I’d love to find a “zero landfill” solution where I was able to give away all that I have and throw away nothing, but the truth is that for now there are four categories: keep, give away, recycle, and throw away. I’m aware that my “keep” pile is still too large.

It helps me to think about the last things, knowing that I need to reduce my “keep” pile as I go through the remaining moments of my life. What do I want to be holding with gratitude and grace when my last moment comes. Possessions will have lost their meaning.

I think I would choose the glory of a lake sunrise and if I am no longer able to paddle my canoe the memory, perhaps enhanced with a photograph, will suffice. I wouldn’t mind the sound of a Widor organ finale, perhaps symphony 4 or 6, but I could live with the toccata from symphony 5 as well. I think I would choose the wind through the pine trees over the ocean, but I wouldn’t complain about the ocean.

But the more I think of it, the more I might like the giggle of my granddaughter or one of my son’s puns or a simple “I love you,” from my wife as the last sound.

And when I think these thoughts I realize that the things I already have are more precious than I could ever possibly express. They don’t require the investment of the billionaire’s money or access to his private jet. I am already blessed beyond my wildest expectations.

Just one more thing: when I come to my final moments and am no longer capable of doing so myself, please turn off the television. I’d prefer not to have its droning at my last, even if it is a good movie.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Being a parent is one of the toughest jobs in the world. It is also one of the most rewarding. When our children were young, it seemed like there was a challenge every day. They were developing and changing every day and the world in which they were growing up was changing as well. There were plenty of challenges of parenthood that had been faced by previous generations. I remember my mother’s knowing acknowledgement when I complained of a lack of sleep. But there were also challenges that were unique to the times in which we were raising our children.

Those changes continue. Watching our grandchildren, I am aware that things are different now than they were for us. We didn’t know the term “screen time,” but if we had, we would have been thinking about television only. We didn’t have smart phones, tablet computers or even a computer when our children were in preschool. It was very easy to limit their exposure to television to what we determined to be an acceptable level.

One of the joys of being a pastor is that I get to watch children every day. Our church is home to a preschool with an enrollment of over eighty children, some of whom attend two half days per week and others who attend three half days. One of the annual entertainments for me is reading the lists of names of the children and marveling at the unique spelling chosen by some parents.

We also have a Sunday school and midweek programs for children and youth in our church, so I am allowed to watch children regularly and often have the opportunity to observe interactions between parents and children.

Recently I have been fascinated by the phenomenon of children coming to public programs dressed in costumes. I don’t remember that being a part of my own growing up or an issue with our children. It seems, at least in our church, to be much more prevalent among little girls than boys, but we regularly have several children at programs of the church wearing costumes. Princess costumes seem to be the most popular, followed by ballet tutus.

Dress up, of course, is a very important part of child play. Children enjoy using their imagination to create stories and the ability to change one’s appearance by changing one’s costume allows them to try out various scenarios and options for their lives. We were intentional about having a variety of costumes for our children when they were growing up. Many of the costumes had something to do with adult professions, such as a construction helmet, a fireman’s coat, a stethoscope, and other tools related to specific occupations. It is part of allowing children to imagine themselves in adult roles and modeling what they might become. We also had costumes that encouraged imagination such as capes for pretend superheroes and crowns for princes and princesses.

Child psychologists even refer to the “costume phase” between the ages of three and six when children are especially attracted to playing dress up. It can be helpful to normal development to allow children to participate in dress up activities.

There are, however, some things about the phenomena in our community that puzzle me. One is that it seems common for parents to allow dress up as regular clothing. I see costumes in the grocery store, at regular church services and activities, and other places where I don’t expect them. If part of the process of dress up is a child learning the difference between real and make believe, it seems like the parents could assist in the process by setting some boundaries as to when and where costumes are acceptable and when and where regular dress is appropriate.

