"God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down."

-----C.S. Lewis, "A Grief Observed"

"MTV is like Unions, you know? Because it started out really cool, but now it's just turning into a big mess, and it needs to be changed. It's so boring! It's so bloody boring!!! I'm numbed, day after day."

----Jeff Buckley, 1995 French TV interview

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men."

-----John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"Beginners in the spiritual life are apt to become very diligent in their exercises. The great danger for them will be to become satisfied with their religious works and with themselves. It is easy for them to develop a kind of secret pride, which is the first of the seven capital sins.

Such persons become too spiritual. They like to speak of "spiritual things" all the time. They become content with their growth. They would prefer to teach rather than to be taught. They condemn others who are not as spiritual as they are. They are like the Pharisee who boasted in himself and despised the publican who was not as spiritual as he.

The devil will often inflame their fervor so that their pride will grow even greater. The devil knows that all of their works and virtues will become valueless and, if unchecked, will become vices. For they begin to do these spiritual exercises to be esteemed by others. They want others to realize how spiritual they are. They will also begin to fear confession to another for it would ruin their image. So they soften their sins when they make confession in order to make them appear less imperfect.

They will beg God to take away their imperfections, but they do this only because they want to find inner peace and not for God's sake. They do not realize that if God were to take away their imperfections from them, they would probably become prouder and more presumptiuous still.

But those who are at this time moving in God's way will counter this pride with humility. They will learn to think very little of themselves and their religious works. Instead, they will focus on how great and how deserving God is and how little it is that they can do for Him. The Spirit of God dwells in such persons, urging them to keep their treasures secretly within themselves."

----St. John of the Cross, from "Dark Night of the Soul"

"The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated in quotations." -Benjamin Disraeli

A friend forwarded the transcript of Bono's Dec. 1 interview with Larry King of CNN (I checked but the transcript is not yet online). Here are three things Bono said:
== "...religion is this sort of -- religion is the artifice, you know, the building, after God has left it sometimes, like Elvis has left the building. You hold onto religion, you know, rules, regulations, traditions. I think what God is interested in is people's hearts, and that's hard enough."

== "I'm half Catholic and half -- I mean, I'm not doubting. I don't doubt God. I have firm faith absolutely in God. It's religion I'm doubting.."

== "America is not just a country; it's an idea. You have to defend the idea as well as the country, and that idea is being attacked."

"As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."

Mere Christianity

"I met Prince some years back---I believe in Prince almost as much as Prince believes in Prince, which is saying something---and he had 'slave' written on the side of his face. I asked him why he was doing that. He said, 'I don't own my master tapes. I don't own my copyrights.' Then he said, 'You do own your master tapes. You do own your copyrights. How did you do that?' I said, 'Lower royalty rate.'

-----Bono on the diminutive artist who was formerly good, and how U2 owns all their music. Rolling Stone, November 28th, 2002

I AM AUGUSTINE

"God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity he would be careless; and understanding of his adversity he would be senseless."

You are Augustine! You love to study tough issues and don't mind it if you lose sleep over them. Everyone loves you and wants to talk to you and hear your views, you even get things like "nice debating with you." Yep, you are super smart, even if you are still trying to figure it all out. You're also very honest, something people admire, even when you do stupid things.

What theologian are you?

A creation of Henderson

I read an interesting piece on Herbert Asbury, the author of "Gangs of New York", in the New Yorker last night. Apparently Asbury was a lapsed Methodist, with three generations of pastors in his family. His comments regarding the church are generally bitter, which probably makes them all the more important for those of us who still attend service (much like we should all read Twain's "Letters from the Earth"). Anyway, there was one section in particular that stood out to me. Asbury wrote a book called "Up from Methodism" and in it he acridly described the story of a local harlot who would take men into the cemetary to offer her wares, and then try to come to church to atone for her sins.

"She was not wanted in the house of God. I have seen her sit alone and miserably unhappy while the Preacher bellowed a sermon about forgiveness with the whole church rocking to a chorus and sobbing, moaning amens as he told the stories of various Biblical harlots, and how God had forgiven them. But for Hatrack (the harlot) there was no forgiveness. Mary Magdalene was a saint in heaven, but Hatrack remained a harlot in Farmington. Every Sunday night for years she went through the same procedure. She was hopeful always that someone would speak to her and make a place for her, that the Brothers and Sisters who talked so voluably about the grace and mercy of God would offer her some of the religion that they dripped so freely over everyone else in town. But they did not, and so she went back down the street to the Post Office, swishing her skirts and brazenly offering herself to all who desired her."

And then this morning I was reading in Matthew 23 for my devotional, and I read this:

"Woe to you hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in."

A strong reminder to us all.

"We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun itself, it smites us into darkness."

-----John Milton

Every Grain Of Salad
(Bob Dylan)

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There's a dyin' voice within me reaching out somewhere,
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair.

Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake,
Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break.
In the fury of the moment I can see the Master's hand
In every leaf that trembles and, in every grain of sand.

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear,
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer.
The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay.

I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name.
Then onward in my journey I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer's dream, in the chill of a wintry light,
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space,
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face.

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me.
I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

Biloxi Blues aired on Comedy Central tonight. I hope this means that a DVD release is imminent.

Toomey: Tell me, Jerome, if a piss drunk sergeant has a loaded .45 pointed at the head of a piece of dung that the piss drunk sergeant hates and despises, how would you describe the situation?
Jerome: Delicate. Extremely delicate.
Toomey: Right. I'll be honest with you, Jerome. It was my intention of getting Epstein in here, and putting this pistol to his ear, and blowing a tunnel through his head. But you'll do just as well.
Eugene: I'm sorry to hear that.
Toomey: There's something about you New York boys that riles my ass. You don't appreciate the Army, do you?
Eugene: There are some things I like.
Toomey: Such as?
Eugene: Mail. I like getting my mail.
Toomey: You shittin' me, Jerome?
Eugene: A piece of dung would never shit a piss drunk sergeant with a loaded .45.

I've just heard about a wonderful organization. It's called "Food Finders", and it's a conduit between the restaurant/grocery business and impoverished/hungry people. What they do is solicit vendors for food that would otherwise be thrown away (perfectly good food) and then they collect it and distribute it to the needy.

If you're like me, you're probably thinking, "how much food could needlessly be thrown away in a given month?" Well, to my surprise, Food Finders alone distributes about 350,000 pounds of food per month, which equated to about 27,000 meals per day in 2001.

On the 22nd and 23rd of this month, I will participate with this organization in a food drive to collect canned goods and turkeys. I'm very excited about this opportunity and I would love to see some of my friends out there as well. If you'd like more information, please email me for dates and times. We will be in the city of Los Alamitos.

"Freely you have received. Freely Give."

Chris
cstratton1@socal.rr.com

"He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether anyone else in the world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder. . . "

-----Edith Wharton, from "Ethan Frome"

"Secret Of The Easy Yoke" by Pedro The Lion, from the album "It's Hard to Find a Friend"

"I could hear the church bells ringing
they pealed aloud your praise
the members faces were smiling
with their hands out stretched to shake
it's true they did not move me
my heart was hard and tired
their perfect fire annoyed me
I could not find you anywhere

could someone please tell me the story
of sinners ransomed from the fall
I still have never seen you
and some days I don't love you at all

the devoted were wearing bracelets
to remind them why they came
some concrete motivation
when the abstract could not do the same
but if all that's left is duty
I'm falling on my sword
at least then I would not serve
an unseen distant lord

if this is only a test
I hope that i'm passing
cause I'm losing steam
and I still want to trust you

peace be still
peace be still
peace be still. . . "

"Magazine" by Pedro The Lion, from the album "Control"

This line is metaphysical
And on the one side
And on the one side
The bad half live in wickedness
And on the other side
And on the other side
The good half live in arrogance
And there's a steep slope
With a short rope
This line is metaphysical
And there's a steady flow
Moving to and fro

Oh look you earned your wings
Are you an angel now
Or a vulture?
Constantly hovering over
Looking for a big mistake

Oh my God, what have I done?

Wouldn't you love to be
On the cover of a magazine?
Healthy skin and perfect teeth
Designed to hide what lies beneath

And I feel the darkness growing stronger
As you cram life down my throat
And how does that work out for you
In your holy quest to be above reproach?

Wouldn't you love to be
On the cover of a magazine?
Healthy skin and perfect teeth
Designed to hide what lies beneath
What lies beneath

I was reading in bed last night and stumbled across this line. I must have read it 30 times before I put the book down and turned off my light, right in the middle of the chapter. I fell asleep with "cannot surmount the established conclusions amid which it has been reared" ringing in my head.

"In the problems which the Almighty sets his humble servants things hardly ever happen the same way twice over, or if they seem to do so there is some variant which stultifies undue generalisation. The human mind, excet when guided by extraordinary genius, cannot surmount the established conclusions amid which it has been reared."

-----Winston Churchill, from "The Gathering Storm"

And now for some timeless quotations from When Harry Met Sally.. . . .

Harry Burns: "Had my dream again where I'm making love, and the Olympic judges are watching. I'd nailed the compulsaries, so this is it, the finals. I got a 9.8 from the Canadians, a perfect 10 from the Americans, and my mother, disguised as an East German judge, gave me a 5.6. Must have been the dismount."

Harry: "No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her."
Sally: "So you are saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?"
Harry: "No, you pretty much want to nail them too."


Harry Burns: "I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle in your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

I also picked up three albums today.

Jeff Buckley and Gary Lucas: "Songs to No One" = a disappointment on the whole, with a few moments of brilliance, and many moments of academic interest to any Buckley fan. Don't buy it unless you're a fan.

