Yesterday afternoon I had an errand to run downtown that I wanted to take care of before the end of the week. I also was leading devotions at the mission at supper time. So I decided to make one trip out of the excursion with two stops. My errand took less time thanI expected, and I had about 45 extra minutes - too short to accomplish any meaningful work back at the office. So I just went to the mission and visited with people with the extra time. Here are some random observations from my afternoon.

Random observation number one: There are a lot of adults who are way more into Halloween than I am. Actually I noticed this earlier when I went to a routine doctor’s appointment last week and found that the doctor’s office was all decorated for Halloween. Mind you Halloween isn’t one of the big holidays in my life, but I do enjoy watching the preschoolers arrive in their costumes. I guess I just think of it as a holiday for children. Anyway, a professional office isn’t where I expected to find a lot of effort and money invested in decorations. Yesterday my business took me to the new county administration building where I found employees dressed in costume. It seemed rather strange to be conducting business with a woman dressed up as a Roman centurion. Actually, I wondered if she had borrowed the costume from her church’s supply of costumes for Christmas or Lenten pageants. I wanted to ask her, but refrained. If not, perhaps she could donate it to her church after the holiday.

Random observation number two: Everyone seems to have a smartphone. I have a smartphone, but I keep it in its case most of the time. I prefer the computer for checking e-mail and I will often allow a call to go to voicemail if I am visiting with someone when it comes in. I don’t need to be checking the Internet for many things during a normal conversation. Waiting for a few minutes for the next clerk at the county office, I observed that people were whipping out their phones as soon as there was a moment of calm. The county provides benches to sit on and I was grateful for a moment of quiet to just sit and think. I was the only one on the bench who wasn’t using my phone. That didn’t surprise me, but I was more surprised as I sat in the mission dining room how many people were doing the same thing. Just a few years ago when Hope Center was opened, one of the things that was needed for homeless people in our community was a place where they could receive phone calls. Job seekers need to give their phone numbers and have a reliable place to receive a phone message. It seemed that most of the people at the mission last night had cell phones. I saw several people take out their phones to take a picture of the meal schedule at the mission, where mealtimes are different on Saturday and Sunday from other days of the week. I saw people sending and receiving messages.

Random observation number three: People don’t really talk on their phones that much. In all of the smartphone activity in the two places, I only saw one person who was actually talking on their phone. All of the other phone activity involved taking pictures, sending text messages, exchanging e-mails and the like. I can usually tell when someone is taking a picture with their phone, but can’t really tell what they are doing when they are holding it in their hand, touching icons on the screen.

Random observation number four: There are a lot of people who become uncomfortable with normal everyday conversation. Sitting on the bench at the county office and sitting in the dining room at the mission, I discovered that there were several people who didn’t respond to a simple “Good afternoon!” greeting. Some would say, “Hi” and immediately return to whatever it was they were doing. Having an actual conversation seemed to be a challenge. I realize that I am a stranger, but I don’t think I appear all that threatening. Still there was a tendency of people to put some space between themselves and me. I guess they just didn’t want to talk.

I am not a person who gets lonely. My life is filled with people and lots of interesting conversation. There are many people in my life with whom I’d like to have more time for visiting. When I have some extra time, I enjoy talking on the phone with our children or Skyping with our grandchildren. A few moments of quiet are always a gift. I don’t mind waiting at the doctor’s office or the county building. I just sit and think of what is going on in my life. Sometimes a gift of a few moments is a time to simply be grateful for the goodness of this life. A few minutes to sort out my thoughts is appreciated. I can, however, see why loneliness is a problem for some people. We are together in the same building, but we are not in relationship with each other. We spend a lot of time occupying space in close proximity, but not talking. Even a busy room can be a lonely place if you are a stranger.

And that brings me to random observation number five: People are much more alike than they are different. The county office very closely resembles the mission. The person out front trying to get everyone’s attention was circulating a petition at the county office and the one at the mission was trying to evangelize about his religion, but there were folks in both places trying to speak and folks in both places trying to avoid those who were standing by the door. And inside, with the exception of those dressed in costumes at the county building, the people wore remarkably similar clothes and were doing almost the same activities.

Maybe if they took time to recognize it, they would discover that we’re all in this together and we have plenty enough in common to strike up a conversation in any public building in our town.

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What does it take to become a true master of a particular field? In the western educational tradition, there are a series of degrees that denote one’s educational attainment. An Associate’s Degree denotes that one has learned enough about a field to practice that field under the supervision of a more trained professional. A Batchelor’s Degree certifies that one has the skills necessary to practice a profession independently and to become the supervisor of an Associate. A Master’s degree denotes mastery of a particular field sufficient to serve as a teacher in that field. In the original configuration of degrees there were only two academic doctorates: A PhD, or a Doctor of Philosophy degree, was awarded to those with sufficient education, knowledge, expertise and wisdom to have achieved mastery of multiple subjects. a PhD designated one as able to head a college of Masters - to run an educational institution. A PhD was deemed qualified to teach all academic subjects. Further study beyond the PhD, led to the possibility of earning a ThD - becoming a Doctor of Theology. A ThD was considered to be the supreme height of education, beyond which there were no advanced degrees to be attained.

Along the way, three specialized professional doctorates were added to the arena of degrees. A Doctor of Divinity designated one as having the educational background to serve as the head of a religious institution beyond a local church. The church, in some places ran its own parallel educational institutions, or seminaries, awarding Associate, Bachelor, Masters and Doctors of Divinity degrees. The second specialized professional doctorate was the MD, or Medical Doctor, awarded to one who had sufficient education to practice the arts of medicine and surgery. The third degree, J.D. designated one who was able to practice law. These professional degrees were originally awarded as honorary degrees and later became earned degrees on the level of a Masters, though holding the title of doctor. Later educational requirements were strengthened for all three degrees.

Those systems of academic degrees have changed over the years. Different emphases have been made in different universities. A university was considered to be a group of colleges - an institution of multiple academic disciplines and professions.

Remnants of that system remain in accredited institutions in contemporary society. The degrees, Associate, Batchelor, Master, and Doctor remain generally recognized by professions and employers.

The educational schema was different in the ancient world. Different systems were employed by Greek, Latin and other old world scholars. In our tradition - the tradition into which Jesus was born, the Rabbinate was the certifier of academic achievement. The system was essentially an apprenticeship system with a system of general schooling. For families who had the luxury of being able to afford it, young boys were enrolled in Hebrew School. Enrolling a son in Hebrew School meant that the family had sufficient wealth to be able to sustain itself without the labor of the boy for a couple of years when he reached the age of 12. The boy also had to show sufficient academic ability to be accepted into Hebrew School. In the Gospels we read that Jesus met such a criteria. When he was 12 he went up to the temple and remained their with the scholars for several days and they were amazed at his questions. We also know that he was not allowed to remain at the Hebrew school as the gospel reports that his parents went back and retrieved him from the temple.

Hebrew school, in those days, focused on rote memorization of the torah - roughly the first five books of our modern bible. Imagine memorizing Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The process was one of group memorization with individuals being singled out to recite specific chapters. Upon mastery of those five books, a few students, considered to be the best of the best, were invited to continue their studies with the rabbis in the temple. They would study the Psalms and the prophets primarily. Psalm 19, with a chapter for each letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, was considered the standard of literacy. A student who was able to recite the entire psalm (which is the longest of the psalms) was considered to know the written language as well as the spoken one. The best of the best of those students were then selected to study with an individual rabbi on the road to becoming a rabbi themselves. These students were called disciples.

At each stage of the process, there were students who didn’t make the grade and who were then returned to their families, usually to apprentice in the profession of their fathers, occasionally to apprentice with other adult males in other fields.

It is interesting to note that Jesus, who achieved the title rabbi, not from the traditional academic system, but from the acclaim afforded by his followers, chose disciples who were not from the traditional academic schools. We read that Peter and Andrew and James and John were all fishing with their fathers - that is they had either not attended Hebrew School or they had not been selected as disciples of the rabbis and were apprenticing the family trade. Jesus invited them to become disciples and the Gospels report that they immediately left their nets and followed Jesus. In those days, such a decision would be considered to be a step up - a career advancement - from fisherman to disciple. It was the offer of an academic career in place of being a laborer.

Jesus assembled his small group of disciples from non-traditional sources. It should come as no surprise that those who follow the Christian tradition have, for most of the history of the church, sought multiple paths to the Christian ministry. There have always been alternate ways of achieving degrees. This comes from the recognition that it isn’t academic achievement alone that qualifies one to be a minister of the Gospel. There are other skills and attributes that are necessary for ordination.

One of my teachers, the Hebrew scholar Andre Lacocque, told us, “A lifetime is too short to master a single book of the bible.” His life was dedicated to the Book of Daniel and he became recognized as one of the leading scholars of that particular piece of the scriptures. My dedication and devotion to academic scholarship has been less intense.

So when a colleague claims to be an expert in the Bible, or to preach the Bible, I raise my eyebrows slightly. Having been preaching from the Bible since 1973, when I was licensed and 1978 when I was ordained, I have not yet achieved such expertise. I’m still a student with much to learn.

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You’ve probably caught the story from other media. Yesterday, shortly after noon local time, an unmanned Army surveillance blimp broke lose from its moorings in Maryland and floated over Pennsylvania for three hours before coming to ground. This is a very big balloon - just over 240 feet in length. It is known as the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, also identified by the letters JLENS. It was designed to be part of a missile defense system. The cost of developing the system was over $2.7 billion over 17 years. Even after spending all of that money, the system hasn’t exactly worked out as planned.

The system has been deployed exclusively in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is designed to be tethered to the ground by a cable when deployed. Since its first deployment, however, it has been filled with problems. Defective software has rendered many of the observations of the balloons unusable. They are particularly vulnerable to bad weather and high winds and that has led to a poor reliability record in combat settings.

Yesterday’s misadventure was pretty public. The balloon rose to an altitude of 16,000 feet and drifted over mostly rural areas, but lots of people on the ground got pictures of it, especially as it neared the end of its flight, where it drifted close to the ground, dragging its tether cable over power lines and tearing them apart.

I’m not sure how much the day’s activities cost, but quite a little bit. There is the cost of the blimp in the first place. As far as I know the individual cost per unit has not been released. But if you take the $2.7 billion price tag and divide it by the estimated 16 aircraft in use, they’re pretty expensive. It is possible, however, that it wasn’t destroyed in the journey. According to unclassified sources, JLENS have come loose in Afghanistan and been recovered, repaired and redeployed. So lets assume, for our study that the aircraft was not a loss. It still was fairly expensive. Two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled for the three hour adventure. The average cost of operating F-16s is around $20,000 per hour. That’s $120,000. Then there is the cost of restoring power to the 19,000 homes that were left without power after the tether dragged down power lines.

We’re talking serious money to fuel a couple of twitter accounts to go wild with blimp stories.

Now, I have some sympathy for the developers and deployers of the system. In my earlier days I did some experimenting with various forms of flight. I built a few kites that weren’t exactly successful in the way envisioned and I spend some money buying supplies to build them. Then there was the experiment with rocket propulsion involving paint thinner as a fuel that set the neighbor’s fence on fire and resulted in nearly $30 of damage, which I had to borrow and repay because I had spent all of my available funds on other experiments. So, I can’t claim to be free from having wasted a few dollars in my flying adventures. We won’t go into the full costs of my years of renting airplanes and an airplane partnership in which I was involved. Suffice it to say that those costs were higher than kites, but considerably less than the JLENS balloons.

What concerns me is that we have gotten to the point where we take those kinds of expenses for granted. Here in the United States the Republican Party is traditionally the party of smaller government, lower expenses and a conservative approach. But at the fiery Republican debate in Colorado last night, there wasn’t a candidate who proposed any decrease in military spending. The cost of defense is unquestioned. Unlimited budgets lead to extravagances that might not occur if developers were required to apply some form of cost effectiveness to their planning.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m awed by the dedication of the men and women who serve in our military and I believe that they need to be supported with fair wages, excellent health benefits and high quality equipment. And I am aware that advanced technological developments contribute to the safety of the citizens of our country. But billions of dollars spent on tethered blimps with software that doesn’t work and tethers that break in poor weather and cause thousands of power outages don’t make me feel any more secure. Apparently the US Army agrees with me. After spending all of those dollars developing the system, it has decided not to proceed with production of the system.

You got it. It took nearly $3 billion to decided that the program doesn’t work and isn’t worth the investment of tax dollars. It is enough to make one wish that we could have found a less expensive way to discover that there are better ways to defend against missiles.

So here is my plan. I think we ought to sell millionaire adventure seekers rides on the blimps to recover part of the cost. After all, there have been plenty of people willing to shell out $250,000 each for one of the first Virgin Galactic flights into space. Wealthy adventurers are willing to pay $20,000 for a ride in the back seat of a fighter jet with a few minutes of supersonic flight. Maybe some of the people who shell out tens of thousands of dollars to go bungie jumping in New Zealand or pay for special thermal suits for high altitude sky diving would pay big money to dangle from a blimp on a cable. Maybe they could bungie jump or parachute from the blimp. It would take quite a few different schemes to earn back the $2.7 spent on developing the JLENS.

I sort of like the idea. Something that was designed to make the general population feel safe could be used to make very wealthy people feel like they are taking a risk. After all it seems that there are people who will pay more money to be frightened than they will invest in security.

So far no one in the Army is taking my idea seriously. I guess they’re trying to figure out how to repair their balloon.

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I joined Recreational Equipment Inc. back in the 1970’s. The cooperative was originally a place where one could obtain high-quality outdoor adventure equipment that wasn’t available through other retailers. These days you can obtain backpack tents and climbing gear from other retailers, but 40 years ago it was hard to find a locking carabiner or a bivouac tent in the local hardware store. Back then, Scheels was a hardware store with a very small sports section, not a sports store. In fact, when I make a purchase at REI these days, I have to remember to add two zeros to the beginning of my membership number in order to have the correct number of digits for the online ordering form. I remember a trip to Seattle when we visited the company’s only retail store. I think we might have bought a couple of sleeping pads, but mostly we just wandered around awed by the selection of camping equipment.

These days much has changed. I don’t find myself shopping at REI very much. There are other sources for the things that REI sells and REI is no longer a rough and tumble retailer of technical gear. These days more than half of the REI inventory is clothing. I guess jeans reinforced with duct tape at the knees is no longer the fashion for rock climbing and skiers need to have outfits that match. I remember the days when we wore wool snow pants and didn’t have fancy bibs for skiing. In those days we considered those with designer outfits to be “tourists” and not serious skiers.

I am, however, proud to be a member of the cooperative today. Yesterday I learned that REI has opted out of the Black Friday shopping frenzy that has gripped our nation. All of the company’s retail employees will receive their wages for the day, but the stores will be closed. REI wants its customers to take a hike - literally. “Black Friday is the perfect time to remind ourselves of the essential truth that life is richer, more connected and complete when you choose to spend it outside,” Jerry Stritzke, the chief executive of REI, said in a press release.

There have been a few clues that some retailers are re-thinking the craziness of frenzied holiday shopping. Staples, the office supply retailer, has announced that it will close its stores on Thanksgiving Day, something it did not do last year, to give customers and employees a holiday.

I’m not a typical Black Friday shopper. I try to avoid shopping at all during the Thanksgiving weekend. As I’ve commented before, in our profession, the only three day weekend is Thanksgiving. It is time for family and friends in my mind. And frequently around here it is a great weekend for an outdoor adventure as simple as taking a walk in the woods or putting a boat into the water for a last paddle before freeze up.

Something in me wants to celebrate REI’s decision. It seems to me that it might just be a very shrewd marketing choice. After all REI is in he business of selling gear for outdoor adventure. Theoretically, the thing that drives the business is not the experience of shopping in a store, even a fantastic store with an indoor climbing wall and plenty of tents set up. The thing that drives their business is people going outdoors to hike, climb, bike, ski, and paddle. More people going out for adventures should prove, in the long run, to be good for business.

Of course REI, as a cooperative, can afford to focus on other values than just short term profits. As members we weren’t motivated by the hope of financial gain when we joined the coop. We joined because we wanted access to quality gear at reasonable prices. I like having dividends that I can invest in gear when I shop at REI, but frankly I get more pleasure out of clerks who marvel at my low membership number and the joy of having been part of a movement for a long time.