I realize that parents have different levels of comfort with setting boundaries. It is easy to see a wide range of parental attitudes at the church. We have parents who become directly involved with all that their children do, sometimes leaving worship to join their child in the nursery every week. We also have parents who drop off their children and seem totally uninvolved in their activities. And we have everything in-between those extremes. I am frequently puzzled by parents who seem more interested in their smart phones than their children. I just hope that the reason that children are wearing costumes in public isn’t because their parents aren’t noticing or simply don’t participate in conversations with their children about choices of clothing.

Another thing that puzzles me about the phenomenon is the number of costumes that are a single specific character. When our children were little, costumes could be used to portray many different characters. A cape could be Superman, but it could also be a different hero, including one that came from the imagination of the child. A helmet could be used to pretend one is a firefighter or a jungle explorer or a construction worker or an astronaut. Costumes encouraged expanding imagination. These days I see specific characters from specific movies marketed to children and their parents. Not every costume has the same value for encouraging imagination. It makes me wonder if the parents are relying too much on media to be the source of stories for their children. Are they not also telling their own stories and encouraging their children to use their imaginations to make up new stories?

One more thing. It is clear that among the children I observe that costumes in public are almost always worn by girls and rarely by boys. It makes me wonder if there is a difference in the tolerance of costumes that is related to gender. Little boys are allowed to be themselves. Little girls are encouraged to dress up as someone else when going out in public. I’m not sure that this is what is going on, but the question comes up in my mind.

I don’t have answers and I’m in no position to offer advice to parents of preschool children, but the phenomenon interests me because I care about children. I want them to grow up with appropriate structure and boundaries so that they can be safe, know they are loved, have their imaginations stirred and learn.

The job of being a parent definitely isn’t getting easier. I salute the brave parents of this generation as they make decisions with their children.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I’ve joked with all of the congregations I have served about election day sermons. The joke is based on an inaccurate representation of the traditional 18th Century New England Practice of pastors preaching an election day sermon. I say that I’m not too inclined to tell the members of my congregation how to vote because I know that they wouldn’t listen to my advice if I gave it.

The misunderstanding is that election day sermons were not, for the most part, lectures to congregants on how to vote. They were important parts of a celebration of democracy and the role of religion in the formation of community.

To understand the phenomenon of election day sermons, it is important to remember that they arose in different times. In 18th-century New England, the most important form of public communication and public entertainment was the sermon. This was a time before television, before movies, and before social media. Newspapers abounded, and many people read more than one newspaper. People who wanted to influence public opinion published tracts and there were plenty of tracts that were printed and circulated. But at almost every public gathering, there would be a sermon.

In those days, most people attended church. The typical church had far more people attending every Sunday than the official membership. Weekly churchgoing was common and expected of most people in the community. Sermons, in those days, were much longer than the typical experience today. Two hours was common. The tradition of the sermon hourglass involved an hourglass that relatively accurately measured an hour. When an hour had passed, it was turned over, indicating the midpoint of the sermon. A weekly churchgoer would hear over 7,000 sermons in a lifetime: over 15,000 hours of listening. That pales in comparison with the average of 140,000 hours of screen time in a contemporary life. The significant difference is the level of concentration and actually listening. An 18th-century New England church goer retained a much higher percentage of the information given than a typical American watching 5.5 hours of TV per day.

As part of the departure from the Church of England, where sermons were supposed to “please and inspire,” New England Congregationalists had a rational tradition that upheld a good sermon as a vehicle to “inform and convince.” A New England preacher’s words carried great influence.

As such, preachers were asked to deliver sermons on other occasions than just Sunday worship. They delivered sermons for anniversaries, thanksgiving feasts, fast days and, yes, on election day. Election day was a holiday in Massachusetts in the mid-18th century. It began with cannon firing, military exercises, and usually some form of procession of government officials from the seat of government to a nearby church. The most politically and socially important members of community listened carefully for several hours.

Election Day sermons were not always delivered before the people voted. The point wasn’t to advise people on how to vote, but rather to celebrate the opportunity to vote and reflect on the deeper meanings of democracy.