Foo Fighters: "One on One" = blistering opening track, then fades significantly after that and doesn't return. Where have all the hooks gone Mr. Grohl? Did you forget them when you discovered you could scream a chorus? This album is okay. I may change my mind after a few listens, but it didn't make me do the dance of joy that all three of the first albums did. I guess 3 out of 4 ain't bad.

Joshua Redman Quartet: "Moodswing" = Wow! This is a beauty of an album. Mehldau on Piano, Christian McBride on Bass and Brian Blade on drums. . . you can't ask for much more if it's the best of young talent that you are looking for. Redman's sax is evocative of so many great moods, and the backing band is stellar in their own right. Thanks to Wilfred for the tip on this gem. Go out and buy it.

Well, I finally managed to do it. . . I got a flu shot. Hopefully this will help "Ebola Boy" get through the flu season. Funny moment: standing in a line of old people about 30 deep, the man in front of me is mumbling about the high prices of liquor nowadays as he lics his lips rather loudly while looking at a bottle of absolute citron. Then the lady behind me chimes in with, "you look like a healthy young man, what are you doing in this line." "Chronic fatigue syndrome" I whisper as if it's the plague. She responds rather loudly, "I see. I have Lupus. I picked it up from the birth control pill." As I look around to notice that everyone heard that proclamation, I give her my best Ace Ventura "Ahh (as in I see)" with raised eyebrows. Assuming that she's hooked a sympathetic ear, she proceeds to talk to me, or rather at me, for the next 15 minutes we're in line. It was too funny. She was a nice old gal.

I am a 29 year old geriatric.

"In the Trinity Term I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?"

-----C.S. Lewis, "Surprised by Joy"

"With all sorts of doubts I am familiar, and the result of them is, has been, and will be, a widening of my heart and soul and mind to greater glories of the truth ... ... ... I cannot say I never doubt, nor until I hold the very heart of good as my very own in Him, can I wish not to doubt.  For doubt is the hammer that breaks the windows clouded with human fancies, and lets in the pure light."

-----George MacDonald, "From Letter to an Unknown lady."

Manifesto:
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

"I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don't want enough of God to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please."

-----Wilbur Rees

Well Blake posted a nice tribute to the Chicago trip on his site, so I thought I better offer my take as well.

- I too watched Like Mike and actually enjoyed it for what it was.
- Yes, the Fairmont was really as expensive and unhelpful as Blake said.
- The food in Chicago was amazing. I didn't eat at one place that was bad. Bennigan's was great, Pizzaria Duo was amazing, and Bandera had great jazz (Dave Wilson Trio) and a "saucy" little Romanian waitress named Miruna. Not to mention the best pork tenderloin I've ever had!!
- The Art Institute was brilliant once again. Highlights for me, Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Picasso, Seurat, and Chagall's Stained Glass windows.
- Riding the train is always a pleasure. Shame on the oil mongers in LA for not creating a usefull public transit network.
-Realizing that though he's run 14 marathons, my Dad hates to walk, and will take the bus even if it takes him longer to get somewhere than walking does.
- Vincent, Blake's sister's overweight cat, playing with a candy corn pumpkin like it was a dead mouse.
-Shopping in Evanston bookstores
-Seeing "Red Dragon" with my Mom.
-Running the marathon with little to no pain. Watching my brother slug it out in severe pain. Feeling inspired by that performance, and the performance of my old man who, much to my chagrin, can still outrun us all.
-Visiting a Presbyterian church downtown and seeing a photo exhibit from 9/11 taken by associated press photogs.
-Taking the elevator to the top of the Hancock (John, not Herbie) building to get a 360 panorama of the city for free.
-Watching the Angels pummel Minnesota while I rested from the marathon.
-Flying home with Blake and Scott. Watching Blake fall asleep five minutes after boarding only to remain in that same position for 3 hours straight. Laughing when he woke up with mashed face and hair.
-Waiting for John to come pick us up, figuring he'd forgotten us after 30 minutes of waiting, taking a cab to Scott's car, realizing after the cab left that Scott's battery was dead, calling AAA to come jump the car, getting home just as John pulls up saying that he's been at the airport for 2 hours looking for us.
-Priceless.

`` Ozzy Osbourne used to snort ants. Led Zeppelin had sex with hookers on
private planes. And I start a book club. Because one can only snort so
many ants and have so much sex before one starts to long for the comfort
and companionship of a book.''

-----Moby

I'm leaving for a week in Chicago. I've got some training to do with my company, OKI, and then I'm going to take a couple days of vacation around the city and run the marathon on the 13th with my Dad and Brother. Should be a good time. Having said that, I probably won't be posting too much on this site for the next 10 days. But I'll leave you with this:

"If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it---I mean really asked, expecting an answer.
I am saying just this: go to him the way the father of the sick boy did (cf. Mark 9) and ask him. Pray to him, is what I am saying. In whatever words you have. And if the little voice that is in side all of us as the inheritance of generations of unfaith, if this little voice inside says, 'But I don't believe. I don't believe,' don't worry too much. Just keep on anyway. 'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
Seek and you will find---this is the power of God's love to heal, to give peace and, at last, something like real life, so that little by little, like the boy, you can get up. Yes, get up. But we must seek---like a child at first, like playing a kind of game at first because prayer is so foreign to most of us. It is so hard and it is so easy. And everything depends on it. Seek. Ask. And by God's grace we will find. In Christ's name and with his power I can promise you this."