It would be easy for me to rant about my dislike of the commercialization of holidays and my intense dislike of businesses that fail to give their employees time to celebrate Thanksgiving. I could report how I have avoided Black Friday sales for decades, preferring not to be part of the long lines and aggressive fights over low priced television sets and other consumer goods.

Instead, however, I would like to celebrate the decision of one retailer - a cooperative of which I am a member. REI has made up a hashtag for the campaign, #optoutside, and is inviting shoppers to share photos of their Black Friday hiking, biking and other excursions on social media. The retailer has also built a Web page offering suggestions for activities people might do instead of hitting the stores.

Of course we don’t have an REI retail store in our town, so in recent years I’ve done most of my REI shopping online. But I can celebrate the holiday and the store’s decision by not making any online purchases from them or anyone else on Black Friday. I plan to opt out of Cyber Monday as well.

I’m well aware that Christmas Shopping is an important part of the business plan of many retail merchants and that they depend on high volume of purchases between Thanksgiving and Christmas to make ends meet. The emphasis on making purchases, however, tends to corrupt both holidays in my mind.

Giving thanks for the blessings of this life doesn’t involve a shopping spree to obtain more consumer goods, many of which have short lives and are far from necessary for happy living. Celebrating the birth of Jesus doesn’t require running up huge credit card balances. And the best gifts we can give don’t involve items at all. They are the gifts of our time, attention and presence.

My advice for Black Friday shoppers mirrors that of the cooperative: Go take a hike!

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One of the podcasts I enjoy is called “A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment.” It features one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie and fellow author Jess Walter in conversation, generally about the process of writing, but sometimes on topics as far afield as basketball and current events. They occasionally have a guest to interview and regularly feature readings of their newest works. Both write fiction and poetry, two genres that are a challenge to me, but I am fascinated by the processes by which they come up with ideas for their stories.

A few weeks ago, the two were talking about writing the stories that did not come to pass. When life presents a choice and the choice is made, there is always a potential story in the path not taken. What if I hat attended a different school from the one I did attend. What if there had been an accident instead of the near miss? What if our team had won the game instead of losing? Those speculations lead to stories for both Sherman and Jess.

I can see the potentials for stories in my own life. Before they had children, my parents considered purchasing a business in a different state. Banking financing wasn’t working out and they both had a desire to return home, where they established their business. But it leaves one wondering what might have happened were that the case. Would I have grown up with an alternate life, with different friends, with different loyalties? Or would I not have been born at all?

Susan and I had multiple options when we headed for graduate school. We chose the option where we had the best financial aid offers. The other options were farther away and had different professors. How might our lives unfolded had we made a different choice?

I can see the potential for stories in these speculations and perhaps one day I will pursue writing such a story.

On the other hand, as an essayist, it is entirely possible that I will never master the genre of fiction. I haven’t shown much promise in that field to date. The great American novel probably won’t come from my creativity. So far there hasn’t even been a short story worthy of submitting to a publisher.

Still, one wonders about the difference between fiction and non fiction. In another podcast, Sherman and Jess were joking about their ability to lie - at least to put a different spin on events than others. I’ve always tried to be truthful and to represent things honestly. Honesty and integrity were very important values to our parents and they spoke often about the need for honesty. Still, when I get together with my siblings these days it is clear that we have different memories. It is not just that some events stand out more prominently in the memory of one than another - we have memories of different events and often remember the same event in ways that are substantially different.

I have a very clear memory of a trip on which we took our dog in our airplane. I can remember the exact destination and even have a family photo to reinforce my memory. My brother remembers a different destination and quite a different trip. Discussing those differences with a sister I discovered that she has almost no memory of the trip at all. It just wasn’t a very significant event in her life.

When we are together, story after story told about our common past sound to me like fiction. My siblings just don’t remember the past the way that I do.

There has been quite a bit of research in recent years about the accuracy of memory and one discovery about memory is pretty counter-intuitive. The stories we tell the most about our past are likely to contain more factual errors than ones that we do not tell. There is something in the process of recalling and telling the story of a memory that allows for a certain degree of creativity and change in the memory. In a sense, we are always crafting stories and the more practiced the story, the more details have been altered for the flow of the story. We create drama and excitement, raise the level of risk or uncertainty, and even adjust outcomes in order to make the story a good one to tell and hear.

It would seem that we are created for fiction.

Of course what makes fiction work is that it has a certain degree of credibility. A story that has no possibility of being true cannot hold our attention unless we are able to suspend disbelief. We need to have recognizable emotions and characters in order to associate with a story. When we venture into fiction, telling what might have been instead of what was, there needs to be enough that is like reality for the reader to remain engaged.

That’s one thing we’ve got down when it comes to storytelling in my family. We tell our stories with passion and conviction. So if our stories, especially those that have been told over and over, are embellished, how far are we from the realm of fiction?

I think a fiction writer has to know that the story is the product of imagination. If they are convinced that it is the truth it no longer can unfold like fiction. When telling the truth one doesn’t feel the freedom to substantially change the facts, insert new characters, play out different scenarios. Great fiction is far more than the product of a rambling mind with an inaccurate memory. Good fiction writing is a craft that must be honed and refined. A good editor is essential to the process. The story might all come out in a single session, but the crafting of fiction requires the tenacity to revisit the story, find the points where the energy is the greatest and determine where one story ends and another begins.

So I have not yet become a fiction writer. It seems unlikely that I ever will. Still, I appreciate good fiction and enjoy reading fiction. Who knows? There may yet be a reasonable short story in me.

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Yesterday was a typical busy day in he life of our congregation. Attendance at worship was a little lighter than usual, but there was a good spirit and an excess of food as the congregation shared a chili lunch with a few visitors following worship. Our organist, who is also a piano technician tuned the sanctuary piano after worship and shortly after he finished the artists for an afternoon concert showed up to warm up. The concert began at 3. While it was in session an afternoon emerging church gathering began. I met with that group for an hour before going to assist with the set up for an evening meal and presentation by a local Rotary group. In between the activities there was time for conversation with friends. Two conversations stand out because of the ways they contrast. In the first conversation, we spoke of our frustrations with too many meetings and how boards and committees can sap energy from real work. Talking about what we want to do can be so much less effective than simply doing the work that needs to be done.

I think that my tolerance for meetings has decreased as I age. I still attend a lot of meetings and I don’t know how to organize the church to respond to its calling without meetings. Still, we need to continually work to make meetings effective while honoring and respecting the time of those who participate. Some of the best meetings are short. It is, in part, an organizational task. When leaders are well-prepared, it is possible to leave a meeting with a feeling of accomplishment and success. Unfortunately, I attend a lot of meetings whose purpose is unclear that are filled with a lot of talk and not very much substance. Too often meetings have to be repeated because the original purpose of the meeting was not respected.

Less than an hour after the first conversation, I was speaking to another person who was clearly recruiting me to return to a board on which I served for 16 years. As we spoke I could remember the sense of freedom and excitement I felt less than a year ago when I decided to step aside from that particular board and allow others to assume leadership. As I listened to the speaker, there was no desire inside of me to return to that board. I believe in the work of the board. I support the organization. But I don’t feel the call to return to the board.

Maybe it is just my age.

I can remember when I felt honored to be recruited for a leadership position in a board or organization. I used to frequently volunteer to take minutes at meetings because I knew that serving in that role led to other leadership roles within the organization. If you are good a recording minutes people will notice and you’ll be asked to serve in other positions. These days, I am slow to volunteer.

I want to be a giver, and not just a consumer of life. I believe that we are all called to service. I want to support the organizations that add to the quality of life in our community. I want to invest my time and energy to build relationships, solve community problems, and serve others.

Adam Grant is professor of psychology at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the school’s youngest tenured professor and its highest-rated professor. His book “Give and Take” examines ways in which generosity can enable success. While most business schools focus on passion, hard work, talent and luck as the primary factors driving success, Grant examines how givers contribute to others without expecting anything in return and how that quality enables them to achieve success in business and in life.

I have discovered a similar phenomenon in my work. In addition to a sort of continual process of fund-raising for the work of the church, I have been involved in raising funds for arts agencies and many other groups in our community. I used to speak of the benefits of giving with donors. There are tax breaks that can be obtained through charitable giving. Some organizations offer thank you gifts such as free concert tickets, memorabilia and other items. What I discovered is that the donors I approached weren’t motivated by the benefits that would come to them. What motivates the donors with whom I work is telling them how their gift helps others. It is far easier to raise money, in my opinion, when you talk about the benefits to others than when you speak of some benefit that might come back to the donor. People are inherently generous, at least many people are. And those who are not generous, or for whom the particular cause at hand is not the right project, probably aren’t going to give more than a token gift anyway.

Grant’s work is far more involved and insightful than reported here, but his book came to mind yesterday as I listened to the person trying to recruit me to return to the board. The speaker spoke only of the benefits to me: how I would enjoy the new members of the board, how I like working with artists, and how little time and effort it would take for me to serve. Missing from the appeal was any talk of what I could contribute: how the organization would be better off with my leadership.

It wasn’t hard for me to decline the offer. I have no shortage of meetings in my life and I can think of several other ways to contribute to the organization without serving on the board.

The truth is that the most important things in life are not connected to individual achievement. There is little about which I deeply care that rests on what I can do, achieve, or accomplish. The genuinely meaningful things in life are what we do together. I am far more interested in collaboration than in position.

Then, again, I may just be getting old.

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Over the years I have found writing to be a meaningful discipline, but would start and stop my journals. In 2006, as part of a sabbatical, I began journaling in what morphed, about a year later into this blog. I had mixed motivations for the project in the beginning. I understood the spiritual value of regular writing, but I also wanted to develop my skills as a professional writer. One way to learn to write is by writing. It seemed to me at the time that writing an essay every day would help to hone my skills as a writer. Now, eight years and over 2,900 essays after starting the discipline, I haven’t missed a single day. I’m not sure that I have become a better writer. It is likely that I would learn more by revisiting some of my essays, editing and honing them and working on improvement rather than focusing on sheer volume. After all, what inspires us as readers is not the amount someone has written, but rather the quality of what is written.

There are, however, many successful writers and storytellers who followed the discipline of writing every day and from their work came some very high quality documents.

A perpetual challenge of this type of writing is selecting topics for the blog. Sometimes, I have several possible blog topics come to me in a single day. I keep lists of blog ideas and there will be times when I have a week or more of ideas at once. Then other times come when I go for days without producing a new idea and the list dwindles to nothing. An not every idea that comes to me becomes a blog. Some of them are just bad ideas and not worthy of a 1,000-word essay. I have some good ideas and some bad ideas. Occasionally a bad idea can be turned into a good idea with a few days of reflection and a little work.

There are other times when I go to bed in the evening with no clue what the blog topic for the next day may be. I’ve been known to sit for a half hour or more just coming up with a topic. There are a few web sites that I visit and a few other bloggers whose work I read for inspiration. Interestingly my favorite blog sites have writers who are regular and disciplined in their posts, but none of them post daily. Some of my favorite sites have multiple writers, each taking one day of the week.

My goal, however, is not to be able to reflect the ideas of others, but rather to write what is on my heart and mind. I have never tried to restrict the topics of the blog. This isn’t a blog devoted exclusively to theology or philosophy except in the very broadest definitions of those words. I write about technology, pets, relationships, family, church, and current events. I try not to restrict my ideas, but to encourage their flow. For several years I would visit a half dozen or more news sites first thing in the morning, before writing the blog, and often a blog idea would come from those sites. I like to get news from a variety of perspectives so check out British, Costa Rican, Australian, and Israeli newspaper sites as well as The Washington Post, New York Times and Chicago Tribune. That practice, however, seemed to produce a bit too much reaction to current events for my taste, so I changed my discipline. These days I try to write first thing upon rising before going through the news sites. It isn’t that the blog is uninfluenced by the daily news. Rather, I give myself time to process the news by looking at it after writing and mulling it through the day.

Although the blog isn’t a research paper in any stretch of the word, I do allow myself access to the Internet while writing. I have a second monitor so that I generally write the blog on the screen to the right while having the ability to look up items on the screen on the left. I try to limit my browsing while writing to fact checking. I also try to be disciplined about indicating my sources when writing about a topic or idea that I got from someone else. Ideas, however, are rarely unique. Most of my thoughts have been influenced by conversations, reading, and relationships with others. It is not uncommon for my ideas to reflect my studies of the history of philosophy. By reading about the history of ideas, I discover that my ideas fit into patterns of thinking that were circulating in human cultures before I was born. I like the feeling of wresting with big ideas and regular readers of the blog know that I frequently refer to ideas that take multiple generations to be fully developed. I also like the mental challenge of organizing my thinking in such a way that I might pass on thoughts to younger generations. I imagine that questions I have pondered will be considered in the future by children yet to be conceived as they find their way in the world. I enjoy intergenerational enterprises.

Furthermore, as you can tell from today’s post, occasionally I write about the process of writing itself. I am frequently asked how I come up with my ideas for the blog. I have reflected on that question, but I’m not sure that I understand the process. Mostly, I believe it is a product of being a voracious reader and being influenced by the things I read and hear. Yesterday I was listening to a podcast in which a composer was reflecting on the process of writing music. I’m sure that podcast got my mind stirred about the process of writing essays. I’m not sure that many composers write every day, but I suspect that like, writers, they have ideas that work out and others that are discarded.

I don’t know how long I will keep up this discipline of daily writing. For now it seems to be meaningful. Certainly the universe has many more topics worthy of thought.

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One of the gifts of being human is imagination. We have the capacity to see the world not only as it is, but to imagine changes that might make the world better. We are not confined and forced to simply accept everything the way it is. We can use our imaginations and creative capacities to make things different. Even when we are incapable of making changes, our imaginations can provide an avenue of escape from the harsh realities of the world. There are plenty of stories of imagination playing a definite role in the survival of individuals, groups and cultures. In the darkest days of Nazi extermination camps, groups of detainees formed orchestras and created music together. The resiliency of spirt that was demonstrated in these dark moments contributed not only to the survival of Judaism against the forces of genocide, but to a deeper understanding of the nature of the true sources of power and authority.

Imagination, however, can be a source of problems for humans. People who prefer their imaginary worlds to that of reality can lose touch with what is true and what is not. In some cases, an inability to distinguish between reality and imagination can be manifested as a brain disease. Some who suffer from mental illnesses are literally unable to tell the difference between an objective reality that can be observed by others and their internal delusions. In severe cases, the delusions can be life-threatening, demanding actions that are dangerous.

Trained crime investigators know that human memories are far from perfect. Different people tell the story of events in different ways. Not every difference in detail is the product of intentional lying. Sometimes, people genuinely believe they are telling the truth, but have been misled by a misinterpreted memory. The phenomenon of false memory has been widely studied and is not the topic of today’s blog, but it is clear that not all false memories come from malevolent manipulation. Some false memories are the product of innocent recall.

Imagination is a powerful force in our lives. It can be the source of innovation and new ways of living. It can be the source of pain and suffering. It all depends on how we employ our imaginations.

I have been thinking of imagination this week because I have been taking classes as part of the International Convention of Police Chaplains Region 3 Training Session. Some of our classes were taught by seasoned police officers who helped us to understand the processes of careful investigation of crimes. Often it is difficult to obtain the evidence required to know what has happened. Even trained investigators fail to see some details. Sometimes a crime scene may lack the details necessary to obtain a complete picture. Information provided by witnesses can be key to understanding what has happened, but that information has to be carefully obtained so that the witness is not negatively influenced. Witness information also has to be taken carefully as memory can become clouded and inaccurate. And, in the world of crime investigation, there are witnesses who intentionally lie to mislead investigators.

Investigators need to have active imaginations to come up with all of the possible scenarios. They also need to understand that criminals have active imaginations that enable them to come up with false alibis and misleading stories.The same human capacity that works towards the good of an ordered society can be employed to cause harm to others and disrupt society.

We are complex beings living in a complex world. There are times when we need a deeper truth than just the “who, what, why, when and where.” Jesus understood this when he employed the ancient teaching practice of parable. Sometimes, in order to reveal a deeper truth, a story is required. A man asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor.” Jesus answers with a story about a man who falls into robbers and, left lying to die, is passed by a Priest and a Levite before a Samaritan provides assistance and rescues him. “Who,” asks Jesus, “proved to be a neighbor to that man?” The point of the story is not the same as a crime investigation. The name of the priest and the levite is not essential to the deeper meaning. It is not necessary to determine whether Jesus is telling of an actual event that occurred at a specific time and place or whether the story is a product of his imagination. The underlying truth of how neighborliness is born of caring and compassionate relationships can be learned regardless of the origins of the story. We re-tell that story over and over in our generation to help people learn ways of relating to the people they meet.