Election Day sermons generally followed the pattern of three main points: First they asserted that civil government is necessary, citing scriptural references. Government is founded on an agreement between God and citizens to promote the common good. No civil system is perfect, however, and human systems are in need of continuing reformation.

Secondly, preachers urged a specific covenant. People promise to follow leaders and leaders promise to act for the good of all. That meant that following the election, people demonstrated loyalty and respect to elected leaders whether or not their candidate had won. And leaders demonstrated concern of all those they governed, not just their supporters. Imagine democracy without the contemporary practice of elected officials spending hundreds of hours each year speaking by telephone only with supporters.

The third point of an election day sermon was the charge. Voters and rulers alike were charged to promote virtue, to suppress vice, and to demonstrate “proven wisdom, integrity, justice and holiness.” Compare that with the headlines coming out of the recent Iowa caucuses.

The real reason I don’t preach election day sermons is that the custom has faded from our society. Preachers don’t have the same access to politicians as was the case in 18th-century New England. We don’t have a military parade from the seat of government to the largest church in town in our community on election day. A far more common election day practice in our time involves a huge party in a convention center with too much alcohol being served. The speeches are given by the politicians, who are far more practiced in talking than listening these days.

It is the loss of the practice of listening - both in politicians and in those who are governed - that I grieve. It isn’t just that they aren’t listening to preachers. They aren’t listening to anyone. Watch a congressional “debate” on television. It is all about grandstanding and speaking. No one is listening. No hearts are swayed in the process. Votes are counted and changed in behind-the-scenes activities and deals not in public discourse.

If I were to preach an election day sermon, I could keep it much under the 2 hour limit. I doubt if I could go much over 20 minutes. But I wouldn’t be able to restrain myself to just 3 points. I might need 5 or more.

I would seek to remind people that we are all in this together. We humans are connected to each other. As we are dependent upon each other we must be accountable to each other. Forgetting our interconnectedness can mean peril for many.

I would exhort leaders and followers to develop our appreciation of otherness. Human imagination is limited by thinking of “us” and “them.” Instead, I would offer the biblical mandate of hospitality to strangers and sojourners and remembering our own heritage as refugees without a land to call our own.

And I would speak of creating community. Dividing people from one another may be a way to win elections in our time, but it is not a way to govern. I would go so far to say that the skills demonstrated in campaigning have very little to do with the skills required to govern successfully. Building community involves developing consensus, seeking agreement, and listening to opinions that are different from your own. It means accepting and treasuring all of the people.

But the, don’t expect to hear that sermon. When this long campaign finally ends and election day comes, I don’t expect to have a crowd gathered in church.

That’s a sad reflection on our times.

The good news in all this is that you don’t have to listen to me going on and on for two hours at the next anniversary party in addition to every Sunday.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Is Eeyore Tigger? I know that on the surface the question sounds absurd. “Of course not!” you say. Eeyore is a donkey and Tigger is a tiger. Eeyore is a perpetual pessimist and Tigger is not.

You know the story: Tigger shows up on Winnie-the-Pooh’s doorstep in the middle of the night with one big bounce. Despite his claim that he likes everything, most of the rest of the second chapter of “House at Pooh Corner” is consumed with trying to figure out what food Tigger can eat for breakfast. Much to Pooh’s amazement, he doesn’t like honey. He also doesn’t like acorns or thistles or other contents of Kanga’s larder. What tiggers mostly like, it turns out is extract of malt, the “strengthening medicine” that Kanga gives to Roo. That discovery explains why Tigger lives with Kanga and Roo for the rest of the book.

Eeyore, on the other hand, as you know, is not bouncy. He is an old grey donkey, who is prone to losing his tail, of which he is rather fond. His favorite food is thistles and he sees the hundred acre wood as a gloomy place: rather boggy and sad. It is Eeyore’s house that is the house at Pooh corner. It was made for him by Pooh and Piglet after they mistook the house that Eeyore built as a pile of sticks. Eeyore is the only character in the stories other than Pooh who writes poetry and he does a rather good job at that task. When Pooh humbly declares that Eeyore’s poetry is better than his own, “really believing it to be true,” Eeyore vainly replies that “it was meant to be.”