-----Frederick Buechner, "The Power of God, The Power of Man" from the book "The Magnificent Defeat"

"When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer."

----Brennan Manning, "The Ragamuffin Gospel"

Even my Tarot card says I'm an INTJ. I guess being a moralist is just the bane of my existence. That must be why I need to read guys like Brennan Manning to keep me grounded.

"FIRE OF AIR. Serious and intellectual, you live in the world of thoughts and ideas. You grasp things quicker than most and are a master debater. Your verbal skills are unparalleled; your conversations are stimulating. You are concerned with issues of justice. Your standards are high, so there is danger of becoming too moralistic. While truth is generally an honorable thing, chew on this: "Why Yes Herr Strudel, my neighbor IS hiding Jews in his basement!" You're Christopher Walken in Suicide Kings."

Quiz
created by Polly Snodgrass.

FIRE OF AIR. Serious and intellectual, you live in the world of thoughts and ideas. You grasp things quicker than most and are a master debater. Your verbal skills are unparalleled; your conversations are stimulating. You are concerned with issues of justice. Your standards are high, so there is danger of becoming too moralistic. While truth is generally an honorable thing, chew on this: "Why Yes Herr Strudel, my neighbor IS hiding Jews in his basement!" You're Christopher Walken in Suicide Kings.

"The universe would be to me no more than a pasteboard scene, all surface and no deepness, on the stage, if I did not hope in God. I will not say believe, for that is a big word, and it means so much more than my low beginnings of confidence. But a little faith may wake a great big hope, and I look for great things from him whose perfection breathed me out that I might be a perfect thing one day. The more we trust, the more reasonable we find it to trust."

-----George MacDonald
From a letter to Lady Mount-Temple, 1888

I went to the beach this afternoon to read and watch the sun set. It was wonderful and shocking. What was wonderful about it was the grace that comes through in a beach sunset. The changing hues of the atmosphere, the thunderous yet calming break of the waves, the strange carefree lives of birds; all of them speak to me of a story much larger than my own. What was shocking to me is that for almost 2 hours while the sun went down, I was virtually alone. If it weren't for another man sitting in his reclining beach chair about two stations away from me, I would have been completely alone on the beach. For a moment I thought how sad it was that here was this marvelous act of communication, and only two souls were there to join in with it and offer praise back. But then I just relaxed and let it wash over me. Sometimes it's better not to think too much upon these things.

"Photography need no longer bide its time, or bite its nails, in underground dens or unvisited wings of the major museums; it is right there in the throne rooms, and in order to reach Avedon's Groucho, say---balding, black sweatered, solemnly dreaming of something off-camera---you have to stride through a vista of Rodins."

----"Head On: A Richard Avedon Retrospective", as quoted from Anthony Lane in this week's New Yorker.

LATE SEPTEMBER

The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretendng to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.

----Charles Simic

"Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, [one] is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all the sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."

-----C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"

"Man's original sin was a lust after self-sufficient knowledge, a craving to shake off all EXTERNAL (emphasis mine) authority and work things out for himself (cf. Gen 3:5-6); and God deliberately presents saving truth to sinnners in such a way that their acceptance of it involves an act of intellectual repentance, whereby they humble themselves and submit once more to be taught by Him. Thus they renounce their calamitous search after a self-made wisdom (cf. Rom 1:22; 1 Cor. 1:19-25) in order to regain the kind of knowledge for which they were made, that which comes from taking their Creator's word. So as to make this renunciation clear-cut, God has ensured that no single article of faith should be demonstrable as, say a geometrical theorem is, nor free from unsolved mystery. Man must be content to know by faith, and to know, in this world at any rate, in part."


----J.I. Packer, from an essay entitled "Revelation and Inspiration" (c. 1954)

EYES

My most honourable eyes. You are not in the best shape.
I receive from you an image less than sharp,
And if a color, then it's dimmed.
And you were a pack of royal hounds
With whom I would set forth in the early morning.
My wonderously quick eyes, you saw many things,
Countries and cities. Islands and oceans.
Together we greeted immense sunrises,
When the fresh air invited us to run
Along trails just dry from the cold night dew.
Now what you have seen is hidden inside
And changed into memory or dreams.
Slowly I move away from the fair of this world
And I notice myself in a distaste
For monkeyish dress, shreiks, and drumbeats.
What a relief. Alone with my mediation
On the basic similarity of humans
And their tiny grain of dissimilarity.
Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point
That grows large and takes me in.