There are plenty of other examples of teaching by parable in the Gospels. Jesus, the good teacher, employs not only his own imagination, but also stirs the imaginations of his followers by telling these stories. The relationship of God and humans is not a concept that is easy to learn and once things are learned they are difficult to pass on to others. Our faith is a multiple-generation process. There is too much to be learned by a single generation. We rely on the discoveries and understandings of those who have gone before us. And we trust that new insights and understandings can be discovered in each generation. The stories themselves appear to change when told in new and different contexts.

Theologians and biblical scholars have long known that sometimes an uninitiated person can open a text and discover a meaning that has eluded those who have invested a lifetime of study. Devotional reading can yield insights that scholarly examination misses. Like the witnesses at a crime scene, each perspective is worth consideration and each interpretation is worthy of considering. There are, however, some avenues of interpretation that can be misleading. Knowledge of history can be valuable in preventing repeated misinterpretations. The study of the history, traditions and discoveries of previous generations is important in equipping teachers of religion for their tasks.

In the midst of the complexities and failings of our very human circumstances, truth does emerge. Eternal truth is distinguished from flights of imagination. Approaching the big truths of life is its own reward and worthy of a lifetime of study and reflection.

I continue to be a student for there is much to learn.

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I’ve told this story so many times, I don’t remember if I’ve ever included it in the blog, so if you’ve already heard it, I apologize. Still, I have been thinking of it recently.

Grandpa Pogany had worked hard in his life. He was born in Hungary and emigrated to the United States where, after several adventures, he joined other Hungarian refugees in Ohio. There he worked as a laborer in a coal mine, dining by hand and loading coal. Later, after raising his family and becoming a widower, he moved to South Dakota where he assisted his children in a very small coal mining operation. When one of his sons became manager at Placerville Camp, he moved in with his son and daughter and law for the final years of his life. While living at the camp, the Conference found a way to build a new chapel for the camp. The site was prepared and the footings were poured. A large truck arrived with the cement blocks that would be used to make the basement sidewalls. The truck was equipped with a hydraulic mechanism that allowed an operator to life the pallets of block from the truck and set them onto the ground near the construction site. As I heard the story, Grandpa Pogany complained about that machine for several days afterward, saying that machines should not take jobs from men and that someday there wouldn’t be enough work for people because they kept making machines that stole their jobs.

As far as I know, no one else could see a negative side to this machine. It was saving people from grueling work that had great potential for back injuries. It was allowing the camp to get a new chapel at a more affordable cost. And there didn’t seem to be a group of volunteers who were wanting to unload the block by hand.

From the beginning of the industrial revolution until well into the twentieth century, people spoke of labor-saving devices. Machines were developed that allowed people to escape some of the most difficult and injury-causing tasks. Workplaces got safer and people began to have increased time for rest and recreation. The machines allowed for more balance to life. Work could be accomplished and leave time for other activities. People had more time to visit with family and friends and even to pursue hobbies and recreational activities.

The promise of technology has long been one of reducing everyone’s workload and giving more time for creative activities and recreation.

When it comes to the technologies of my working career, however, few have accomplished that goal. In fact, some of our modern technologies have actually increased our workloads and given us less time for recreation. I have been aware of this during the last three days of attending a regional training event. At every break in the intense schedule of classes and seminars, I would take out my cell phone, check my messages, return calls and text messages, check and respond to my email. When the sessions concluded in the evening, I turned to my computer to accomplish a few tasks before creating in bed.

You know what they say, “All work and no play makes Jack (also Ted) a dull boy.”

Let me be quick to say that the problem is not inherent in the technology itself. Just because I have a smartphone doesn’t mean that it has to come out of its carrying case instead of taking time to talk with my colleagues, read a novel, or take a walk. I am the one who made the choices. I am also aware that I am not the only one making similar choices. At least I left my laptop at the office and refrained from checking e-mail and returning messages during the actual class sessions, something that a few of my colleagues were doing.

I remember reading, back in my college years, a book by Robert Neale, entitled “In Praise of Play,” in which he made an eloquent argument for recreation as a necessary part of a religious life. Essentially, he said that play is a way of expressing gratitude. Too little play results in people who do not express gratitude. The failure to express gratitude leaves us unaware of our place in this world. That is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the ideas, but they did make an imprint on my understanding of life in general.

I have tried to maintain a balance of work and play in my life and to model that balance for our children. In that I was only partially successful. There were times when I shortchanged my family as I followed my career. I think that both of our children could tell stories of my inability to make a distinction between work and home and bringing a bit too much of my workplace into our home. It probably didn’t help that both of their parents worked together for all of their lives. Still, they have become adults with remarkably balanced lives in which they are able to leave work behind and devote time to family and recreation.

These days, however, with our children raised and continuing to love the work that I do, I find that I am tempted to engage in work more hours of the day and to devote less time to recreation. In that, modern technology seems not to help, but actually to hinder. Just recently, within the last year, I have stopped taking my work computer home. I have a personal computer at home, but I don’t use it for checking work email and responding to work messages. I post my blog from my home computer, but I don’t consider this type of writing to be work. Still, I took my work computer with me on our vacation trips this year. I didn’t check in at work every day, but I didn’t take a full week without doing any work, either.

The lesson to be learned is not to blame the technology, but to learn to use it appropriately. The challenge for me is significant, but being aware of my tendencies helps.

If we are serious about saving labor and freeing more time for recreation, we are going to have to become more wise in the choices we make. That has probably always been true. The great lessons in life need to be learned freshly by each generation.

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I missed the horsepower race of 1960’s muscle cars. I was aware of all of the new models and the ever-increasing engine options, but I was also growing up in a family with a bunch of children and limited financial means. After I earned my driver’s license, I was allowed to drive the family’s 1966 Chevy II. It wasn’t the Super Sport version, but rather the base model with a 230 cubic inch inline six. I don’t remember the exact horsepower, but 194 is what sticks in my mind. It was a long ways from the Turbo-Fire 327 that put out 350 horsepower. We had a standard three speed manual transmission on the column, and not the available close-ration four-speed that was combined with the 327 to make a sort of entry-level muscle car.

The first vehicle that I called my own was a 1958 Ford f-100 1/2 ton pickup with a 223 cubic inch inline six. It had a 5,000 GVWR. And that really was a limit. I obtained a used slide-in pickup camper that set off a series of rear end failures in the truck. After the second replacement, the truck was deemed to be in need of a new owner. By then I was in college, engaged, and in need of a practical car.

I purchased a 1966 Opel Kadett from my uncle. The car was practical. It got very good gas mileage. And, with its light weight of only 1475 pounds and its 987 cc four cylinder inline engine it put out 46 hp, six more than the Volkswagen 1200. The horsepower boost combined with the fact it weighted 200 pounds less than the VW meant that it was at least considered zippy.

Horsepower, in my world, came in the form of tractors. The summer before I got my driver’s license, I was doing field work with a John Deere R. The model R was John Deere’s first diesel tractor. That 2-cylinder popper had 415 cubic inches and put out a whopping 43 hp on the drawbar and 48 on the belt pulley.

In those days, however, my mind and attention was focused on airplanes. The pinnacle in my airplane world was the Beech 18 our company owned with its Pratt and Whitney R-985 engines putting out 450 hp each. That was 900 hp that could be controlled by two throttles in the right hand of the pilot.

I soloed in a Piper PA-22 tripacer. The tripacer originally came out with a 135 hp engine and was available in a 150 hp model. We had the “top of the line” model with a 160 hp Lycoming high octane engine. 130 octane fuel was available in those days.

I’ve been thinking about engines and horsepower these days because we just traded our 10-year-old pickup truck for one that is only 4 years old. It has a 6.7 liter turbo-diesel V-8 engine that is rated at 400 hp and 800 lb-ft of torque. I may have missed the muscle car horsepower race of the 1960’s, but I appear to be right in the middle of the pickup truck horsepower race of the 2010’s.

I have no idea why we need that much horsepower. It is, after all, a pickup truck.

In our defense, we do haul somewhat heavier loads than most contemporary pickup truck drivers. We’ve been known to put nearly 2000 pounds of firewood in the box of the pickup and then hitch up a trailer that weighs another 5000 or more pounds. That was with our old pickup. Something tells me that this new one, that gets its first firewood workout this weekend, won’t be straining much with that load.

Because we did quite a bit of shopping before finding the truck that we decided to buy I did a reasonable amount of research including looking at quite a few YouTube videos of truck comparisons. I already know we aren’t going to win any mileage contests, though the new pickup should produce significantly better mileage than our old gas model.

It all seems a bit overwhelming to me. I haven’t even begun to write about the price of a new pickup truck. I didn’t buy my Opel new, but in 1966, the headline in the Opel advertisement was, “How to remodel your garage for only $1618.” Of course I didn’t have a thousand dollars, let alone 1,600 in those days. I paid a little less than half of the new price when I obtained the car for $800. Along with the horsepower race, contemporary pickup trucks are in a kind of race to the top in terms of power. There are pickups on dealers’ lots in our area with sticker prices above $70,000. The price we paid for a 4-year-old pickup with nearly 50,000 miles on it was around $5,000 more than we paid for a new pickup ten years ago.

Just as I have no idea about why we need all of that horsepower, I must admit that I have no way of practically evaluating the price we paid. It certainly seems at the moment to be excessive. What business does a minister whose calling is to serve those who are poor and oppressed have spending that much money on a pickup truck? It is a good question and I’m not sure that I can justify the money that we spent. I’m not sure that I can justify that salary that the church pays me so that I can afford to make such a purchase. How is that fair when a preschool teacher doesn’t earn enough money to make rent and groceries? What is fair in an world where there are such radical differences between rich and poor.

The good news is that I’m reaching an age where there won’t be many more pickup truck purchases. I’m relieved. I have no desire to participate in a horsepower race that keeps going up and up along with a price race that clearly places such vehicles beyond the reach of most people.

Still, that engine does sound good. And it does feel good to drive that truck. I can’t wait to load it up and see what it will do.

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Different parts of the church have different expectations when it comes to the preparation for ministry. In our corner of the church, we have a long-established tradition of a highly educated clergy. Although we now recognize that there are multiple paths to the ministry and have eased off from the rigid standards of a few decades ago, it is still the expectation that a minister have a rigorous academic preparation. The standard remains a three-year master’s degree following a four-year bachelor’s. There are parts of the church where academic preparation is not stressed in the same way. There are ordained ministers who have not graduated from high school and in some denominations a high school diploma plus two years of bible college, often at an unaccredited institution, is the norm in terms of academic preparation.

This wide variation has resulted in challenges for places where ministers from many different denominations serve together, such as in chaplaincies in hospitals or law enforcement. While I have both undergraduate and graduate credits in ethics and am required by my denomination to take recurrent boundary training every five years, I have colleagues who have never had a professional ethics course.

In response to this variation, different organizations have grown up to help with the credentialing of professional chaplains. In the law enforcement community, the most widely recognized organization is the International Convention of Police Chaplains (ICPC). In the United States the ICPC holds an annual training session at its national convention as well as annual regional training events. Yesterday, today and tomorrow I am participating in the ICPC Region 3 training. ICPC credentials are not required for law enforcement chaplaincy in our area. Our Sheriff’s office has six chaplains, but only two of us are participating in this training.

For me personally it is not a matter of “What are the minimum requirements,” but rather, “What best equips me for ministry in my setting?” The courses vary in terms of my familiarity and expertise in the subject. Yesterday I attended sessions on crime scene procedures, blood born pathogens, and regional drug enforcement. Those are all areas where I have less knowledge and there was much to learn. For the most part I was glad to learn that the procedures that we follow in our department are in keeping with the latest information. Still there were plenty of nuances and details of which I had been unaware and attending the classes was well worth my time.

I also attended a session on death notification. While there was good information to be learned in that session, I suspect that it was geared to beginning chaplains. Such was appropriate. I sat next to a young chaplain who had never participated in a death notification. I’ve been doing them for nearly 40 years and suspect that I have participated in as many as the instructor. I had to hold my tongue from time to time, especially when the talk turned to suicide response, an area of specialization for me. I’ve invested the last 20 years in honing my skills for this difficult and necessary ministry and I have great passion about how we talk about suicide and how we provide care and support for survivors.

Today’s sessions look to be more of a mixture of topics. Unfortunately, the courses required for basic certification as a law enforcement chaplain are, from my perspective, incredibly elementary. There is a part of me that wants to ask, “How did you become a minister without learning this?” Still, the fact that there are colleagues who lack this basic information and training demonstrates the need for this level of education. I only wonder about my colleagues who do not participate in these opportunities for continuing education.

So much of what we do in ministry is of critical importance for the people we serve. It doesn’t matter how many death notifications I have made in the past, each one is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the family to whom I am delivering news. Each is critically important and each family deserves the best we can bring to the situation. This is true of many other aspects of ministry as well. For some people, their judgement of the entire church will be based on the quality of my interaction with them. It isn’t fair, but it does happen. This means that I not only have the power to damage relationships between people and God, I also have the possibility of opening people to new experiences and a deepening relationship with God. It is a heavy responsibility.

I’ve been lucky to be skilled and experienced at academic study. I read and retain information well. I can listen and discern which information is most important. I know how and when to take notes. Tests and quizzes are easy for me. I know that this is not the same for other learners. There are many different styles of learning and listening to PowerPoint presentations with questions to follow isn’t the best way for many to add to their information and knowledge. Still, I remain committed to the maintenance of basic academic standards for ministers. Our work is too critical to be left to chance. The truth we are asked to carry is too important to be left to uninformed opinion.

We who serve in chaplaincies work daily with some of the most highly trained and professionals in our community. Our law enforcement colleagues train continually and maintain the highest standards. We owe it to them to approach our part of the work with the same dedication and professionalism. Being a chaplain is much more than wearing the right clothing and having a cross on your lapel.

So I am investing my time, which means long days this week. I go to the office early to get my desk work done and return to the office in the evening for meetings and other responsibilities. I check my email and answer messages during the breaks. I try to bring the best of my focus to the sessions and learn as much as I am able. I can’t control the decisions or training of my colleagues, but I can prepare as best as I know how for the challenges that lie ahead in my ministry.

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Film producer George Lucas has said that the appeal of the Star Wars franchise is rooted in its appeal to the universal hero story. He has cited Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” as the classic study that traces the hero’s journey through mythologies from across the world. The book, originally published in 1949, has sold nearly a million copies and has inspired and informed generations of students. It continues to be one of the essential textbooks for storytellers of all kinds. I have appreciated the reference to classical philosophy by the film maker in part because I am not a huge fan of the movies. We rarely go to the theater and we aren’t much for watching television. In contrast to our children with their collections of DVDs and Netflix memberships, we are content to stay at home and read books as our primary form of entertainment.

I do have to admit, however, that I have been a fan of the Star Wars movies. The original Star Wars movie came out in 1977. I was a seminary student at the time, immersed in my studies. It was the only summer of our seminary years that we didn’t return to Montana to work and take a break from studies. I continued my internship and my work in the Chicago area. In the midst of that summer my Uncle Ted passed away and we made a whirlwind trip to Montana to be with family for the memorial service then rushed back to Chicago for the rest of the summer. I don’t remember exactly where in the process I got to see the movie, but I remember being impressed by the special effects and saving money to buy a cassette tape of John Williams’ soundtrack. The next two movies in the original trilogy came out in 1980, when we were struggling with my father’s cancer and death and 1983, when we were adjusting to the reality of being a family with a baby and a two-year-old. Each release of the original trilogy was accompanied by events in my life that were consuming and from which I was needing a little escape from reality. In addition to watching the films in movie theaters, I had recordings of the sound tracks and played them frequently as I drove the somewhat empty roads of North Dakota.

The second wave of Star Wars movies, released between 1999 and 2005, corresponded with our son’s teenage and young young adult years. We stood in line to get into the theatre for some of the first showings of those films. The joy of the movies wasn’t in my amazement at the technical effects nor was it in my being impressed and inspired by the plot lines and classic explorations of hero’s tales. The joy was in sharing with my son a hero’s journey through the storytelling of the movies. Somewhere in the midst of the process we obtained VCR tapes of all six of the two series and watched them several more times. I’m sure our son watched them even more than I.

