Ayn Rand vs. Kathleen Dean Moore

I'm currently reading Ayn Rand's We the Living. I've only read one Ayn Rand before; I can't remember which book it was.  All I remember was that the two characters that hated each other the most were also constantly having sex with each other.  It seemed a bit bizarre to me. But since then I've occasionally heard people rave over Ayn Rand's books. So I decided to dive in again in hopes of figuring out what exactly it was that people liked in them. I still don't think I get it.  (Feel free to enlighten me.) But I did find that some sections of the book stand at a delightful juxtaposition to an article I was reading in this week's High Country News.

I'm curious, which quote resonates with you more? And why?

"Don't you know," her voice trembled suddenly in a passionate plea she could not hide, "don't you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: 'This is mine'? Don't you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don't you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?" -- Ayn Rand, in We the Living

This inclusiveness is by design. Kathy's friends and family members underscore Aldo Leopold's belief that, just as ecology is the science of connection, so "all ethics... rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts." It is also Moore's reply to centuries of Western philosophy.  She believes that our great thinkers have spent far too much energy parsing distinctions between ideas, between humans and other living things, between the mundane and the sacred, and not given nearly enough effort to pointing out commonalities. -- John Calderazzo, writing about Kathleen Dean Moore in an article entitled, "When reverence isn't enough" in HCN.

Re: Jesus loves you

This cracked me up. I'd love to see what folks said in the emails they sent in reply to him.

I think the answer to the disconnect has to do with justice. But the disconnect itself is interesting in its own right (as the video hilariously points out). I think many people who call themselves Christians live in this world of disconnect without ever realizing how confused they are. And when it dawns on them, I think that's when they jump ship.

Death is a Donne Deal

I think I'd be remiss in talking about death if I didn't mention what I believe Death's fate is in the end. John Donne (one of my favorite poets) summed it up far better than I ever could:

Death Be Not Proud

by John Donne
(1572-1631)

---

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

(copied over from About.com)

End of Life Discussions

OK, so perhaps we can't prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we're all gonna die, but I'd venture to say that it's pretty likely to occur. It's going to happen to me. It's going to happen to you. Whether we want to talk about it or not, it's one of those pieces of life that we get to undergo whether we ever talk about it or not.

But why don't we talk about it? Why does the inclusion of "end-of-life counseling" in the president's health care proposal stir so much acrimony? I can understand where people have concerns about a government run health care system or they might have issues with the increased cost to the nation or other similar issues.  But fighting the inclusion of counseling to help people know what their options are when making a living will? What is it that we're really fighting there? Is this a means for the nation to channel Dylan Thomas in raging against the dying of the light? It's not the counseling we're afraid of. It's that bit about death.

The older sister of one of Nathan's former classmates died last Thursday. She was 14. She was hit by an SUV as she biked across a crosswalk and her body was thrown 60 feet. I heard that her mother spent most of the day thrown across her body crying. I can't get that image out of my mind. I ache for her loss and I imagine myself similarly prostrate across one of my children's lifeless forms if the same were to befall us. And that leads me to appreciate and love and cherish my kids all the more. They're not dead, yet. I'm not dead, yet. But all of us will be one day. Recognizing and being aware of that fact enables me to be more thankful for the life we have today.

The New York Times had an article on end-of-life care and counseling yesterday entitled, "At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Comfort." The article touches upon different people's ability to cope with the fact that they are nearing the end of their life. It described a cancer patient whose response to the tragic news that her cancer was terminal was to state matter-of-factly that she's rather live, thank you very much. Her response echoed the statements made by a gal in our church who passed away several years ago from a brain tumor. She "just wanted to get on with life." ... Isn't that what many of us would say when faced with death? "No thank you. I'll pass on that. I've got better things to do." And yet it comes anyway.

Why is discussing death left to the goths and morbid teens who have more life in them than the death they love to ruminate on? Why are we not more aware of death in our day-today lives? Rob and I both remind our kids that we're not going to be around forever.  We don't know the day of our demise, but we recognize that it's coming. We know that each day we have in which we can be with our kids and love them and raise them is a gift. We try hard not to take that for granted. As much as I'd love to promise my kids that I'll always be here for them, I'd be a fool to say that. There are no guarantees.

I would have thought that Terry Schiavo's situation would have taught us all a lesson. Death is coming and it's not always as clean and definitive as one might hope. Talking about death with our family members might seem like a real downer, but if something like what happened to Terry happened to us, wouldn't that downer of a conversation take on a whole new light? Wouldn't our family members feel relieved that we'd written down our wishes? The pain of the death might not be diminished, but at least it wouldn't also be shackled with the doubt, guilt and other issues that can come with trying to decide about pulling that plug.

The beautiful thing when talking about death is that it proves to be such a perfect foil for life. It illuminates and highlights the precious nature of that which we often take for granted. As Natalie Babbitt said in Tuck Everlasting, "Don't be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life."

Spiritual Gifts - An Intro.

I'm a project person. I like to have a goal in mind so I know what I'm working toward.  Since I'm finished with the Bible study on the environment, I thought it was time to move on to a new topic. This time around I thought I'd take a gander at spiritual gifts.