So you can see that they really are quite different.

What they have in common, other than the fact that they are both characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne, is that they are both characters in which children can see a bit of themselves. It isn’t difficult for a four-year-old to identify with an energetic, constantly bouncing character whose excitement stretches the capacities of others. It is equally easy for that same four-year-old to understand the gloomy mood of a different character who seems to see the worst in every situation.

What the books achieve that is only partially achieved by the Disney animations, is the creation of a world where children can experience the full range of the characters’ emotions and in doing so explore their own.

“Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.” A. A. Milne gives us stories in which it is easy to listen. And in listening we can discover fundamental truths about what it means to be a human being in relationship with others. And sometimes, exploring our humanity, we discover that we identify with the moods and characteristics of others around us. “‘I don’t feel very much like Pooh today,’ said Pooh.”

These stories, that my mother read to me, are as wonderful to read to our grandson as they were to read to his father and aunt when they were children. I don’t know if they were read to my parents when they were children, but they are old enough to have been. Some stories are timeless.

I remember a conversation with a classmate, when we had experienced short internships in the Chicago Theological Seminary Lab Preschool, that Martha Snyder, director of the school, had a unique way of talking to children. My colleague found Martha’s slow and deliberate way of talking to be a bit condescending. I pointed out that she spoke the same way to her then 74-year-old husband. Martha didn’t discriminate. She listened intently to everyone, regardless of their age. And she carefully repeated an idea back to the speaker just to make sure that she had gotten it right. It wasn’t that she didn’t have ideas of her own. She most certainly did and she had convictions from which she couldn’t be shaken. She was, however, careful to have always listened and understood the person with whom she was speaking.

I have since heard a similar criticism of Fred Rogers, creator of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Despite that criticism, Rogers received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, forty honorary degrees, and a Peabody Award. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame, was recognized by two Congressional resolutions, and was ranked No. 35 among TV Guide's Fifty Greatest TV Stars of All Time. Several buildings and artworks in Pennsylvania are dedicated to his memory, and the Smithsonian Institution displays one of his trademark sweaters as a "Treasure of American History".

Mr. Rogers, Martha Snyder, A. A. Milne: just three of many, many adults who took children seriously. And when you take children seriously, you discover that they are incredibly complex and wonderful beings who have a lot to offer to the world.

“Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.
"I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Just because an animal is large, it doesn't mean he doesn't want kindness; however big Tigger seems to be, remember that he wants as much kindness as Roo.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Which brings us back to the question with which today’s blog began: Is Eeyore Tigger? I think I am both. They are both reflections of who we are. They are different sides of the complex human beings that dwell inside of each of us. And getting to know humans is an essential task of every Christian for we believe in incarnation - that the great God Almighty, creator of the Universe, meets our humanity fully in human form.

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”

Which is to say that I think that reading A. A. Milne out loud is a very enriching spiritual discipline. It is how I learned: “Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.”

And on the days when I'm feeling very much Eeyore, it is good to know that there is still a bit of Tigger inside of me.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

There is an exchange between Jesus and one of the teachers of the law that is recorded in both the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew. The teacher asks Jesus, “Of all the commandments, which is most important?” The question asks for a single answer, but in response, Jesus quotes two different commandments: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

The first part of Jesus’ answer should have been nearly automatic for anyone who grew up in a Jewish community at the time - and for Jews of many other generations. The Shema is the first part of the central prayer of the Jewish prayerbook. Often known by the first word of the prayer, “shema,” The complete first section of that prayer appears in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. Loving the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength is a memorized commandment, known by all of the faithful and a quick and easy answer to a question. The exchange between the teacher and the student is nearly automatic, like the first few questions of a Christian catechism or any other central tenet of a faith.