I’m sure that most people understand that the story was not told in chronological order. The first three films are the center of the story, followed by the second three, which are prequel to those three, so the first movie was episode four and episode on was the fourth movie released. It sounds more confusing than it is.

So, I paid attention to the release of the trailer for episode seven, which is slated for release around Christmas this year. Yes, I was one of the quarter of a million people who watched it on YouTube yesterday. You can check it out yourself, but the trailer gives little hint as to the plot of the story - just the information that there is a new generation of characters, more reasons for battle, lots of chasing and shooting with spaceships and, perhaps, more prominent roles for women in the show.

True to the philosopher’s examination of the great hero stories of the world, legacy and inheritance are important factors for both hero and villain in the Star Wars movies. The hero discovers that he has inherited a bit of the bad as well as the good and that a choice is critical to the future of the world.

The timing of the release of this new trilogy of films, with a new film each year for three years doesn’t correspond to any of the chapters of my personal hero story. In contrast to the first, when I was personally wrestling with the meaning of legacy and inheritance in the death of my namesake and then my father; and the second, when I was exploring the meaning of legacy and inheritance in passing on family stories to our son, our grandchildren are a bit too young for this new series. Like many other things in our world, the pace is accelerating and the events of our lives don’t always come out synchronized with the stories told in popular culture.

I watched the trailer on its release day. It seems unlikely that I’ll watch the movie when it is released two months from now. The weekend of the Fourth Sunday of Advent isn’t exactly “down time” in my life. I’m not much for looking for entertainment outside of the activities of the church at that time of the year.

On the other hand, our Son and his family along with our daughter and her husband will be coming to visit us around new years. Perhaps the years have mellowed our children a little bit and they won’t have lined up at the theaters to be among the first to see the new movie. If things line up, we might all go to see the movie together around New Years. I’m sure it will still be in the theaters.

Often we understand our own stories better by hearing the stories of others. Perhaps there is a bit of Star Wars in the hero journey of our family.

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OK, here’s a cheerful topic for a Monday morning: death. However, I need to say up front that I don’t find the topic to be that depressing. Sure we can get down and yes, grief can be a difficult road, but I have no interest in being immortal. The moments of our lives are precious in part because they are in limited supply. None of us has forever. This life is a span of time with a beginning and an end and it is our vocation to make the most of the time that we have. Were we to be beings that go on forever, we likely would become bored. Both Greek and Roman mythologies have gods who are immortal that end up envying humans. Immortality has its downside, it would appear.

The philosopher Stephen Cave has written a fascinating book titled “Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization,” in which he explores several different perspectives on immortality. He considers the quest for a disease-free body. He considers how one might live on in a famous piece of art, music or literature. He considers whether living on in memory is the same as life before death. More interesting, he reflects on how the urge to survive and extend life acts to drive and inspire much of civilization. There are several places in the book where I find myself questioning his directions and conclusions, but it raises some fascinating thoughts.

There have been some writers to claim that humanity is getting close enough to providing a kind of technological immortality. One scheme is the preservation of DNA for a future technology that would allow the creation of a clone. We know, however, from animal cloning that a creature reproduced from DNA isn’t the same as the one from which the DNA was harvested. Others believe that there are specific eating and nutritional programs that might add decades to a person’s life span enabling that person to live to the point where humans will have developed the cure for every disease. Still others have written about the advance of computer memory that would allow a mapping and storage of the contents of one’s brain so that one could live on in a technological sense. Perhaps computers can even be programmed to continue learning in such a way that human identity implanted in the machine would continue not in a static form, but in a way that grows, changes and evolves.

None of these options hold much appeal for me. I am content to be mortal. I find it fascinating to live among mortals.

I’ve never been good at completing projects that don’t have some kind of deadline or target date. I work best with a little bit of pressure. I enjoy the challenge of crafting a sermon every week, writing a blog every day. I don’t think I’d do well with an immortal life in which I was tempted to tackle 300- or 500-year projects. I love big ideas. I enjoy being a part of things that are bigger than myself. I have no need to go on forever, however. I’m happy to hand off projects and ideas to others who will, no doubt, head off in directions that I had never imagined.

We do not, however, invest very much energy in contemplating our own death. I’m sure that it is for the best. We can focus on living while we are alive. Still, I occasionally get caught up in reading and thinking about death.

I used to think that some ways of dying are better than others. It is something that I often hear from others. My father used to say, “The worst way to die would be to have a brain disease that took away your ability to think rationally.” My father died of a brain cancer that robbed him of his mental capacities. It turns out that it wasn’t the worst way to die. He died with dignity and grace and relatively small amounts of pain and suffering. I have a friend who just celebrated his 87th birthday who not long ago spoke to me about his “Do Not Resuscitate” order: “There are very few ways to get out of this life with your dignity in tact. A heart attack is one of them. Don’t take that away from me.” I have deep respect for his choices and wishes, but the statistical odds are against a sudden and traumatic heart attack being the mode of his death. He is likely to go on a more gradual path with an extended time of needing care.

Of course one wouldn’t wish intense pain for anyone, but the rare occasions that I have experienced pain have been opportunities for learning for me. It may be my lack of experience - I’ve had a bit of dental pain and I once was burned fairly seriously - but I think that going through a certain amount of pain is a life experience that shapes one’s character. I wouldn’t opt for a pain-free life and I’m not sure that one ought to opt for a pain-free death. At any rate, I have come to the conclusion that I do not want to choose the manner of my own death. I’m willing to take whatever comes.

One of the essential elements of dying is losing control. There is no need for me to retain control to the very end. I intend to live as fully and engaged as long as is possible. I want to experience all that this life has to offer. I try to take reasonable care of my health and limit risk when possible. But when the time comes for me to die, I’l willing to follow whatever path lies ahead for me without a need to choose a particular path.

And when I die? I’m content to leave that up to its own time. I am a Christian. I see plenty of evidence that death is not the end. But I have no particular wisdom on what lies beyond. I’m content to allow that to be revealed in its own time and own way as well.

For now, I have a life to live. I intend to live without inordinate fear of dying and with sufficient trust to allow the future to belong to itself.

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I recently read a piece in the New York Times by N. R. Kleinfeld entitled, “The Lonely Death of George Bell.” It contains a long story about a man who died alone in his apartment in Queens. His body was discovered only after neighbors complained of smell in the apartment. Investigators took some time to determine the identity of the man who had no family and few friends. Kleinfeld took time to find out a bit more and even located some photographs from earlier in his life. The article ends up being a rather extensive obituary for a man who lived and died in obscurity in the midst of a huge city.

We will never know if George Bell experienced loneliness, or if he had adapted to his life in a way that he was comfortable with all of its eccentricities. Having read the article, I don’t really feel like I know much about the man except that the end of his life seems to me to be forlorn and sad.

There was no funeral, no mourners, no ceremony. Just a simple urn with his cremains placed in a city-owned storage facility on the outside chance that some relative might be found to claim them and put them to rest in a permanent location.

The circumstances might be different, but people living alone without family or any form of community is not a phenomenon reserved to giant cities. It also occurs in rural areas. There are folks living alone out in the hills whose deaths go unnoticed and undiscovered for some time.

Besides the obvious issues of a lack of help in a medical crisis, there are other problems that aries from the failure of community. When I look back on my life there have been moments when I don’t know how I would have survived without the help of others. In most cases, I wasn’t dependent upon physical support, but rather upon the emotional and spiritual support of others. As I often say, “When you can’t find the words for your prayer, it’s good to know that you aren’t the only one praying.” When we have experienced a death in our family, the community just appears. Food is delivered to our house, cards and letters appear, people stop by to offer their condolences and to check to see that we are OK.

There are many things in this life that require community. I am convinced that this is true of the three things that are most important: Faith, hope and love.

I frequently hear some version of “I don’t need a church to believe in God,” from those who don’t participate in church regularly. On the surface, the statement is true. A person’s intellectual ideas and commitments are not always dependent upon others. There is ample evidence of God in the world for one to come to the conclusion that God exists. There are sufficient opportunities to experience God’s presence without the need for gathering in a church building. God is not confined to the structures we make for the gathering of our communities. One can be alone in the hills walking through the forest and experience God’s presence.

There is, however, something important and transforming when you share that experience with others. Telling the stories of your experiences of God gives you the opportunity to see them in the context of a bigger story. Religion isn’t just about sensing God’s presence, it is belonging to a long line of people who have touched an experience that is as ancient as the universe and will continue until the end of time. Ours isn’t the first generation to have know of God’s goodness. Ours isn’t the last.

Faith is formed and nurtured by community. Gathering together to experience and share beliefs is far different from the solitary experience. Furthermore, times of solitude often provide the motivation to engage community. It isn’t a coincidence that so many who have lived in monastic isolation become engaged in issues of social justice. Time alone with God provides energy and enthusiasm to engage others and the world in meaningful activities.

In preparation for a presentation that I am making this afternoon, I’ve been thinking a lot about hope in the last week or so. I am convinced that hope is more than a mere wish for a positive outcome. It even reaches beyond an individual longing for a brighter future. Hope is a power - a positive energy - that dwells in community. Alone we don’t have the ability to manufacture hope. And there are times, when individuals and communities come under intense pressure, that hope would not exist were it not for the wider community.

One of the hardest years of my life started with the sudden and unexpected death of my brother. By the time of the anniversary of his death, we had experienced the death of my mother, the birth of a grandson, the death of my father-in-law and the wedding of our daughter. The year had both high points and low points, celebration and grief. It was also a year of vocational challenge for me. There were pressures at work that I had not previously experienced and questions in my mind about what directions to take. It was a year of many sleepless nights and challenging days.

It was also a year of truly experiencing community. A small group Bible study in which I have participated for years became a center of support and encouragement. Even though it is my place of employment, the church became a source of care and centering. Prayers in church became more powerful than prayers alone at home. The genuine care and concern of others was essential to the journey.

The hope I discovered that year did not come from some internal source. It wasn’t an idea I thought up or an emotion that came from within. It was a gift of the community that nurtured hope while it seemed to temporarily fade inside of me. The gifts of faith, hope and love came from beyond my internal resources.

Nurturing community isn’t an option. It is essential for ongoing life.

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No one has ever accused me of being tall. When I report my height at 5’6” I may be exaggerating a little bit. I was not destined to shine as a basketball player. I am frequently in the front row in group photographs. I look up when conversing with others a lot. I know a lot of short jokes.

It isn’t a difficult burden to bear.

After all, height is a matter of perspective. I’m taller than all of the children in the preschool.

We use images of height in all kinds of ways in our culture. It is frequently a part of our religious imagination. We speak of the heights of spirituality, of the depths of depression, of the lofty realm of God. The Old Testament gives us images of Moses talking with God up on the mountain, of the building of a tower in an effort to reach God, of Elijah’s and Jesus’ ascents into heaven. We often think of God’s realm as being above earth and hell being down below.

But there is no sin in being short.

The teacher and Quaker elder Parker Palmer reports of a therapist who once told him:

“You seem to image depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Would it be possible to image it instead as the hand of a friend pressing you down to ground on which it’s safe to stand?”

He also jokes, “My first thought was, ‘I need a new therapist.’”

I remember a time when I wished that I were taller. I didn’t always like being the shortest in my class. It isn’t much fun in junior high when all the girls are taller than you. I grew up (notice the use of the word “up”) thinking that going to high places was a good idea. My parents were pilots. I love flying. I enjoy being above the clouds.

As an academic and an intellectual, I have invested a lot of time and energy in thinking. Thinking is something that I love to do. But the world of universities and academic thinking also teaches one to live largely in one’s head. To approach every situation and every problem with the intellect, even if that means ignoring one’s feelings. Calm thinking in place of loud outbursts. Ideas trump emotions. It is commonplace in the world of academia. Living mostly in one’s head means focusing attention on the part of one’s body that is farthest from the ground. It is easy to forget one’s roots. Universities aren’t the best teachers of how to integrate ideas with real world experience. They say that it takes three or four years after seminary for a pastor to gain practical skills. I may be a slow learner. The seven years we spent in rural North Dakota were an important part of my learning to integrate thinking and acting. And I spent part of my time in North Dakota longing for the mountains of Montana. I was still trying to get up in the world, to climb the ladder, to ascend to the heights.

There is something reassuring about the place in life where I find myself these days. I’m aware that as I age I’m not getting any taller. In fact things seem to be settling a bit. I am, however, quite comfortable in my own skin and have learned to be quite happy with who I am. I no longer have to worry about a career ladder. I’m not going to be coming into some big promotion. I won’t be asked to lead a larger congregation or become a Conference Minister or join the national leadership of the church. I suspect that I would never have been good at those jobs, but there was a time when I could imagine myself as being in charge. Knowing that this congregation and these people are where I am called to serve and being secure in that relationship frees me to focus on serving others in this place. I don’t have to worry about how my resume looks. I don’t have to think about how others view me.

I am aware that the future of this congregation holds new leaders who will have new ideas and who will lead in new directions. For now, however, we are doing well with who we are. We don’t need to be the biggest or fastest growing congregation in our town. We don’t have to hold the most expensive real estate or have the tallest steeple. We understand our call to serve others and are at home in our neighborhood.

Before he died, Rabbi Zusya said: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

So here I am. All 5’ 5 1/2” of me. I’m not the best or most sought after preacher in the church. I’m a pastor to a particular congregation. I’m not perfect in any way, I make mistakes and employ poor judgment. I can be a procrastinator and a bit messy. I’m not skilled at politics and I don’t stand out in a crowd. But God gives me the most exquisite joy of looking at the stars on a clear autumn night and watching the sunrise creep over the lake. There is incredible beauty in being close to the ground. I doubt if any captain in the largest tanker or cruise ship in the world experiences anything more beautiful that the sights I see lying on my back in a canoe looking at the world from the level of the surface of the lake. There is grace in the height that I have been given.

And “down here” is a good place to ponder the miracle of incarnation. For us Christians, Jesus is God embodied in the midst of this world. If there is any sense of up and down, we focus our attention on God come down to our level - being accessible in the midst of this life. Here in this place, serving this congregation, is a wonderful place to look at God’s presence in the midst of the people.

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From time to time I read articles about sleep. A few years ago, European researchers found that people in pre-industrial times used to wake up for a while during the night, sleeping in two shifts. They would spend more time in bed, but often would not sleep the whole night through. It was thought that this was due, in part, to the long nights of winter in temperate and sub-arctic climates. Without artificial light there isn’t too much to do once it gets dark outside.

The generally accepted norm for sleep is seven to nine and a half hours. Some researchers have found that adults who get fewer than seven hours of sleep on average do not function at their best when they are awake. Those with not enough sleep have more difficulty concentrating and have more mood problems than those who average more than seven hours per night of sleep. Another study showed higher mortality rates among those who sleep fewer than seven hours per night. Less advertised was that the same study demonstrated that mortality rates also rise among those who sleep more than nine hours per night.

So how much sleep do we really need?

The National Sleep Foundation recognizes that sleep requirements decrease as we age. They recommend 14 to 17 hours per day for the first three months of life, decreasing to 12 - 15 hours in months 4 to 11. Toddlers and preschoolers continue to decrease in their sleep needs until at school age they do will with 9 - 11 hours of sleep per night. In our adult years, the foundation recommends 7 - 9 hours decreasing to 7 - 8 hours for adults 65 years and older. They also acknowledge that there are people whose sleep patterns vary and who function well and have good health with slightly less or slightly more than the averages.

That comes as a relief to me because I’ve been a pretty consistent 7 hours a night sleeper since my young adult years. I’ve never been a particularly good sleeper, waking easily and often rising for an hour or more to read in the middle of the night. I guess I have some of the genes from our pre-industrial ancestors.

I am, on the other hand, pretty good at taking naps. Although I don’t nap every day, when the opportunity presents itself, I can often be refreshed with a half hour to an hour’s sleep in the middle of the day.

Looking at the symptoms of those who receive too little sleep, it would seem that I am not deprived. I seem to be productive, happy and healthy during the day. Although I was a heavy coffee drinker in my young adult years, I have transitioned to a caffeine free lifestyle without any problems in alertness. I don’t fall asleep when driving or doing other tasks that require concentration and attention.