-----Czeslaw Milosz

I watched M. Night Shyamalan's movie, Signs, a couple weeks ago, and I'm not sure why I haven't written about it until now. The movie was very well done. Even if it missed the mark at the end, the suspense and the chill down the spine were worth my $6 bucks.

Mel Gibson's character plays a lapsed priest. The movie fails because we know he's going to be redeemed, worse yet by a dubious series of events, but there is a nice monologue by Gibson about 2/3 of the way through the film. His younger brother asks him to comfort him, and Gibson, the lapsed preacher a la Jesus, asks him a question: "Are you someone who believes in dumb luck or that there's a purpose (God) at the center of the universe?" A good question to be sure, and well worth asking, but it made me think about a related question: "If you believe that there is a purpose (God) at the center of the universe, is it good or bad?"

Having no taste for those who think we came from nothing (atheists you can stop reading now), this latter question seems much more important to me, and more urgent. As a Christian, I've found that one of the truths I need for the preservation of my faith is that there is a good and perfect purpose (God) at the center of the universe. . . that "all things work together for good" . . . even suffering. This is not an easy concept to embrace, in fact, most days it seems ridiculous, but yet I keep coming back to it. I think everything in my life hinges on that belief. It's more important than ecclesiastical doctrines. It's more important than church attendence. It's called hope, and it has to be maintained through a shitstorm we like to call the world.

Why the world is this way, I don't think we'll ever fully understand, but I believe that there's a good and perfect purpose at the center of it for us all.

"One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them."

-----G. C. Lichtenberg

Yesterday I went to see Sam Jones' new documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, and really enjoyed it. It felt like a cross between Rattle & Hum and Grant Gee's Meeting People Is Easy.

The film documents the making of Wilco's latest album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the loss of co-songwriter Jay Bennett, the dropping of the band by Reprise records and the subsequent pickup of the album by Nonesuch records, ironically both divisions of Warner Bros. Music.

There's a great moment when David Fricke of Rolling Stone speculates on why Reprise let go of such a great band. He says it really has to do with our culture and how things are marketed to us. He uses the anology of a cell phone. He says, "Everyone's got a cell phone. Why? I bet 80-90% of the phone calls taking place right now boil down to this phrase. . . 'I'll be there in five minutes.' Why can't you just f@#$ing be there in five minutes!" (If Chesterton was still alive, this would be the part where he inadvertently blows popcorn all over the guy in front of him). This, Fricke says, is in large part why an album like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will never be a commercial success, and is likely why Reprise let them go.

Maybe in about 10 years people will realize how significant this album is, maybe they won't, but do yourself a favor and go out and buy it to hear for yourself (pretend like you don't have a cell phone and the earth still takes 24 hours to rotate once). If nothing else, go see the movie; it's worth seeing just for the lush visuals of Chicago in grainy Black and White.

I am the railroad
Track abandoned
With the sunset
Forgetting
I ever happened
Did I ever happen?

Jeff Buckley-----"Opened Once" from Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

It's a sad day for Laker fans, and basketball fans in general. Our beloved Chick Hearn passed away. Get out your black armbands.

I recently embarked upon the daunting task of reading Winston Churchill's memoirs of The Second World War. It's a six volume set with each volume finishing up somewhere around 6-700 pages in miniscule print. This is why the books have been on my shelf for about 2 years. That notwithstanding, I'm glad I started to read this collection. The first volume is entitled "The Gathering Storm" and chronicles the countless political blunders that lead to Hitler's re-armament and eventually to war, as well as Churchill's rise to the role of Prime Minister. In reading this book I'm confronted with a number of astounding things: 1) Churchill was spot-on re: Hitler as far back as 1931 and he was continually ridiculed and derided for his opinions even into 1939 2) In their blind search for peace and their belief in the innate goodness of man, the French and British foolishly allowed Hitler to do whatever he wanted, at the expense of a number of treaties violated; they were in essence, "men without chests." 3) The US isolationist policies virtually sank the League of Nations and thus deflated many hopes of keeping Hitler in line 4) Many of the mistakes made with the German tyrants could apply to our situation with Islamic Terrorists of the present day. The US is still as rash about their foreign policy as they were in the 30's. Let's hope that Sept. 11th taught us something about helping out around the globe.

Churchill summarizes the folly from '32-'39 nicely at one point:

"In this sad tale of wrong judgments formed by well-meaning and capable people we now reach our climax. That we should all have come to this pass makes those responsible, however honourable their motives, blameworthy before history. Look back and see what we had successively accepted and thrown away: a Germany disarmed by solemn treaty; a Germany rearmed in violation of a solmen treaty; air superiority or even air parity cast away; the Rhineland forcibly occupied and the Seigfried line built or building; the Berlin-Rome Axis established; Austria devoured and digested by the Reich; Czechoslovakia deserted and ruined by the Munich pact, its fortress line in German hands, its mighty arsenal of Skoda henceforward making munitions for the German armies; President Roosevelt's effort to stabilise or bring to a head the European situation by the intervention of the United States waved aside with one hand, and Soviet Russia's undoubted willingness to join the Western Powers and go all lengths to save Czechoslovakia ignored on the other; the services of thirty five Czech divisions against the still unripened German army cast away, when Great Britain could herself supply only two to strengthen the front in France; all gone with the wind."