So there is no surprise in the beginning of Jesus’ answer to the teacher. The second part of the answer, however, is different. The teacher asks for a single commandment. Jesus gives two. And Jesus doesn’t expand the first part of the answer with the blessings of faithfulness to God as does the Book of Deuteronomy from which he quotes. Instead he jumps to a quote from Leviticus: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In Leviticus, there is more than the simple words Jesus says, including specific instructions about how to harvest fields to leave behind food for the hungry, and leaving grapes for the poor and the sojourner. Proper treatment of refugees is as important as proper treatment of the poor throughout much of the laws of the Old Testament.

Preachers have expounded on this exchange between Jesus and the teacher for generation upon generation and perhaps there is nothing that I could add that is new. Some of the observations of others have been so repeated that I don’t know their sources any more. It is clear, however, that this exchange outlines the central tenets of Christian theology. Love of God is central, but love of neighbor is equal in importance. The teacher didn’t ask about the second commandment, but it was important to Jesus that he told the teacher about it.

I think it is because a commandment to love God alone could lead to a kind of arrogant self-righteousness. While it should be evident that loving God requires treating neighbors with compassion, that isn’t the way many people speak or behave. Instead they claim that their love of God - their way of practicing faith - is superior to that of others and that their superiority gives them some kind of authority to try to force the conversion of others to their way of thinking. It is almost as if they believe, “I love God so you have to agree with me.”

Jesus seems to be saying that our world needs more than people who have the right attitude towards God. It also needs people who are willing to invest in neighborliness.

Neighborliness, however, seems to be missing from much of public debate in our country these days. Serious politicians are proposing actions such as deporting 11 million people, building armed fences along our borders, and increasing the number of armed citizens and the amount of weapons they carry, and a host of other reactions to the fear that has captured our attention in the wake of acts of terrorism and domestic violence of citizen against other citizens.

Jesus’ answer is as relevant today is it was in the time of Roman occupation of Israel. Love God. Love your neighbor.

Over the past year, our congregation has taken a close look at issues of literacy through a joint reading of the book “Hot Dogs and Hamburgers” by Rob Shindler. (For the record, that book is different from the cookbook, “Hamburgers and Hot Dogs” by S.L. Wilson.) Shindler’s book is the story of how literacy tutors can make a positive contribution to the lives of others and to the community by persistent caring and connection. Inspired by the book, several members of our congregation engaged in training to become literacy tutors and volunteer their time working with students. Tutors sit next to, not across from, the students with whom they work. This way of working - sitting next to, not across from - is taught in most literacy training sessions. It is a basic concept for all tutors. Come alongside the person you are assisting, demonstrating your willingness to join with that person in solving a problem.

This process of coming alongside others is, I believe, an important symbol for all of us who seek to apply our faith to the world in which we live. Are we standing against others, confronting them with what we believe is our superior attitude, beliefs and ideas? Or are we willing to come alongside others as your neighbors.

The gospels contain several parables in answer to the question of who is the neighbor to which the commandment refers. The parable of the Good Samaritan is clearly addressing this question. The neighbor is the one who responds to a need. In the gospel, neighborliness is not defined by nationality or ethnicity or position of power. It is defined by the basic response to an obvious need.

We’ve plenty of self-righteous believers who can only remember one of the commandments. Jesus invites us to remember the second commandment. After all, “There is no commandment greater than these.”

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I live a fairly active lifestyle. My library is in the basement of my home and I make many trips each day up and down the stairs. I do quite a bit of walking from the parking lot and up and down the halls in the church. I often take the stairs instead of riding the elevators in public buildings and some days I get in as many as ten flights of stairs in a single hospital visit. Many days I take a walk in the woods or row or paddle. In the winter when the ice is on the lake, I have a rowing machine that gets a half hour workout many evenings. I rowed five days in the last week. Yesterday I didn’t row, but loaded over 3/4 of a cord of firewood into my pickup by myself, which includes climbing up into the pickup box several times in addition to carrying the wood.