The one area that raises a bit of a red flag is that being overweight is associated with too little sleep and I have struggled with my weight for most of my adult life.

Enough about me, however.

A few days ago I read a new study by US-based researchers who studied the sleeping patterns of traditional hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and South America. They thought that studying traditional cultures living in relative isolation might give clues to the ways that our tribal ancestors lived. The study, published in the journal Current Biology, clearly illustrated that people in those societies do not sleep more than we do. In fact, they sleep less. 98 people were monitored for 1,165 nights. The study discovered that the average was 6.5 hours of sleep per night. Even more surprising was that sleep was not overly dependent on daylight. In the study, people fell asleep on average 3.3 hours after sunset. They gathered around fires, visited, ate, and engaged in other activities after the sun went down.

The study found that temperature was a more important factor in sleep than daylight. People in these traditional societies fall asleep in a time of falling temperature and when the temperature reaches its coldest point they tend to wake up.

Researchers also noted that insomnia was rare among the research subjects and that they rarely napped. When they did 25 minutes was the average length of nap time sleep.

I’m not sure that the study tells us anything about how our forebears lived. Comparing this recent study with earlier studies by European researchers, it seems to me that sleep patterns vary more by climate and location than by other factors. The fact that our sleep patterns are different than those of our ancestors doesn’t give much information about what is optimal for people living in our time and place. In terms of health, there are simply too many factors for a controlled study. It would appear that we sleep more than some of our ancestors and less than others.

In recent years the National Sleep Foundation has added a new range, “may be appropriate” to their sleep charts to illustrate that there are great differences in individuals when it comes to the amount of sleep needed.

So here is my new theory. Sleep when you are tired and get up when you aren’t sleeping. It seems to work for me. The best cure for insomnia that I’ve discovered so far is fatigue. If I engage in physical work for a day, I sleep well at night. When I have my exercise levels up, I am less likely to wake in the middle of the night. It sounds simple because it is.

I’m grateful to the researchers for all of their work, but I’m getting close to ignoring the studies when I read through the abstracts of current research. I’m not sure that we need more studies of how people sleep. More helpful for health and well being, it seems to me, is increase sensitivity to our own individual needs. Knowing what is average or normal doesn’t seem to be of much value if one doesn’t know what is right for him or her self.

As for me, well, I guess I’m neither a hunter/gatherer nor a pre-industrial ancestor. Life is far too interesting and exciting to spend too much of it in bed.

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I’m not very good at politics and I don’t often venture into political debates in my daily life or in this blog. So don’t worry, I’m not about to tell you how to vote.

Anthony Zurcher is a North American reporter for BBC News who frequently writes stories about US politics aimed at a United Kingdom audience. I know that writers produce articles and others select the headlines, but there is a page on the BBC News website with an article by Lurcher with the headline, “Did the debate dash Biden’s presidential hopes?” The link from the main page has a slightly different line: “Are Biden’s 2016 hopes over?” The link got my attention enough to get me to read the article, which was a little analysis of the recent Democratic presidential debate.

There was nothing in the article to indicate that Vice President Biden is hopeless.

In fact, it occurs to me that after more than three decades as a US senator and eight years as Vice President the 72-year-old might be hoping for a little peace and quiet and retirement when his current term is completed at the end of 2016. Deciding not to run for President could, it seems to me, be a relief for him.

There probably have been days in his life when hope was hard to find. During his first term in the U.S. Senate, his wife Neilla died suddenly and traumatically in an automobile accident, leaving Joe alone to raise their three children, Hunter, Beau and Naomi. A person doesn’t recover from that kind of grief quickly. In the dark days of sorrow there can be a sense of hopelessness that causes a person to wonder if one can survive.

Last year, Vice President Biden, lost his son Beau, who was also his namesake: Joseph Robinette Biden III. Beau was an attorney, an officer in the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and a politician. There were many who hoped that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. But an aggressive brain cancer took his life. It is never easy for a parent to lose a child. It affects your entire sense of the future. Hopelessness is part of the process.

Joe Biden knows from the experiences of his life what the loss and recovery of hope feels like. He has considerable experience with hope. I doubt if deciding not to run for the office of President constitutes a loss of hope for him.

The word hope is too often abused by contemporary speakers, as if hope were a sunny-day good feeling in anticipation of positive personal outcomes. The word gets used as a substitute for wish way too often. People say “I hope,” when they mean “I want.” Hope is substantially deeper and more powerful than a simple statement of desired outcomes.

I work with people who have suffered deep loss. I walk the journey of grief with the survivors of the deaths of spouses and children, of parents and others. I have officiated at a dozen funerals a year for nearly four decades. I have responded to hundreds of cries for help from hospital emergency rooms. I have been appointed to bring death notification to next of kin on many occasions. I have been present in many moments where hope is dim and hard to find. I don’t mean for this to sound glib, but I have been grateful when someone literally collapses sobbing on the floor because the floor is safe. The person won’t fall farther. I can get down on my knees and begin to offer comfort to someone who is at one of the lowest points of their life.

From that point, they often are not yet able to see any hope, but within a few minutes, I begin to see signs of hope. Another family member will begin to share a memory. A neighbor will drop by offering food or assistance. An officer will have an accurate answer to a question. Someone will remember a favorite song. Little by little, signs of community, compassion and caring creep into the darkness of grief. Grief is a slow process and it takes time to occur. And somewhere in that process of grief, hope is rediscovered. Sometimes it is first recognized as the simple awareness that this loss can be survived. Surviving is enough at times. It comes before one recognizes the possibility that one might someday experience joy again.

We don’t hope because of. We hope in spite of.

The realization of hope that is born in the depths of grief and loss is something entirely different from the kind of magical granting of wishes that is too often presented in the media.

I’m not much of a television viewer, but I a few years ago there was a television series called “Touched by an Angel.” People in my congregations would watch episodes and be moved by them. They would ask me if I have seen the show and often tell me that I should watch it. I think that part of the premise of the show is that Angels not only communicate messages from God, they themselves are in a process of learning and growing closer to God.
I can’t comment on the theology of the show. I have only watched one or two episodes. What I can say is that there is more to real life experience than the show could possibly illustrate. Each episode of the show took a half hour less the amount of time devoted to commercial messages.

I’ve spent too much time with people who wait years for a message from God to expect that the real problems and challenges of life can be resolved in 20 minutes.

I know how hard hope can be to find in real world situations. But I also know how resilient hope is. Instead of being what I want at the moment, hope is the assurance that I belong to something much bigger than myself.

The apostle Paul wrote, “Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three.”

May we have the courage and vision to look beyond the headlines for true signs of genuine hope in our world.

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It was October 14, 1960 when then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, in a campaign stop at the University of Michigan, proposed that the United States create a Peace Corps. The proposal was simple, create a group of volunteers who would serve around the world serving those in need and working to end violence and conflict by bringing education and higher living standards. Kennedy was elected and the Peace Corps was formed. Over its history, the Corps has had ups and downs in the numbers of recruits, but it has maintained a steady group of volunteers. Over 220,000 Americans have served in over 140 countries, working at the grassroots level developing sustainable solutions that address challenges in agriculture, community economic development, education, environment, health, and youth development. In the process volunteers have helped to promote a better understanding of the United States in the countries where they serve.

This year is proving to be a banner year for Peace Corps volunteering. About 23,000 citizens have volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps in fiscal 2015. That’s a whopping 32% increase from last year and more than double the number of applications in 2013. Although they are different paths of service, for comparison, the U.S. Army recruits about 57,000 per year, a decline from 80,000 per year a decade ago.

“What these application numbers tell us is that Americans today are as passionate about service as they have ever been, and that they are clamoring for the opportunity to make sustainable change in communities around the world,” Hessler-Radelet said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Today’s Americans, from all walks of life, are ready to put their skills to work making a difference, and when given the opportunity to make their mark on the world, they will raise their hands to serve in record numbers.”

Peace Corps Volunteers serve two-year appointments. One of the reasons cited for the increase in applications to serve is that in contrast to prior years, the Peace Corps now allows volunteers to pick their favorites from a list of 65 countries. Volunteers are also allowed to select a specialization once they have been deployed. The process of application has also been streamlined. Applicants can now complete their online application in about an hour, down from the estimated eight hours that it took before.

Cynics cite the rising difficulty of finding suitable employment for recent college graduates as one of the reasons for the increase in applications. While this may be a factor for some applicants - after all, service in the Peace Corps looks good on a resume - it is clear that our nation continues to have a large number of people who are interested in not just imagining a bretter future for the world, but also rolling up their sleeves and doing something to make the world better.

In four decades of working with youth and young adults, I have not experienced any decrease in the idealism and willingness to serve others. The youth with whom we work today are different in many ways than was the case when we began our ministry. They are more technologically savvy. In general they are more affluent. They have busier schedules and less free time. Despite the differences, however, they appear to be eager to make a difference in the world. And despite a lot of negative media, today’s youth continue to believe that it is possible to contribute and to live meaningful lives of service.

Interestingly, however, many adults seem to be timid when speaking to young people about sacrifice and service. I hear a lot of talk about the benefits and financial rewards of university education. I hear a lot of conversation about potential earnings and job placement. I probably shouldn’t be surprised by this. Mid-career adults in their 40’s and 50’s went through college in a time when volunteerism had dropped off and volunteer agencies were having difficulty recruiting. They were more focused on career success and financial gain and it showed in a general decrease in volunteerism.

The source of volunteerism, however, doesn’t come primarily from the outside. While it is true that an inspirational speech can motivate volunteers, the primary thrust has to come from within the individual. People volunteer because they experience a call to serve that comes from within.

I believe that it is time for us to renew our commitment to the concept of vocation - calling. We need to be bold in speaking to children and youth about a higher calling that comes from God. In a society and culture where pursuit of profits seems to be celebrated at almost every turn by the media, the path of service doesn’t have the same flash and flare. It is, however, a deeply meaningful investment of a life.

I celebrate the recent increase in Peace Corps volunteers as a sign of the character of the people of our nation. Despite the rhetoric of candidates who speak as if our nation is in decline and everything is going wrong, the people of this country continue to demonstrate that we are capable of rising above legislative gridlock and money-bloated politics.

At our core, we still believe in the value of serving others.

At our core, we are still willing to make sacrifices for the good of the world.

I was just a kid when then Senator Kennedy was traveling around the country campaigning by making live speeches. I was, however, able to feel some of the idealism he inspired in the adults around me. Some of his ideas continue to be bright spots in the story of our world.

Presidential candidates these days seem to gravitate not to speaking directly to people, but to televised events with more distant audiences. They seem to appeal to the lowest common denominator and spend most of their energy in attacking their opponents. I admit that I tune out most of their chatter.

Still, I long for just one good world-changing idea from one of the candidates who is running for the office. One really good call to service would get my attention. It might even get my vote.

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I am not a linguist, though the study of languages and how people use them holds interest for me. One of the stories that I was told years ago about language has been repeated by me many times. It goes something like this. Hebrew is among the oldest of languages to use an alphabet for writing. Many say that it was the first language to use an alphabet. The word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, but there are similar languages in the region with similar names for letters, so which was first may be something that is lost to history. At any rate, Hebrew is an ancient language and its use of an alphabet stands in contrast to other languages of the region. Ancient Egyptian, for example, is a pictographic language. The written form is a series of pictures. It wasn’t not understood by modern scholars until the discovery, in 1799, of the Rosetta Stone. The stone has a decree by King Ptolemy V inscribed on it in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script and Ancient Greek. The stone was used to provide a key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The story is that Hebrew developed in contrast to Egyptian pictographs/hieroglyphs because of its focus on speaking about God. God is beyond the human ability to picture. Any picture that might be drawn by a human would fall short of the ultimate reality of God. An alphabetic language, then allows for the use of symbol and metaphor to point toward God. The attempts to talk about God have resulted in a variety of different names for God that are used in Hebrew Scriptures. The most sacred of these names, the one considered to be God’s personal name, is not pronounced. It is written with three consonants, one of which is repeated. When those four letters are encountered in reading Scripture, a tradition of saying a substitute word developed. So faithful readers pronounce the four letters “Adonai,” another Hebrew word meaning “master,” or “owner.” The word is in its plural form, like another name for God, Elohim, but the text regularly uses the singular form of verbs in combination with the plural name.

To avoid taking the name of God in vain, the Majorettes put the vowel marks for Adonai under the letters for God’s name to remind readers to pronounce Adonai regardless of the consonants in the text. To make matters more confusing, Adonai also appears as a name of God in Hebrew texts.

The story of language and the names of God is much more complex, but suffice it to say that Hebrew scholars found that an alphabetic language was more suitable for the expression of theological conversation than a pictographic language.

For millennia, we have written about God primarily in languages that use an alphabet and are capable of expressing complex concepts and using metaphor, simile and other ways to point beyond language to a wider reality.

However, I am beginning to wonder if English is quickly being transformed from an alphabetic language to a pictographic language. I’m not sure where it started, but for some time now I have noticed the increasing use of pictures in short messages, especially telephone text messages. It started with the use of parenthesis and colin to express either happy :) or sad :( emotions. I guess writing out the words was considered cumbersome back in the days when we used numeric keypads to enter alphabetic text. Soon we had coined a word for these combinations of symbols: emoticons. The emoticons began to be a part of smartphone keyboards and now the word used for a world of small pictures is “emoji.” Facebook is set to introduce a series of emoji alongside of their signature “like” button as a way of allowing users to express a variety of emotions.

There is a Hollywood film soon to be released that features the little symbols as characters. The misuse of emoji have landed a teenage boy in a police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin’s wrath in Russia.

For some commentators on technology and the evolving use of it in human communities, emoji represent an evolution in language. Perhaps emoji even represent an emerging international language that might even compete with English for global usage. For other writers, emoji are seen as the enemy of effective visual communication.

I suspect that these little symbols are neither good nor bad, but rather a phase in a larger development of communication that will lead humans to new forms of expression.

Right now, for the most part, emoji seem to be supplements to enhance writing rather than substitutes for words spelled out in letters. I think of them as similar to gestures that we use when speaking out loud. I will sometimes point in different directions, hold out my open hands, or even make a circle with my thumb and forefinger to add emphasis to words I am speaking out loud. Emoji don’t take the place of the written word, they enhance understanding by adding an emotional quality. They also seem to function as a kind of shorthand - a way to express an idea or emotion that employs fewer characters.

I remain unconvinced that emoji have enough sophistication to express all of the complex thoughts and ideas that humans want to communicate. There is no real grammar or syntax to the use of emoji at present. My son and I will exchange text messages using the menu of emoji on our phones. Some of these messages are sort of like visual lists. For example he might send me pictures of a present, a cake, a balloon and confetti - a group of images that bring to mind parties and celebrations. Or he will send a picture of an alligator, which might bring to mind the expression “up to my eyeballs in alligators,” meaning that he is very busy at the moment.

Often the pictures have no particular order. They seem to mostly be used to communicate nouns. Although we try, we often find that you have to insert words or assume verbs in order to make a sentence out of the little pictures.

I guess it remains to be seen whether a new visual language is emerging or whether we are experiencing a devolution to a more primitive form of communication.

For now, I plan to keep writing in words.

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For many years, I have had an interest in reading and thinking about the north country. I’m a big fan of books about Alaska, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. I’ve never traveled to those areas, but dreaming of such a trip has been a constant adventure for me. One of the attractions of those places is the remoteness. There are miles and miles of roads through nearly empty territory with few people. And the people who do live in those places are a little less affected by the crush of modern life and little more attached to the old ways.

Great Bear Lake is the largest lake entirely in Canada and it stretches across the Arctic Circle. It is just starting to form ice, but by sometime in November it will be frozen solid enough for the ice road to open. The Sahtu Dene people who live at the Deline settlement have access by road only November through April when the ice road proved access to the other side of the lake. When the lake is free of ice there are three fishing lodges accessible by boat. The main source of contact with the outside world is by small airplane year round. With satellite communications, the Dene people are not completely isolated and they have many struggles and problems that are familiar to other modern societies, but they have sought to preserve the old ways and the elders are a rich source of information about how people lived in isolation for generations.