One of my favorite authors died on Tuesday. Chaim Potok was 73. I loved his work because he understood the necessity and pain of the struggle to break free of one's parochial religious tendencies in order to find meaning in the world.

LA Times

"Milton's admirer's [are] divided into roughly two camps. One tradition, running from Addison to C.S. Lewis, held that Paradise Lost is a great poem because its justification of God is largely successful. A rival tradition, running from William Blake to William Empson, held that the poem is great because it expresses unconscious hostility toward God. Blake famously wrote that Milton was 'a true poet of the Devil's party without knowing it.' Many have dismissed this comment as incorrigibly eccentric, but Blake and his successors hold one advantage over their critical adversaries. They can point for support to Milton's political career. Milton, like Satan, was a rebel in a civil war [against Charles II].

Why then did he choose a poetic subject that seems to concede everything to the Royalist cause? C.S. Lewis, writing in 1942, argued that the problem disappears when we consider one simple truth: Charles Stuart is not God. Milton's entire case against the divine right of kings is that divine right arrogates a dominion that belongs to God alone. Earthly kings like Charles Stuart merely play at being God; God does not play at being himself. It follows that what would be tyranny in Charles Stuart is perfect justice in God. Lewis' argument works in theory, but many readers of Paradise Lost still find Satan's rhetoric of rebellion to be seductive in practice."


-----John K. Leonard, The New York Review of Books, review of "How Milton Works" by Stanley Fish

This is to serve as an apology to John Cordova, ex-sous chef of the world famous Hobbit restaurant. He did not steal or misplace, or run over with his car, my copy of Pete Yorn's album, Music for the Morning After. It is a regretable fact of my nature that I have a strong tendancy to blame those close to me when I lose things. This instance is no exception to that rule. I found the CD under my car seat today.

With that said, I now take back all the nasty things I've said about John; that he's a clepto, that there's a reason why I never have any whiskey in my cupboard, etc.

Forgive me.

"I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anyone else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Leon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible---a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth---but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part time novelist, Christian, pig.. . . ..That is who I am."

-----Frederick Buechner, from the preface to "The Alphabet of Grace" (originally delivered as The William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard University, 1969)

"Trying to get another start, I circled back to general resolutions I had made to myself about getting old. I kept returning to my seventieth birthday, seventy seemingly being what man has been given as his biblical allotment on earth. I sat in my study making clear to myself, possibly even with gestures, my homespun anti-shuffleboard philosophy of what to do when I was old enough to be scripturally dead. I wanted this possible life extension to be hard as always, but also new, something not done before, like writing stories. That would be sure to be hard, and to make stories fresh I would have to find a new way of looking at things I had known nearly all my life, such as scholarship and the woods. If you think vividly enough about your general resolutions, sometimes your consience will furnish the particulars to exemplify them. . . ."


-----Norman Maclean, "Young Men and Fire"

I bet no one knew I worked at MIT and played the French Horn.

My Website

My Grandpa sent me a newspaper clipping today regarding my Great Aunt Jeanne's death. Jeanne was the head of the Glendale School board, as well as a devoted mother, widow and grandmother. For the last 30 or so years, she hosted the Bentley family Christmas party at her house in La Canada . . .(we're talking over 100 Bentley's in one little house). She also had cancer. But her constant joy and love never waivered. She never left her job or forgot about her family. She was an inspiration to us all.

In the newspaper clipping my grandpa sent, one of Jeanne's long time associates, Pam Ellis, said something pretty amazing. She said, "I will always remember and ask myself, 'what would Jeanne do?' because she will be the rod against which I will always measure my decisions."

You can't do much better than that.

Well done Jeanne. We will miss you.

Times Article

"Dostoyevsky shows us that pride and humility are really one. If you are proud, you almost certainly feel humbler than someone else in the world, because pride is an anxiety, not a consolation. And if you are humble, you almost certainly feel better than someone else in the world, because humility is an acheivement, not a freedom. Pride, one might say, is the sin of humble people, and humility is the punishment of proud people; and each reversal represents a kind of self-punishment. Thus Fyodor Karamazov enters the dining room ready to abase himself because he disdains everyone else. This sort of logic is hard to find, at least as an explicit psychology, in novelists before Dostoyevsky. One has instead to consult the religious weepers and gnashers---Ignatius of Loyola, or Kierkegaard---to encounter anything like it."