I started out by doing an online search on spiritual gifts and I ended up with a bunch of tests. The consensus seemed to be that I have gifts in administration, teaching and writing.  ... I'm not making that up -- writing.  (Pssst, if you can find a verse in the Bible regarding the gift of writing, I'd love to see it.)

What struck me (as I pointed out in the post that I linked to above) is that I could have skipped the spiritual gifts tests and just looked at a description of an INTJ to tell you what my gifts were.  *scratches head*  The Holy Spirit seems to prefer giving gifts that match a person's Meyers Briggs type.  Isn't that convenient.

So my goals in this study are shaping up to be: 1) What the heck is a spiritual gift and why do we call it that? 2) What's the difference between a spiritual gift and a personality trait? 3) and my favorite topic (just ask the gals in my Bible study) how are we to be using these gifts for the benefit of one another?

So far all I've written is an intro.  But I thought I'd share it here in case anyone would like to get a head-start on picking my writing apart.  ... Don't be intimidated by the fact that writing is one of my spiritual gifts. ;-)


The phrase “spiritual gifts” is fairly common in Christian circles today. It’s not a common phrase in the Bible, however. In the NIV and KJV translations of the Bible, this combination of words only appears 4 times, and three of those times the word “gift” doesn’t actually appear in the original Greek.  Only Romans 1:11 puts the two words “spiritual” (pneumatikos) and “gift” (charisma) together.  On the other hand, the idea of gifts from God is quite frequent in the Bible and encompasses quite a bit more than we usually associate with the term “spiritual gifts.”

Labeling some gifts differently than others and having workbooks and online tests that help you to determine your spiritual gifts set these gifts apart as being quite different than the other gifts that God gives. The way we talk about them also tends to put the focus on us rather than on God.  “What are my spiritual gifts?” or “How should I be using my spiritual gift?” Contrast that with, “What gifts has God given to me?” or “How does God expect me to use these gifts within the church?”  In the first two examples we have ownership and authority to control our gifts as we please. In the second two we are entrusted with something from God, and we have a responsibility to use what has been given to us for a purpose other than our own.  I’d like to suggest that the second way of relating to gifts is more in keeping with what we find in Biblical texts.

(cartoon was snagged from this Grasping for the Wind page)

Beaver Dams Lead to Spiritual Maturity

High Country News published an article about beavers a few weeks ago. Beavers are considered by many to be nothing more than a pesky nuisance. Their dams have been known to cause flooding across popular hiking trails and even threaten some lake front mountain properties. But there's a new movement to bring back the beaver, and in the end, letting the beavers return may not only restore some mountain habitat, but it could also save taxpayers money. Beavers can help to restore soil that has been badly fire damaged along the Rocky Mountains. And their dams might do a better job of slowing water release from the mountains, which would provide water storage, at no cost, to the people and farms down slope.

The article points out that for millenia, beavers have been an integral part of the mountain ecosystem. It wasn't until trappers invaded en masse that beaver populations plummeted from what the trappers described as "60 to 80 beaver" per mile of stream to an estimated 100,000 total after a century or heavy trapping. Because of that, as European settlers moved into the areas where beavers used to live, they found streams that were wide, shallow and fast moving. Despite how beautiful such a scene might be, with the sun glinting off quickly flowing water, these water systems have actually been corrupted. They are out of sync with how they had been running for thousands of years prior. As a forest service hydrologist explained, we have "internalized a degraded stream as natural." 

That line particularly grabbed my attention. What this hydrologist was saying was that we had not only come to believe a lie, but that we had looked upon that lie as something natural -- beautiful even.

From a Christian perspective, these streams are no longer flowing the way God made them to flow because they no longer have the large beaver populations that God had put in place to manage the water. And yet, looking upon these streams, unless you knew how the stream was supposed to look, it would seem to be just fine. One might even go so far as to say that its beauty somehow reflected the glory of God. And yet in saying such a thing, we'd actually be giving high praise to a system that has been perverted from the way it was created to be!

I began to wonder how often we do that. How often have we not only come to believe the lie, but we even elevate it as something extraordinary, something wonderful?! How many things in our lives -- the way we interact with others, the way we do church, the way we set goals and make decisions -- are predicated upon an understanding that is warped by our constrained knowledge of how things are compared to how God meant them to be? How often do we let the culture we grew up in dictate to us what is right and what is wrong? And how often do we tag those "right" things as being God's right things (whether or not they actually are)? 

The mountain ecosystem can be a metaphor in which the beaver filled landscape represents our lives as they would be in God's perfect world, in Eden. The beavers are managers put in place to care for the water ways, and yet these God-chosen managers are seen by us in our fallen state as pesky vermin. I'm not sure what the exact parallel would be with the beavers. Perhaps they are the people in our lives who can speak the truth to us in love. Perhaps they're the people who slow us down long enough to help us reflect on our lives, our actions, our beliefs. How often do we shut the beavers our of our lives thinking that our speedy, sediment filled rush down the hill is how life is supposed to be? How often do we choose what is wrong in the misguided impression that we're doing what's right?

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

http://barefootmeg.multiply.com/reviews/item/36
I've mentioned Rob Bell and his book, Velvet Elvis a few times here in this blog and I finally got a review of the book finished today. Click through on the link above to read the review.