Tuktoyaktuk is an Inuvialuit settlement on the shores of the Arctic Circle. Its name, somewhat anglicized, comes from the native word meaning “resembling a caribou.” The village is accessible by plane. There is a winter ice road connecting it to Inuvik, the end of the Dempster Highway and construction has begun on an all-weather road between the two communities. Because of the permafrost of the area, work on the new road can only be done in the winter when there is no chance of thawing the surface. A layer of gravel, ranging from 7 to 14 feet deep must be compacted on top of the tundra so that it will remain frozen and stable for driving. When the road is complete, it will be the northernmost community accessible by driving on the continent. About 80% of the people of Tuktoyaktuk are Inuit/Inuvialuit. In addition to a small non-Aboriginal population, there are a few members of other North American Tribes and a small Metis population in the community of about 850 people.

Alaska is home to a number of indigenous tribes including Inupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian and several distinct Athabaskan cultures. Each has a distinctive language. Most tribes were historically hunter-gatherer-fishing cultures prior to settlement by outsiders. During the time of Russian rule, some tribal people were forced into slavery, primarily to work in farming and mining operations. Russia also provided Russian Orthodox missionaries, who penetrated deeper into the interior of Alaska than British and American missionaries prior to the nineteenth century. The traditions of orthodox Christianity persist in many remote and isolated locations across the state.

Part of the attraction of the north country for me is the possibility of meeting and learning from these people. I know that opportunities for a tourist to make much substantive contact with people whose languages are different than min are limited. Any trip I might make would involve a lot of traveling in remote locations and very limited contact with the people. I can probably learn more about their cultures and lifestyles by staying at home and researching in books and on the Internet, but there is something about an actual visit that strengthens understanding.

The Gwich’in people of Alaska, an Athabaskan tribe, are a traditional people who are dependent upon the caribou for food, clothing and the maintenance of their culture. They have received attention in recent years because of their opposition to further drilling for oil in Alaska, They are particularly opposed to Alaska Governor Bill Walker’s attempts to promote onshore drilling as a way of increasing oil production. With oil prices low and the Alaska Pipeline running at only 25% of design capacity, Governor Walker wants to increase production to boost the state’s revenues. With no income or sales tax, Alaska is dependent on oil revenue for 90% of its governmental expenses. And the government of Alaska faces huge expenses, in part due to the costs of global climate change. Entire coastal communities need to be relocated to avoid being flooded by rising sea levels. With villages being washed away, the Governor is seeking any source of revenue available, and oil looms large in his plans. The Gwich’in people feel that their lives are threatened by the impact of oil exploration and drilling on the Porcupine Caribou herd whose calving areas are in the region the governor wants to develop. Leaders of the Gwitch’in believe that their native ways and ability to live off of the land are being threatened. As an outsider, it seems that the time may be short to observe the traditional ways as the pressures of modern industrialized society invade formerly isolated communities.

Of course there are plenty of opportunities to visit, listen to and learn from indigenous people right here in South Dakota. We have our own version of the Alaska controversy in the proposed Keystone Pipeline that proponents suggest will bring financial revenues to our state and opponents feel threatens the environmental quality and sovereignty of tribal lands. It is a big topic of conversation when we visit the Cheyenne River Reservation.

Maybe the allure of travel is not so much to discover the differences between ourselves and those who live in distant locations, but rather to discover our similarities. We have more in common than initially appears.

This world is rich in natural beauty and there is much to see. But it is also deeply affected by our presence and our travels have an impact on the beauty that we seek to observe. I have been fortunate to be able to travel a great deal. And I’m sure there are more trips in my future. In the meantime, there is much that can be learned with books and online research.

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From the perspective of geological evolution, the period of time in which humans have been a part of this planet is incredibly short. Early in the process of development, we nearly became extinct as the ice age deepened and there was increased desertification of Africa. Ice absorbs enormous amounts of water from the atmosphere and the result is less water for the rest of the planet. Humans, however, proved to be resilient and survived. What is unique about our species is our ability to use language to communicate complex ideas. More importantly, our use of language enables the transmission of memory from one generation to another. We are able to benefit from things learned by previous generations and pass that knowledge on to future generations. To our knowledge, no other species on the planet does so with the same kind of facility. This collective knowledge has brought our species to the point where we now, through technologies such as gene analysis and splicing to even direct our own evolution. Juan Enriquez says that humanity is on the verge of becoming a new and utterly unique species, which he calls Homo Evolutes. Calling it the “ultimate reboot,” he claims that humans are taking direct and deliberate control over the evolution of the species.

We are, it seems, unique and in the process of becoming even more distinct. This we have done in a relatively short amount of time.

There is little doubt that our presence has caused certain processes to speed up. And we experience the acceleration of events and processes as a visceral change in the pace of life. Our lives are observably more hectic and harried than were the lives of our not too distant ancestors. The pace of life has accelerated in our own lifespans. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed with our lives moving at such a breakneck pace.

This accelerating advance, however, isn’t the only product of our collective consciousness. Throughout the generations of humanity, we have discovered that ours isn’t the ultimate intelligence - we aren’t the only sources of creativity and change. Our attempts to connect with that which lies beyond has resulted in the development of religion - a connection with God that has taken generations to develop and become refined. Bridging the distance between those generations of faithfulness can make religion seem to be old and outdated in some contexts. To some it seems that ancient ritual and practice has no place in the modern world.

For those of us who live our lives immersed in religious practice, however, it seems that ritual and belief are necessary in order to maintain the connections that are most essential. For us, we have an answer to the increasingly hectic and overwhelming pace of life. That answer lies in part in careful retelling of our story and repeating the rituals of practice.

It can be as simple as making time in the midst of a busy schedule to simply be quiet and breathe deeply. Deeply ingrained in our tradition is the practice of expressing gratitude. Pausing to remember all of the blessings of this life and expressing gratitude for those blessings offers a change of perspective. In a world that is focused on acquisition and ever-increasing demands for consumption, it can be transforming to simply pause in gratitude for what already is.

The rituals of religion develop their meaning through repetition. Even events that seem to us to be once-in-a-lifetime rituals such as weddings and funerals, gain their weight through collective practice. Our wedding was unique to us and an experience that neither of us had held before or after that day. Still, it was anchored in the promises of commitment that have been made by generations of faithful people. It was not just a formalization of our relationship, but also placed that relationship in the context of a broader family - and a broader community. We were reminded that our actions and commitments affect not only us, but also a large community of others.

I have been the officiant at hundreds of funerals over the years of my pastoral ministry. Each was unique. The grief of the family, the circumstances of the loss, the impact of the moment were different than had ever been experienced. However, our grief was born with the knowledge that ours is not the first generation to have experienced the loss of a loved one. We aren’t the first ones to travel the journey of grief. Our loss is placed into context by the memory of the community and the stories of survival in the face of deep loss and grief.

Institutional religion is not the only place in our society that is a keeper of ritual. Even our most elaborate rites and ceremonies are fairly simple when compared to the collective pageantry of a Super Bowl Game or the opening of trading on Wall Street or the inauguration of a President.

Humans crave ritual and when their lives lack sufficient ritual, they create new ones. I get a kick out of watching parents drop off their children at the preschool in our church. Many of those families would say that they don’t participate in a formal religion. But they have specific rituals for the daily drop-off of their children. If the hug is missed, they need to run back and get it. If the parent leaves too soon, the child’s day can be much more difficult. Just getting to the preschool involves a family ritual of rising, grooming, dressing, eating, checking the weather, and heading out of the home.

I prefer to have some rituals in my life which did not begin with my generation and which will continue long after my time on earth has passed. I enjoy the connection to the past and future. Somewhere inside of each of us is a memory of a time that was simpler and less stressful. Somewhere inside of each of us is a hope for a future of peace.

I choose to worship every day to remain connected to memory and hope.

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Compared to some of my peers, I do not see myself as overly attached to my home. The home where we currently live is the place I’ve lived for the longest period of my life. I grew up in a family home that was stable.We didn’t ever move during those years. Once I went to college, I moved at least once a year, never saying in the same dormitory or apartment for an entire year. Then we lived for seven years in a parsonage, ten in the first home we called our own and twenty in this house. I like this house very much, but I know that in a few years the time will come to sell it and make another move. Our current house was great for the years when we had teenagers at home and when my mother lived with us. It worked fairly well when, for a brief period our adult children lived with us one at at time. But it would be a challenge for someone using a wheelchair. You have to go up steps to get to the main level and once there, there is both an upstairs and a downstairs. Though our basement is considered daylight on the east end of the house, it is four steps below grade. And, quite frankly, it is too big for two people. It is probably already time for us to consider downsizing. Still, it is comfortable and affordable for us at this phase of our lives.

As people approach their aging years, there are many different approaches to housing. It is not uncommon for folks in our community to go through multiple moves in their aging years, similar to the way we went through many moves in our education years. They move from a family home to a townhouse, from a townhouse to an apartment, from an apartment to an assisted living facility, from there to a skilled care home. Some move back and forth between different facilities depending on their health. We have multiple institutions in our town who have all of those levels of living available and assume that people will make their moves within the same institution.

The problem with that option is that in study after study, the vast majority of people don’t want to live that way. In most polls, around 90% of US citizens, and similar numbers in Europe, Australia and Japan state that they would prefer to remain in their own homes through their aging years and have in-home care if and when it is needed. That requires careful planning. Most homes have significant challenges for aging people. Some can be adapted with widened doorways, ramps for wheelchair access, remodeled bathrooms and other changes. Those changes are, however, expensive. Then there is the problem of obtaining services. In the US, services are more available in urban areas than in rural locations and in home care typically costs more than $20 per hour and often is not available 24 hours per day at any cost. In addition to care costs, homeowners have ongoing expenses of taxes and maintenance. Most will need to hire lawn care and repair services as they age.

Then there is the issue of transportation. Many homes assume that the occupants have access to private cars. Once you stop driving it can be a challenge just to get groceries and make medical appointments.

In our country, we are far less likely to follow the pattern that has, throughout history, been the most common and still is prevalent in many other cultures around the world: parents move into the homes of children. We consider ourselves to be lucky that my mother lived in our home for the last couple of years of her life. We did end up hiring a bit of in-home care because we both work full time, but we were able to adapt our schedules and make modest changes in our house so that it worked well for us. However, like most of our peers, we aren’t planning to move into the home of one of our children when we are no longer able to care for our own home.

Although a continuous care retirement community isn’t appealing to me personally, I do suspect that we will make several moves during our aging years. I suppose we should start planning those moves, but I also know that for many of the people that I serve, flexibility is as critical as planning and flexibility is a condition that is a real challenge for us as we age. A set of plans that works well for a couple can change suddenly with an illness or a death. The circumstances of other family members can change. We know lots of stories of people moving to be near children during their retirement years only to have the children move due to a change in jobs or for other reasons.

I am not the best of financial planners and I know that my aging years will present some financial challenges. I believe, however, that as important as financial plans are social plans. People can get in trouble through a failure of community if they don’t have a network of family and friends. I’ve seen some devastating effects of isolation on aging persons. Rather than focus exclusively on financial capital, I’ve been intentional about investing in social capital. Being in the church is a real advantage in those terms. Not only do we have a strong and supportive community, we know that the church is a network of communities. Each time we have moved from one place to another, we have been received into a strong and supportive church community. I’m well aware that many people think of church in terms of belief and spiritual practice and those are important, but it also is important to be aware of the value of community. The failure of community can leave people in very lonely and difficult situations.

I haven’t got this aging business figured out. I’m sure I’ll be making plenty of “seat-of-the-pants” decisions in context as the years pass. But I do have the assurance that I won’t need to make all of my decisions alone. Having a community is a valuable asset.

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OK blog readers, here’s a fair warning, I’m about to go off on one of my philosophical discussions. Those bored by this are invited to entertain yourselves by reading one of my blogs from the archives. Personally, I’m fascinated by philosophy and see even reactions against philosophy like the one voiced by astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson when he spoke in Rapid City last week as a form of philosophy. Tyson claimed that he stayed away from speculative fields such as philosophy. Interesting thought for someone who works in the realms of speculative physics. It seems to me that his avoidance of speaking in philosophical language is in itself a philosophy, but that is a topic for another blog. I wasn’t able to get tickets to the Tyson lecture and so only know what i have heard second-hand anyway.

On with someone who doesn’t mind being called a philosopher. Alan Watts was a British-born American philosopher who died back in 1973. He was probably best known as an interpreter of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. There are plenty of contemporary philosophers who continue to circulate his quotes and keep his wonderfully complex ideas circulating.There are things that I think Watts got wrong. For example, he wrote, “I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.” I would take the view that the illusion is the present, and that the realities are past and future. Present is only the meeting point of the two real realms of time. And all of that is, of course, a bit of speculation because time itself is a human invention and may exist only in our minds. It is a tool that we use to think about the nature of the universe, which in its vastness would overwhelm us if we didn’t come up with some divisions that enable us to look at it little by little.

Watts did make observations with which I resonate deeply. He wrote, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance,” and “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

In trying to make Eastern philosophy more accessible to those of us with a Western perspective, he once observed, that a Chinese child will ask, “How does a baby grow?” but an American child will ask, “How do you make a baby?” I’m not convinced that the basis of that distinction is Eastern or Western. I suspect that members of indigenous tribes, especially those living in very isolated locations such as northern Canada, might also use a growth metaphor when thinking of children. I suspect that the difference lies not in location, but in the closeness to agricultural roots. Grow is an agricultural term. Make is a manufacturing term. We manufacture things from raw material and impose our designs on that material. Grow gives less credit to our action and participation and more attention to the natural processes of the universe. In that distinction of metaphors, as a father I have to say that grow better describes the process of parenting. There is so much in being a parent that is beyond our control. It becomes obvious very early that our children aren’t “ours” at all, but rather independent individuals who belong to the world. We can play a role in their growing, but we hardly have the power to make them.

Metaphors are important in our process of making sense of the world. I use metaphors constantly. If you read my blog for a while, you’ll know that seasons is a powerful metaphor for life for me. I am constantly referring to the changing of seasons as a way to make sense of my life. I’m not sure why I think of childhood as spring and feel that I’m entering the autumn of my life, but that way of thinking works for me. Part of it is that seasons change gradually. Right now we’ve had some rather cool autumn-like days, but this weekend will be much more summer-like. That is the way the seasons change: they fade into each other.

Life is like that. Some days I feel very young. Some days, in some contexts, I feel like I’m pretty old. We have a group in the United Church of Christ who have dubbed themselves the 20s/30s. They are ordained ministers who are in their 20s and 30s. Not only do I not qualify for their group, I soon will not even be able to refer to my years as an ordained minister as being in the 30’s. I just passed the 38th anniversary of my ordination.

When it comes to metaphors, ones from nature often work better for me than ones from activities that are expressly human. It is not that we can ever escape the simple fact that we are a part of nature, but sometimes our attitude toward nature is one of attempting to dominate. Since I use the metaphor of seasons to reflect on my own life and the lives of others, I am aware that the dominant cultural metaphor is different. Our culture insists that we can make whatever kind of life we want. “Take charge!” “Create your own reality!” There are plenty of metaphors for a human life that stand in contrast to a life of flowing from one season into another.

Our lives take place not only in the context of the vastness of the universe, but also in the midst of human community. Old is a matter of perspective. I’m pretty old to the members of our church’s youth group. I’m not all that old when I have dinner at Westhills Village, a local retirement community. Recently I attended a choir rehearsal where the only person younger than me was the director. That makes the metaphor of seasons even more vibrant for me. In a season, different plants change at different paces. Different colors come from different sources. All, however, are caught up in the flow of time.

I’m open to changing my metaphors, but I can’t imagine the task of living a life that is true without employing some kinds of metaphors.

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Last night we gathered for a meal in the fellowship hall of our church. We have recently been blessed with an increase in the number of young children in our programs. There have been more births and we have more preschool children than was the case a few years ago. In response to this blessing, the Department of Education has initiated a program with the families of preschool and elementary children in mind. There is a meal, games, and a brief program all ending up in time for the little ones to get home for an early bedtime.

Last night’s meal had a menu that is familiar to me, but not to many of the children. Dedicated volunteers from our congregation prepared a meal from the recipes of our sister church in Costa Rica. The Community Christian Church of Los Guido has a feeding program. Three days each week a mid-day meal is prepared and served to 50 to 70 people. The cooks and kitchen workers receive their compensation in healthy food to take home to their families, so the program is always feeding more than just the count of people who show up to eat in the same room that serves as the congregation’s sanctuary. Our church has had a relationship with our sister church since 1988. I have been privileged to visit our sister church four times. The volunteers who prepared the meal have gone every year since 2001. Some years they have made more than one trip.