"Thus the many pairings, or doublings, in which one character revolves around another, and each is murderously dependent on the other. . . .In Fyodor's case---and perhaps it is always the case with any colossal egotism---other people appear to have become himself. He dislikes his neighbor because of something that he, Fyodor, did to him: 'I once played a most shameless, nasty trick on him, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it.' Clearly Fyodor longs---however buried the original religious sentiment---to punish himself, because he hates himself. But since other people have merged with him, he punishes himself by punishing other people, and hates himself by hating other people.
And this leads to a Sisyphean repetition of behavior. Self-punishment of this twisted kind means being condemned to re-enact scandal after scandal without cease, because each self-punishment has become indistinguishable from sinning. The sin itself has become the punishment for that sin, and each sin, being another act of outrage, just opens the wound again."

"But Dostoyevsky's novel enshrines, in its very form, a further argument. It is that Ivan's ideas cannot be refuted by other ideas. In debate, in 'dialogism,' there is no way of defeating or even of matching Ivan, and Alyosha does not really try. At the end of Ivan's legend, he simply kisses his brother. The only way in which we can refute Ivan's ideas, the book seems to say, is by maintaining that Christ is not an idea. Socialism is an idea, because it is 'reasonable'; atheism, too. But Christianity, so profoundly unreasonable---what Kierkegaard called 'lunacy'---is not an idea. The painful part is that the only realm in which Christ is not an idea, in which he is pure knowledge, is in heaven. On earth, we are all fallen, and we fall before ideas, we have only ideas, and Christ can always be kicked around the ideational playground."


-----James Wood, "The Gambler," from The New Republic

Wood Article

"The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead."

-----Norman Maclean, from the unpublished preface to "Young Men and Fire"

"God is so beautiful, and so patient, and so loving, and so generous that he is the heart and soul and rock of every love and every kindness and every gladness in the world. All the beauty in the world and in the hearts of men, all the painting all the poetry all the music, all the architecture comes out of his heart first. He is so loveable that no heart can know how loveable he is - can know only in part. When the best loves God best, he does not love him nearly as he deserves, or as he will love him in time."

------George MacDonald
(From a letter to his daughter Mary when she was sixteen)

"It's what they keep telling you in church. Women are all heart and men are all body. I don't know who's supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.
Eccles smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas. Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps----overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath. The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there. Helpless, predestined Man, the king of Creation. Utterly fallen: a hubris in shoving the particular aside. Maybe: he's forgotten most of the theology they made him absorb."

"Harry is happy to go to Eccles' church. Not merely out of uneasy affection for Eccles, though there's that; but because he considers himself happy, lucky, blessed, forgiven, and wants to give thanks. His feeling that there is an unseen world is instinctive, and more of his actions than anyone suspects constitute transactions with it."

"Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the 'going through' quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blown inside out. He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of paradox. His eyes turn toward the light however it catches his retinas."

-----excerpts from "Rabbit Run" by John Updike

My review of the Coen Brother's Movies. "Do it my way, or watch your butts."

Movie Year Grade

Blood Simple 1984 A-
Crimewave 1985 n/a
Raising Arizona 1987 A
Miller's Crossing 1990 A
Barton Fink 1991 A+
The Hudsucker Proxy 1994 B
Fargo 1996 B+
The Big Lebowski 1998 A
O Brother, Where Art Thou 2000 A
The Man Who Wasn't There 2001 A-

Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

-----Norman Mailer

"Mr. Bush, God bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that with
vital operations coming up against Iraq and others, it's in our
interest, as Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as
possible, and, after all, that can't be much harder than stabilizing a
roomful of supermodels who've just had their drugs taken away."

-----Dennis Miller on the current situation in Palestine

"There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. I've know such a time, and, what's more, I shan't now pretend to pull a long face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from want of moral---moral---what shall I say?---posture, or from some other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your tables without any real necessity---from habit, from cowardice, from good nature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons."

"It was solemn, and a little ridiculous, too, as they always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalty of its failure."

"A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person----this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well---the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds."

----- Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

"My earliest memory of Larry was when we were starting off. We were at our first rehearsal in his kitchen and all these girls kept climbing over the walls and looking in the window at Larry. Larry just shouted at them and told them to go away. And then turned the hose on them! Larry likes to play drums." -- Bono

"Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don't believe in it---that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way----part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate---I wish I had more time to tell you only a fragment. We're an ass-backward people, though. You might even beat the game. It's really a very crude affair. Really pre-Renaissance---and that game has been analyzed, put down in books. But down here they've forgotten to take care of the books and that's your opportunity. You're hidden right out in the open---that is, you would be if you only realized it. They wouldn't see you because they don't expect you to know anything, since they believe they've taken care of that. . . . ."