For the most part, I am careful about what I eat. I enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables. I pay attention to portion size. I have a basic understanding of carbohydrates and sugars. I’m pretty good about not snacking, though I certainly don’t have a perfect record in that category. I try to keep carrots, celery, dried fruit and nuts on hand for snacking so that I stay away from higher fat content snacks. I eat fast food only on rare occasions.

I try to keep myself educated about health and to make decisions that promote a healthy lifestyle. I do not, however, count calories. I don’t wear a fitness device. I don’t record the “calories burned” from the meter on my rowing machine. I often read food labels and am aware of the reported calories of something I eat and I know the number of recommended calories for a normal person’s day, but I don’t keep a running total of the number of calories I consume.

You’d think, from reading articles on food and fitness that it is a simple matter of mathematics. A calorie is a measurement unit for energy. Food contains calories. We expend calories by physical activity. If the number of calories in exceeds the number of calories expended, a person gains weight. If the number of calories expended exceeds the number of calories taken in, a person loses weight. That’s basically true, but the process is filled with variables and is far less precise than we might be led to believe.

Back in the 1780’s a French chemist named Antoine Lavoisier made a triple-walled metal canister large enough to hold a guinea pig. Inside the walls was a layer of ice. Lavoisier knew how much energy was required to melt ice, so he could estimate the heat the animal emitted by measuring the amount of water that dripped from the canister. A calorie is the heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.

Scientists these days don’t put people into ice filled canisters to measure calories. Rather they have calculated the amount of energy used during metabolic processes that create the carbon dioxide we breathe out. Then they measure the amount of carbon dioxide one exhales to determine the number of calories used. The formula is 15 liters of carbon dioxide equals 94 calories of energy.

Fitness devices, such as a fitbit or the meter on my rowing machine aren’t measuring how much carbon dioxide we exhale. They are simply measuring motion and using averages to estimate the number of calories based on what other people have consumed. We humans aren’t all the same and the measurements are imprecise at best.

On the other side of the formula, the number of calories in food varies greatly. In 1848, Irish chemist Thomas Andrews developed a method for measuring calories in food by burning the food in a chamber and measuring the temperature change in water from the fire. There are, however, other methods of measuring calories. The FDA allows for five different methods for companies to use in measuring the calories in a portion of their food. Those measurements are not precise, either. A recent study found that a measured serving of spaghetti from the same source could vary by as much as 10 calories. Serving sizes vary. Restaurants, for example, don’t weight all of the food they put onto a plats. A Tufts university study checked 40 US chain restaurants and found that a dish listed as carrying 500 calories could have as many as 800 because local chefs might add a bit more sauce or a few extra french fries.

Even if we had a method for accurately counting calories, not every person extracts the same number of calories from food. It takes calories to extract nutrition from food. We use muscles to chew and other metabolic processes to digest our food. In general cooked food requires fewer calories to digest than uncooked food. A rare steak yields fewer net calories than a well done one. Our bodies sometimes do a better job of breaking down the cell walls of our food than others. The same person will not extract the same number of calories from the same portion of food each time it is eaten.

Differences in height, body fat, liver size, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and gut microbes can influence the amount of energy required by a person. In one study two people of the same sex, weight and age varied by as much as 600 calories per day. That’s more than 25% of the recommended intake.

All of this is to say that the process of counting calories is far less precise than the labels on food packages might indicate.

For me, focusing on what foods make me feel satisfied is a more helpful concept. A very small slice of rich cake might be 300 calories, while a large portion of salad with nuts, olive oil, and roasted vegetables might be the same number of calories. One will leave me wanting more, the other will leave me filled up. An apple is a more satisfying snack than a cookie because it doesn’t leave me wanting more.

But then you wouldn’t want to take diet advice from me. I’m just another overweight American trying to make changes and live a healthier lifestyle.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.