The menu was rice and chicken (with more chicken than is common at our sister church), black beans, fruit, and bread. Butter is very expensive in Costa Rica and not included on their menu, so we didn’t put out butter for the bread last night either. There was a dessert of red jello and ice cream - a favorite in Costa Rica reserved for special occasions.

Having had the honor of sharing similar meals with the children of Costa Rica, it was interesting to me to sit with the children of our church sharing a similar menu. The children of our church at a lot of fruit and bread. They were less eager about the chicken and rice and the black beans. I had generous portions of both so I know that they were delicious, but children often make choices based on appearances. Some children, urged by their parents, at least tried all of the foods. Many simply didn’t take any of the beans or the chicken and rice.

The children in our church are in no danger of suffering malnutrition. When they don’t eat enough at one meal, there are snacks and other meals to make up the deficit. They go home to houses with full pantries and kitchens filled with food. Most of the children in our church have restaurant meals on a fairly regular basis. As a result, teaching them about the lives of the children of our sister church is a challenge. Our sister church has a feeding program because there are hungry children in the neighborhood. Over the years we have seen observable improvement in the overall health of the children growing up in the area of the church due, in a large part, to the availability of nutritious food on a regular basis.

Three lunches a week aren’t enough to sustain life, but added to what can be provided by parents and other family members, three lunches a week are making a substantial difference in the quality of life for a lot of people.

Since my first visit to Costa Rica in 2001, I have done a lot of pondering about how to strengthen the relationship between the two congregations. Too often mission is a kind of abstract concept. We support mission by giving money without really understanding what our money does. In a sister church relationship - at least in the one we share - the money is easy to track. We receive accurate reports of how the money is spent. We know how much the feeding program is costing. We see pictures of the children every year. We can watch their growth and learn of their stories. But there are still many in our congregation who know almost nothing about the lives of the people of our sister church. We have the same faith, claim a relationship with the same Christ, and yet there are great distances between us. Keeping that relationship between the two congregations alive an vital is a challenge.

We are blessed with incredible volunteers who give deeply of their time and financial resources to keep the relationship alive and to make sure that our contact is first-hand. They have been wonderful in bringing news and pictures and reports of the life of our sister church home with them. Over the years they have enabled many others to visit our sister church as well and were active in bringing the pastor of our sister church and some of her family members to visit our congregation.

I dream, however, of somehow raising a new generation of children who are connected to children in distant places with different ways of living. The closeness that I feel to my colleague serving in Costa Rica has transformed my life and given me a healthier perspective on the ministry. I long for the children of our church to get to know the children of Costa Rica.

It is easy to see another place like Costa Rica as a destination for tourism. And tourism is important to the economy of the country. But being a tourist doesn’t give one the connection to the people. Too often our people visit places without getting to know the lives of the folks who live there.

It was another meal. Another day of shopping, preparing and serving for our faithful volunteers. Another set of dishes to wash. Another opportunity to tell part of the story. I hope it was instructional for some of the children and the parents.

For me it is a reminder of the work that remains to be done.

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There is a twinge of fall in the air. The weather has been pleasant and today will have temperatures in the seventies, so it isn’t exactly cold. It may even get up to 90 by Sunday. I had a fun paddle on Monday morning. Of course the days are shorter, so when I go out first thing in the morning, the drive to the lake is in the dark. I launched into a gray morning, with the mists hugging the hills. My kayak is warm for paddling, but it really wasn’t that cold out. I was beginning to think about the four months when the canoes and kayaks spend most of the time in storage. November, December, January and February are often months that I don’t get onto the water. It is possible to paddle all 12 months, but rarely in the same year. Once the ice gets going on the lake, I take a break.

I get a longer paddling season than some. I had a home repair job to tackle on Monday and ended up leaving the kayak on the car until after work yesterday. Driving around town, I got a few questions about paddling. Some people thought that it was pretty late in the season to be paddling. My usual comment is, “If the water is liquid, it is a good time to paddle.”

There are lots of ways to tell that the seasons are changing. The garden is slowing down, some of the grass in the yard is beginning to go dormant. The brightest of the fall colors have passed, with leaves beginning to fall from the trees and bushes. The seasons come and go and the times are changing.

They’re doing a sort of remodel, or at least a reorganization at the grocery store where I shop most often. They moved the liquor department into the main store and in its place have the seasonal items. That means that there is an entire area of the store devoted to Halloween. That section seems to mostly have plastic decorations, lights, candies, and the like. The pumpkins are in huge boxes outside of the store. And the grocery store isn’t the only place getting into the pumpkin business. The hardware store has a large tent outdoors filled with pumpkins. Just down the road from home a landscape business has a big sign and a display of pumpkins. It seems that most retailers are taking advantage of the increased sales for Halloween.

I don’t think that people think of pumpkins as food items much these days. Of course there are lots of delicious foods that come from pumpkins: pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin soup. But they are sold as ornamental items to be parts of yard displays, to be painted and carved as decorations. At least a lot of stores that don’t normally sell food are in the pumpkin business this month.

I’m not sure that I really understand all of the enthusiasm over Halloween. We enjoyed the holiday as kids, getting dressed up and going trick or treating around the town. But I don’t think that we spent much energy preparing. We’d have some Halloween-themed art projects in school about a week before the holiday and we’d start thinking about our costumes. We’d raid the closets and attic in search of things to wear. I think I went as a “bum” several years. All it takes are some old and ill-fitting clothes. If you want to get fancy, you can have your mom or sisters put a few black dots on your chin to look like beard stubble. Never mind that I have never had black hair. I always went for black beard stubble as a kid.

It was an evening and then we went on with our lives.

As near as I can figure, Halloween has become much more of an adult holiday these days. There are entire storefronts, empty during the rest of the year, filled with costume shops. You can buy and rent elaborate costumes. And for those who want to get into it, there are a lot of possibilities for lawn and home decorations. Just down the street we have a neighbor who really gets into it. They’ve strung orange lights all around their yard, placed a cover over their post lamp to look like a pumpkin. Others make artificial graveyards in their lawn. A few years ago inflatable decorations were popular in our neighborhood. There seem to be a few less of those this year.

I’ve got nothing against the celebration. I just don’t understand it. We’ll have a bowl of candy ready and we will enjoy seeing the neighborhood kids in their costumes, but that is about it for our celebration. We don’t get into extensive decoration for any holiday and if we were to pick one, I don’t think Halloween raises that much excitement for us. I’m not superstitious. I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m not afraid of cemeteries. I like the neighbor’s black cat. I do put some energy into our annual all saints recognition on the first Sunday of November each year and this year All Saints falls on a Sunday, so we’ll have a time of remembrance in our worship. But I’m not worried about unsettled souls rambling through the neighborhood on the evening before.

The spirits that are the most frightening to me are the liquid ones, sometimes consumed in excess by party-goers and can result in poor decisions and dangerous driving.

But there are people who are passionate about the holiday. In Lexington, Kentucky, hundreds of residents have signed a petition urging county officials to move Halloween to October 30 this year. They are concerned that a University of Kentucky home football game and the Breeders Cup are both on the 31st and want to move Halloween to the previous day. It seems completely amazing to me that they are petitioning county officials as the means to make the change. Why don’t they just have their Halloween parties a day early? If a children trick or treating show up a day early in our neighborhood, they’re likely to get candy. I say just make the change. Who needs approval from the County Commissioners?

Ah, but then again, I don’t really get Halloween in the first place.

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We tend to name centuries by years that end in 00 by our way of counting. So we call this the 21st century. But not every era is defined by beginning and ending points that line up neatly with our somewhat arbitrary system of counting. For many people living in Detroit and the surrounding area, yesterday was the end of the century of Grace Lee Boggs. The 100-year-old community activist died as she wished, at home, surrounded by books, ideas, going peacefully in her sleep.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she was born in her family home over her father’s restaurant in Rhode Island. At an early age she moved to New York City where her father owned and operated restaurants. Her father had migrated to the United States, moving away from the economic hardships following the First Opium War of 1839-42. Her Chinese given name means “Jade Peace.” She enrolled in Barnard College at the age of 16, graduated in 1935 and earned a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. She had a brilliant mind and might have been a great academician, but there were plenty of barriers for women in academics in the 1940’s. She took a job in the philosophy library of the University of Chicago. That job gave her access to books and ideas and she became an activist, working for a wide variety of causes throughout her life. For many decades, her life’s work focused on the struggles of the African-American community.

In 1953 she married James Boggs, an auto worker and political activist. Their 40-year marriage was a life partnership as well as a political collaboration. Both were involved in many different organizing efforts over the years. James passed away ini 1993. Since his death, Grace has focused her energies on community organization in Detroit. She founded a multicultural intergenerational youth program called Detroit Summer. The program was an outreach of the Boggs Center, founded by their friends in the early 1990’s. The center has served as a hub of community projects including organizing and social activism.

A documentary film, “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs” was released in 2013.

There will doubtlessly be many articles and tributes over the next week as the community of Detroit mourns here passing and those who were closest to her discover new directions for their energies and activities. Fortunately, many of them had the opportunity to express their tributes directly to her on the occasion of her 100th birthday in June.

She is fascinating to me because of her ability to wrestle with complex ideas and then put those ideas to work. I do not agree with all of her philosophical positions, but I do admire her integrity and commitment to working for others. “I think that too much of our emphasis on struggle has simply been in terms of confrontation and not enough recognition of how much spiritual and moral force is involved in the people who are struggling,” she said in a 2007 interview with Bill Moyers. I am interested in how her ideas and philosophies changed over the course of her life. At one time she was strongly attracted by the ideas of Marxism, but she resigned from her membership in socialist organizations and was deeply influenced by the nonviolence taught by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

She was a complex person. Perhaps we all are.

I never met her. I’ve lived my life at a significant distance from her activities and the causes she championed. But I have a sense that the world is a bit better because she lived and that I have been influenced in some small way by her grace and witness. I note her passing with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the world has lost a brilliant mind and a deep thinker. On the other hand, 100 years is a good long life and it seems natural that the time has come for her to die. She will live on in memory and story, in books and in the continuing work of the Boggs center. Perhaps the revitalization of Detroit, work that has just begun, will be among her most lasting legacies of a life well lived. Time will tell. It may take another century for the changes she envisioned to come to fruition.

Our society needs voices like Grace Lee Boggs to remind us that we have much work that is unfinished. Racial inequality has not been overcome. People still suffer because of systemic injustice. The poor are getting poorer while the rich are growing richer. There are systematic flaws in the organization of our society. Change comes only through deep commitment and the ability to invest in long term solutions. Perhaps that is one of the gifts of the aging years, we begin to develop a patience for projects that are bigger than ourselves and an ability to envision changes that will take longer than the span of our lives to accomplish.

The real tribute to the life and work of Grace Lee Boggs won’t come from the many eulogies and tributes that are being made on the occasion of her death. The real tribute will be in the lives of the people living in Detroit - and all around the world - who engage in grassroots organization and work for sustainable change in the world. The real tribute is only just beginning to be worked out on the streets of Detroit and will take decades to accomplish.

It is good to have shared several decades of life in a world with Grace Lee Boggs. I am fortunate to be blessed with the possibility of several more of observing how her legacy will play out in Detroit and other places.

People who dare to wrestle with complex ideas can make a difference in the world. The philosophies with which we engage are important not just to ourselves, but to many others - some of whom we will never meet face to face.

Farewell, Grace. Your spirit remains in our midst.

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A group of us were talking about hope yesterday afternoon. Our conversation was stirred by a beautiful presentation by a bright schoolgirl who combined visual images with a few quotes and thoughts of her own. I participated mostly as an observer, enjoying listening to the contributions of others. Most of the participants were adults and there was a general sense that hope is primarily a state of mind - a positive attitude towards the future. There was also a connection drawn between hope and desire. Often when we say “I hope,” we are expressing what we want to happen.

One of the advantages to being on the edge of my aging years is that I can listen to the thoughts and ideas of others and put them into a bit of context in my own life. When I was younger, I might have wanted to dive into the conversation immediately to express my own thoughts and opinions without taking the same effort to listen. I grew up in a household where conversation and debate was encouraged and often viewed conversation as a kind of competitive sport at which I had to show aggression to win.

The conversation yesterday was much more positive. I didn’t have any points I needed to make, no desire to convince others of my point of view. I may be wrong, but I experience this as a product of age and maturity. I have no fear of being negatively influenced by the thoughts and ideas of others and that sensation is something that is relatively new to me.

Our conversation, however, just began to scratch the surface of the meanings of hope.

People often don’t know what they are talking about. Talking about things is one of the ways that we develop ideas and concepts. Some topics and concepts take many generations to become clear. We don’t know when people first began to talk about God, but we do know that the ancients had some ideas about God that were rather small. It took a series of dramatic events for our people to discover that God was bigger than the small area of land that was familiar. The thought that God might be the same in a distant location hadn’t occurred to them. Understanding that there is only one God took many generations. There was a long time when our people thought that the gods of other people were distinct and different from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is only relatively recent that we were able to begin to grasp the immensity of the universe. Previous images of God as somehow unique to this planet fall short of the glory we now are only beginning to envision.

I had a sense, in yesterday’s conversation, that we were struggling to develop a common understanding of a concept that was much bigger than our small gathering. Beginning to understand hope will require much more conversation and then we will not fully grasp is deepest meanings. I expect that we will have opportunities for those conversations as time passes.

That is another advantage of growing older. I have learned that the really great ideas and concepts of this world will continue to be refined and conversations will continue. I don’t have to lead all of the discussions. The development of understanding doesn’t hinge on my participation. I am hopeful not because I expect to know the full truth, but because those who are younger than I are seriously wrestling with ideas and that process of development will last beyond the span of my time on this earth. The fact that our presenter was willing to tackle such a big topic at such a young age was for me in itself hopeful. There is more to this world than what is immediately observable.

Hope is more than optimism. It is more than a positive attitude. Our speaker yesterday understood this. She said, “Sometimes something really bad has to happen for you to have hope.” A life free of pain and problems might be a life without hope. At her young age she is already understanding that the source of hope is beyond. There may be a power in positive thinking, but hope is beyond that power. This is not to say that one might cause hope to emerge by creating crisis. Hope emerges not because of the events of this world, but in spite of the events of the world.

My hope comes from the understanding that I am a part of something much bigger than myself. There is much more to this universe than what I am able to presently observe. There are conversations that did not begin with me and will not end when my time on this earth is over. We humans have the capacity to engage ideas that are much bigger than ourselves.

The group in which I was participating yesterday afternoon has a practice of sharing celebrations and concerns at the end of our conversations. We recognized a couple of birthdays and celebrated healing and recovery following an accident for one of the participants. There was joyful and exciting announcement of a new baby that will be born in the spring. Our conversations about hope were interesting. The capacity of the group to embody hope was even more impressive. Hope isn’t just a concept, it is a way of living. The group itself was an even deeper source of hope than the words that were said.

As centered as my life has been in the institutional church, I have been discovering that there is an exciting sense of new creation coming not from the center of the institution, but from the edges. I am inspired by some of my conversations with those who don’t really think of themselves as regular church goers - who aren’t very concerned about maintaining buildings or keeping membership lists and statistics. Maybe it has always been true that new ideas come from unexpected places.

In the morning I was the preacher. In the afternoon I was a listener. My life is blessed with both roles. It is clear that God isn’t finished with us yet. There is newness emerging and it is exciting.

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I don’t think that I was particularly challenged by basic arithmetic when I was a student in elementary school. At least I don’t remember any trauma or worries about the subject from my early years in school. I was, in general, a fairly good student and my parents encouraged learning through the activities of our home. I was in the middle grades when our school adopted what was then called “new math.” Other than a new name for arithmetic, I don’t remember much about new math. I knew that there was something controversial about it - that some parents criticized it and that my dad would defend it in conversations with his peers, but it doesn’t seem to me that it posed much of a change in my life one way or another. I made it through memorizing my times tables and learned long division and became competent in basic computation. In high school, I survived algebra and geometry and then sort of stopped taking classes in math. I managed to pretty much avoid math and science courses in college and graduate school. I use basic math in a lot that I do, figuring percentages and proportions and reading budgets, but I certainly don’t consider myself to be any kind of an expert.