-----The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

"The tremulous scrupulosity of those who are obsessed with pleasures they love and fear narrows their souls and makes it impossible for them to get away from their own flesh. They have tried to become spiritual by worrying about the flesh, and as a result they are haunted by it. They have ended in the flesh because they began in it, and the fruit of their anxious asceticism is that they "use things not," but do so as if they used them. In their very self-denial they defile themselves with what they pretend to avoid. They do not have the pleasure they seek, but they taste the bitter discouragement, the feeling of guilt which they would like to escape. This is not the way of the spirit. For when our intention is directed to God, our very use of material things sanctifies both them and us, provided we use them without selfishness or presumption, glad to receive them from Him who loves us and whose love is all we desire."

-----"No Man Is An Island", Thomas Merton

"Indifference to evil is the enemy of good, for indifference is the enemy of everything that exalts the honor of man. We fight indifference through education; we diminish it through compassion. The most efficient remedy? Memory.

To remember means to recognize a time other than the present; to remember means to acknowledge the possibility of a dialogue. In recalling an event, I provoke its rebirth in me. In evoking a face, I place myself in relationship to it. In remembering a landscape, I oppose it to the walls that imprison me. The memory of an ancient joy or defeat is proof that nothing is definitive, nor is it irrevocable. To live through a catastrophe is bad; to forget it is worse."

-----On Sept. 11, 2001, Elie Wiesel

This week's New Yorker has some good articles in it, the best of which is probably Claudia Pierpont's piece on Nietzsche. The article can be found here:

www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?020408crbo_books

It's a very good piece which somehow manages to tie Nietzsche's life in with his thought (I've always believed this to be important, but I've never seen it accomplished so succinctly). It's a sympathetic, but not sychophantic, view of his major works and how his life shaped how his works were brought into being and interpreted.

Read it.

"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut."

------The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

. . . and so he parted ways with the Postmodernists. . . .

In the book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Hunter S. Thompson talks about standing on a rise outside Vegas at the end of a particularly long and frightening drug trip. In that scene Thompson commented on how he could almost see where the wave of the 60's broke over Vegas and then pulled back. As if the 60's had risen to a great height and beauty and then crashed violently leaving behind a huge void.

In a strange way, Easter Sunday reminds me of Thompson's underground homage to 60's drug culture. . . . all the sins of church-people throughout history. . . .rising up like a great big gaudy/hallucinatory wave crashing on the shore of Christendom, at the feet of Christ.

I consider my own life, the sins of it, no less ridiculous and futile than Thompson's sojourn through the drug culture.

But thanks be to God that he sent his son Jesus to stand in our place and renew us through his great sacrifice. He died so that we will never have to, so that we might have eternal life. Remember it today, believe it, take comfort in it. Don't settle for what Thompson settles for. . . don't settle for making beauty out of suffering alone.

Life is not in the mess, life is in looking through the mess at the joy set before us in the Resurrection of Christ.

"I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this. It is not in my nature to make myself responsible for other people. I find it hard enough to pick my own way along."

"Women think that beauty lies in approximation to a harmonious norm. The only reason why they fail to make themselves indistinguishably similar is that they lack the time and the money and the technique."

"Subtle people, like myself, can see too much ever to give a straight answer. Aspects have always been my trouble."

"What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air?"

"I was greatly attached to her, but I could see even then that her character was not all that it should be. Anna is one of those women who cannot bear to reject any offer of love. It is not exactly that it flatters her. She has a talent for personal relations, and she yearns for love as a poet yearns for an audience. To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative, and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. . . . This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others. Or sometimes she would try another technique, that of deadening, by small and steady shocks, the sharpness of jealousy, until in the end the victim became resigned to the liberal scope of her affections, while remaining just as much her slave as ever. I don't care for this; and I saw through Anna very rapidly. Yet my interpretation of her never robbed her of her mystery, nor did her emotional promiscuity ever turn me against her. Perhaps this was because I so constantly felt, like the warm breeze that blows from a longed-for island bringing the seafarer the scent of flowers and fruit, the strength and reality of her tenderness for me. I knew that it was very possible that it was with exactly this charm that she held all her admirers. But it made no difference."

-----Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
That there is nothing, just a seeming,
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
As if snatched up by the hands of theives.

------Hope, by Czeslaw Milosz

Papa was, he still is, such a dude. And I resemble him, inevitably. Sons are bound to pick up the graces and gestures of their daddies. I was using his conventional tricks and mannerisms before I could know what I was doing. In what follows I may appear to poke fun at him. Disavowal is useless. One is forever finding pockets of venom beside one's best feelings, so let's not ask for the moon. . . . .

Mother didn't like to discuss my attachment to Benn, whereas Father was forever digging up my motives. He said, 'Kenneth, you're one of those continuing-education types and you think Benn still has something to teach you. In return, you have to take care of him because, as Aristophanes would say, he's got his head up his ass.' (Dad disliked vulgar expressions and always found a respectable sponsor for them.)

-----More Die of Heartbreak, Saul Bellow

Life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to "figure it out" or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know, moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody's claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is, as Blake said, holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, not humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters.

------Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, Wendell Berry

"When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the post-pubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants."

-----The River Why, David James Duncan