My wife, on the other hand, studied more mathematics than I. She was in a college preparation track in high school and took advanced classes in math each of her high school years. She took calculus in college and god a good grade at it. She is good with numbers and quick to solve the kind of mathematical problems that come up in everyday advice. She can compute fairly complex problems in her head. She does all of our income tax and social security reporting, she is an excellent manager of money and finances, and I’ve always felt that she was just a bit more skilled with numbers than I.

When it comes to boats, however, it seems that I frequently have to explain basic math to her. Being a frugal and reasonable person, she likes to talk about the difference between “wants” and “needs.” I have developed a simple mathematical formula to explain need to her when it comes to boats. The formula is: n+1, with n=the number of boats one currently has. The number of boats one needs is the number you currently have plus one. This is a constant. When we only owned one canoe, we needed two. This led to three, which led to the need for a kayak, several boats later we developed a need for a rowboat. Whitewater canoes and kayaks are different from flat water boats. If a person were to live long enough, it is perfectly reasonable that one would develop a need for a yacht, or even more than one.

I’ve explained this to my wife several times. I am not completely confident that she gets it. She may even hold the basic formula in suspect. Some days I get the impression that she feels that n-1 is the correct formula.

Lest you think she is intolerant or narrow, however, I will simply remind you that she has remained my wife for more than four decades. I’m pretty sure that qualifies one for sainthood in most circles.

Another mathematical principle, when it comes to boats, requires understanding the concept of factors. Boats operate on a factor of two. To put it down clearly, the formula is n x 2. Take any boat that you might find, either a brand-new boat in a showroom or a rather well-used boat on Craig’s list. There will be an advertised price of the boat. You can, assuming you have the money, pay that amount and the boat will become yours. Very good. Boats are wonderful possessions and they create joy in your garage. But they also create a deep urge to head to a lake, river, ocean or other body of water. The cost of actually getting a boat into the water is roughly a factor of two. The cost of paddles, oars, lifejackets, rigging, spray skirts, flotation, bumpers, roof racks and other accessories roughly doubles the cost of the boat before it is put into the water. I’m pretty sure that if I had calculated the cost of roof rack systems into the basic cost of boating, for example, we might have decided that we could not afford even a single boat. Over the years I probably have been identified by the roof rack company as one of their biggest customers. I own most of the accessories they sell.

Then there is clothing. I hate to shop for clothing. Unless I’m looking at boat shoes to keep my feet warm and dry when paddling, or paddling jackets, or dry suits, or other specialized clothing for paddling. I’ve been known to make jokes about spandex-clad bicyclists. I ride my bike wearing jeans and a t-shirt. But when it comes to paddling, I even own a specialized pair of water socks to put into my dry booties at the bottom of my dry pants, which are too warm for summer paddling, so I have special pants and shorts for the warmer seasons.

I’m pretty sure that this factor of two rule is universal because my next door neighbor has a large waterski boat. He started out with two plastic kayaks. That big boat sits on a fancy custom tandem-axle trailer painted to match the boat. He has a bimini for sunny days and a custom canvas cover for the boat when it isn’t in the water. There is a large assortment of water skis, a hugs towable tube for riding, and a host of other accessories which are too numerous to fit into the boat when it is on the trailer. Sometimes they are neatly packed away in their already full garage, but most of the time they are piled on top of the boat sitting outside in the yard.

Some people might be distressed with such a neighbor, but I see him as a great asset when discussing the mathematics of boating with my wife. I’m fairly confident that all of the boats I have ever owned plus all of the boating gear I have ever owned wouldn’t add up to the cost of that boat and its accessories. It is useful to have it visible from our deck as we sit down to a meal whenever the weather allows us to eat outside.

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Although Susan and I lived in Chicago for four years, there are some urban skills that I lack. I’ve never been fully comfortable riding in taxis. I’ve done it and I think I know the routine fairly well, but I often seek alternatives to taxis when I go to an urban location. We do have taxis here in Rapid City, and there are times when it would make sense to use one, but in most cases there are alternatives. Probably the city where I have used taxis the most is Cleveland, home to the offices, chapel and hotel that are our church’s national setting. There is a train that runs directly from the airport to a location only a few blocks’ walk from our church, but we have been advised not to ride the train alone at night. Most of my trips to Cleveland involve arriving late at night and departing early in the morning to maximize the productive time that I am in the city. So I’ve learned to go to the cab station at the airport, state my destination, climb into a cab, inform the driver of my location, enjoy the ride, and pay at the end of the trip.

One of the challenges in learning to ride in a cab was knowing what was appropriate in terms of a tip. I found out, years ago, that it is customary in the US to tip between 10% and 20%. I also was told that a tim of $1 for anyone who carries your bag is appropriate. So do I add a tip for the cab driver who takes my bag at the curb and returns it to the curb at the end of the trip? I’m not made of money and I don’t want to spend more than is appropriate, but I also understand that cab drivers are humans who need to earn a living. I always feel a little bit awkward paying someone else to drive me around as if there was some kind of class distinction between driver and passenger in the first place, I certainly don’t want to be stingy with that other human being.

People who ride in cabs frequently learn to predict the cost of the ride. We folks from other areas who do not frequently ride in cabs often enter the cab without a clear sense of what the charge will be. That makes paying a bit of a problem. You don’t want to appear to be carrying large amounts of cash by requiring a lot of change after the ride. It is best if you can give the driver the fare plus the tip without requiring any change back.

Life got easier for me when cabs switched to accepting credit cards. I could pre-determine the amount of tip and have the cash available or I could tip through the credit card if necessary.

Life, however, changes. In many major cities there is a new alternative to a traditional cab: Uber is a car service that matches private drivers with riders through smartphone applications. After one signs up for the service, you can use the phone app to request a ride. It uses the map technology of the phone to pinpoint your location and estimate how long you will wait for a ride. It sets the fare and charges it through pre-approved credit cards or Paypal accounts on file. Uber prohibits users from paying in cash. Although it doesn’t prohibit tipping, it discourages it by not allowing for tips to be added through the phone app and stating that tips are not required. So it has a kind of double standard about whether or not to use cash and discourages tipping by making it more difficult.

I’ve yet to try Uber. I don’t have the app on my phone. I’ve read to know that the service provides different kinds of rides. You can request a high-end car, a regular family car, an SUV or a luxury vehicle. You can even use Uber to request a regular taxi in cities where cabs have arrangements with Uber. There have been some concerns over the safety of the rides. Uber claims that it checks the criminal backgrounds of drivers and makes sure that they have appropriate insurance, but the risks are probably a little higher than with licensed cab services.

It is silly that I have been thinking about such things, as I have no plans to travel to a city anytime soon. The thought came to me because I have been talking to a colleague who just moved out to the Dakotas after a life of living in cities. I think that he lacks some rural skills that I take for granted. He uses the Interstate whenever possible, even if it means driving extra miles. I prefer two-lane roads and often take them to avoid the Interstate. I’ve no fear of traveling on gravel roads, he avoids them. He worries about what would happen if he had a flat tire or his car broke down in an isolated location. I’d much rather have that happen in a lonely place than in the middle of dangerous traffic. He depends on his cell phone and GPS to navigate. I know of a lot of places where the data bases are inaccurate. There are even a couple of locations in South Dakota where you can end up on the wrong side of the Missouri River with such a device. I think of a GPS primarily as a good way to find your way around a city. Sometimes, like cutting across from Red Scaffold to Dupree, the GPS would direct you drive a lot of extra miles and if you ignore it and take the most direct road it will display your vehicle cutting across open country where there are no roads. I kind of get a kick out of driving on a high-quality gravel road where the device shows none. It gives me a feeling of knowing something that the satellites don’t know.

We each have our skills and our natural environments. I’m happy living where I do and traveling to visit new places. I don’t mind stepping outside of my comfort zone once in a while. And, I confess, I get a bit of pleasure giving an city person directions for driving on the reservation and watching the look on their face as I describe where to go. A city person would probably enjoy my asking how to use Uber. I might even be able to match the facial expression.

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One of the gifts I have inherited in this life is an ease with meeting people. My father was a great one for striking up a conversation with a stranger. He was genuinely interested in people and often could get them to talk about themselves. I am probably just a little bit more shy, and was often a bit embarrassed at my dad’s brashness, especially when I was a teen. But I’m glad that I did spend so much time with him and that I did learn from him not to be fearful around others. In my life I have a lot of acquaintances. I meet people, sometimes have very intense relationships with them, and then we move on with our lives. For examples, there are families who shared very intimate details of their lives with me as we planned the funeral of a loved one. We felt close to each other. I was allowed to minister to them in their time of grief. A few years later, however, we don’t spend much time together at all. Some couples whose marriages I celebrate allow me to witness the unfolding of their families. I baptize the children born to them, watch those children grow up, celebrate communion, confirmation and graduations with them and remain close to the family. Other couples I rarely see after their wedding day.

Through my work in the community, I serve on boards and committees with a lot of different people. I’ve worked side by side with Jews and Muslims, Hindus and people who would claim no religious affiliation. I’ve worked with people from a wide variety of different ethnic heritages and traditions.

I know a lot of people.

But when I think of the people who are my closest, life-long friends, the number is smaller. This is normal and feels very natural to me. I’m happy with the friends I have and feel loved and supported by them. Some of my friends know me better than some of my siblings.

We got to talking, recently, about reconnecting with former friends. We could come up with several stories of people we know who attended reunions - usually school reunions - and reconnected with someone from their past in a meaningful way. We could name a couple of marriages that grew out of relationships rekindled at reunions. It is common, but it seems a bit strange to me. Then again, I’ve never been much for reunions. I attended one all-school reunion of my high school, and have attended three anniversary celebrations of congregations that I served, and that’s about it. I’ve never gone back for homecoming at my college. I’ve never been to a seminary reunion. I’ve nothing against those events. They just don’t attract me enough to become priorities for my time.

The people from my past who are closest to me now are people with whom I’ve maintained relationships over the years. Of course I have the advantage of having met my wife when I was a child and dated her when we were in high school and college, so I’m still best friends with my best friend from those years. But there are other friends from my past with whom I’ve kept up, exchanging letters or e-mails, keeping in touch with social media, and seeing one another when we have the opportunity. Others have drifted away.

The closest I can come to reunion reconnection stories in my life is that there are some people who were part of the churches we served in North Dakota who participate in the church we serve today. There were ten years between those two calls when we lived in Idaho. We might not have seen any of those people during those ten years. When we came to South Dakota there was some reconnection.

It is probably true of most people, but I have a much broader and diverse collection of acquaintances than my group of friends. My friends tend to have a lot in common. For example, thinking of my closest friends, there is a connection with the church for each one. Some are not active in the church today. Some have never been of the same denomination as I. Somewhere in our stories, however, the church played a big role in our meeting and getting to know one other. So, while I have acquaintances of other religions, my closest friends and I have connections to the Christian church.

If this way of forming relationships is common, and I have no reason to think that it is not, it helps to explain why some of the world’s most entrenched conflicts are so difficult to bring to peace. We tend to become closest to people with whom we have much in common. We tend to be more distant from those with greater differences. In Palestine, Christians and Jews and Muslims need to live in very close proximity. They don’t have to be friends, but it would hurt in their struggle to form a civil society and a solution to the generational violence that is entrenched in their communities.

Jesus seemed to be especially gifted at reaching across the divides that separate people. He would spend time with Jews and Gentiles. He would perform miracles of healing with his own people and with their enemies. The gospels tell story of story of his crossing from one group to another carrying the message of God’s love. As disciples of Jesus, we share a call to reach across the divisions of our world.

I need to work harder at being a friend to those who are very different from me.

In that challenge, however, my attention is not focused on going back. It is on going forward and reaching out to those in the community where I live right now. Now is a good time in my life to push myself out of my comfort zone of familiar acquaintances into genuine relationships with those who see things differently than I.

Perhaps for me the connection is more important than the reunion.

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Hattie Russell was a proud member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The family story is that even though their name was Russell and they lived in Fort Benton, Montana, and the mule skinner in one of Charles Russell’s paintings looks an awful lot like Hattie’s brother-in-law, Hattie steadfastly maintained that there was no family relationship between her family and that of the “whiskey-drinking” artist who rose to world prominence and whose paintings now sell for millions of dollars. Another family story is that when the family first arrived in Montana Territory, Hattie was allowed to practice the piano in one of the town’s saloons, but that later her husband had to arrange for a piano to be shipped by steamboat up the Missouri to Fort Benton because Hattie was banned from the saloon because of her outspoken WCTU ways.

Hattie banned all alcohol from her home and raised her children to share her attitude. Her daughter married an attorney who served as a legislator and a sponsor of the move to ratify prohibition in Montana. He wrote impassioned speeches about the detrimental effects of alcohol and envisioned that a total prohibition of alcohol would result in dramatic improvements in society.

It turned out that he was wrong in his expectations that prohibiting alcohol would result in decreased crime, violence, unemployment and illness. But that didn’t prevent him from raising his daughters to eschew alcohol. Each of them made a solemn pledge in the midst of an emotional Christian Endeavor meeting that alcohol would never touch their lips. They kept their pledges.

That’s my mother’s side of the family.

My father was engaged in a profession that is particularly unforgiving of decreases in human performance. The law at the time was eight hours from bottle to throttle for pilots, but he figured if a little bit of abstinence was good, total abstinence would make him a better pilot. His safety record over a lifetime of flying small aircraft in the mountains of the west seems to bear that out. Besides, he fell in love with one of Vernon Lewis’ daughters - a granddaughter of Hattie Russell and it is likely that she would have never agreed to marry him had he been a drinker.

I grew up thinking that I would never drink alcohol. There was none in our family home and there were frequent occasions where it was pointed out how alcohol had damaged the lives of others. I didn’t go into a bar for any reason until as an eighteen-year-old I had urgent need of a restroom and made a quick pit stop. As a high school student I used to pick up gas money from the parents of my classmates by agreeing to go to high school parties and drive home their inebriated children.

My first brush with alcohol was during theological seminary, where beer was a common lubricant for late night theological discussions and a glass of wine was occasionally used for a bit more than communion.

I think that I was a bit surprised that I didn’t immediately turn into a drunk.

In my first parish, the only vendor of alcohol in our town was the State-owned liquor store which was prominently located across the street from the radio station and everyone who went in or out was duly noted. Ministers didn’t do business in that establishment. (“And don’t you ever forget it.”) I think that all of the ministers in our town drank, but we knew how to go to the wine cellar of Assumption Abbey in Richardton, located 80 miles from town. Father Robert, who presided over the cellar, offered his vintages to area clergy without the addition of several taxes on the assumption that “it is all sacramental.” I’m sure that the state never thought to intervene or prosecute the former abbot for his oversight.

As an adult I have been a social drinker. I’ve even had a glass of wine in front of my mother on occasion. And the experience hasn’t ruined my life. I have not become addicted, my family’s finances have not been devastated, and I have enjoyed the good company of friends with an occasional drink.

Still, I have no particular plans for attending the annual Oktoberfest this weekend in Deadwood. And I’m not going to be one of the folks who participates in the rather strange beer market of Main Street Square’s Bierborse, either. I’m sure that the folks who participate in those events will be having a lot of fun, but I don’t feel called to be one of them and there are a lot of other things going on in my life as we begin this new month. I won’t lack for entertainment or things to occupy my time.

So, I’m thinking that I’m probably not a candidate to become a customer of the Santee Sioux tribe’s latest destination venture. No, I’ve never smoked and I’ve not inhaled, either. The Flandreau, South Dakota-based tribe’s announcement of its intention to open the nation’s first marijuana resort is big news. It isn’t often that a South Dakota story is picked up by the BBC and makes the list of breaking stories on its web page. The world did, however, seem to notice the announcement of the latest venture of the tribe that already has a casino, a hotel and a buffalo ranch.

Don’t bet me wrong. I’m all in favor of economic development by and for the tribes of South Dakota. I’m often impressed by the creativity and resourcefulness of our indigenous neighbors. A venture that is projected to produce $2 million per month is nothing to ignore. It is just that I personally have no interest in paying $12 to $15 for a one-gram package of the mind and mood altering drug and sitting around in a lounge of games, food, alcohol and slot machines to smoke it in a state where consumption of the drug is illegal.

I guess I’m just narrow minded that way. Perhaps there is a bit of great-grandma Hattie in me still.

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