Thoughts After A Whidbey Island Landslide

Thousands of feet of earth tore away from a bluff just before Easter on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, where my husband and I live. Whidbey Island, with 168 square miles of land, is one of the larger islands in the continental U.S., so most of Whidbey remains intact, and no one was seriously injured in the slide, though one home, so far, has been destroyed. Other homes sit precariously in danger of future sliding and have basically lost their monetary value.

In fact, all of us, whether we live on unstable soil or not, are never far from losing all that we have in some freak “black swan” event. Tornadoes, meteorites, prolonged droughts, or massive flooding are possible almost anywhere. Recessions can reduce the life savings of ordinary, hardworking citizens and threaten investment in homes.

Such possibilities are sobering when we consider how much time and money many of us have spent in obtaining material possessions.

Should we then become wandering hermits? If God so leads, but Jesus, whom I follow as a Christian, talked of the love of material possessions as the problem, not the possessions themselves. He himself accepted invitations to a good meal, even a banquet, when he had the opportunity. However, it was the community which was important, not the trappings.

Best to avoid major debt or excessive yearning after things, but enjoyment from honest toil, is not forbidden. One of our lifelong tasks is to find the balance between enjoying our material blessings and using them to advance the larger community, including the vulnerable and the have-nots. One way or another, we will lose our physical possessions, if not at the present time, then when we leave this life. They are on loan to us, and I believe we will one day be called to account as to how we used the loan.

Easter Meditation: Christians Grounded in Two-Thousand Years of History

The course of Christianity has been marked by pulsations of advance, retreat, and advance.

–Kenneth Scott Latourette, Volume I, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age

Christianity is a faith that is solidly grounded in history.

–Robert L. Thomas and Stanley N. Gundry, preface to The NIV Harmony of the Gospels

That history includes periods we’d like to forget but can’t because of their lingering influence. Reasons for the Crusades of the Middle Ages were as much economic as religious, a desire for new lands and wealth. We inherit fallout from the Crusades to this day in many of the conflicts in the Middle East.

Colonizations in the Americas evidenced the same split personality. Jamestown vied with Plymouth. Our country inherits this conflict, careening back and forth, stressing economics at one time and community in another.

Some Christians lived more closely to what Jesus taught than others. While Crusaders marched, religious orders treated the ill and destitute in Europe. As the industrial age dawned in the 1700’s, with its disregard for the vulnerable, Christians began schools for children of the poor. They fought against slavery and inhumane working conditions and crowded prisons.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, so the saying goes. Sudden change burst on the world stage—terrorist attacks or revolutions in Arab nations. Others creep in more slowly—social changes due to increased numbers of women in the work force or new methods of birth control. In either case, knowledge of history gives us a better ability to develop reasoned and compassionate responses to such changes.

We Are In For It

“We have got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline will be upon us. This is new to us. It will be hard for us. But we are in for it and the only question is whether we shall know it soon enough.”

A former head of the U.S. State Department, Dean Acheson, made this statement on June 4, 1946. Spoken over six decades ago, the words remain relevant.

The United States had just emerged victorious from World War II as the world’s remaining “superpower.” (Sound familiar?) Understandable that the country wanted to rest and enjoy prosperity. Yet the Cold War confrontations with the Soviet Union were just beginning. For over forty years, we inhabited a MAD world (Mutual Assured Destruction).

We made mistakes, but responsible (if not always perfect) leaders kept us from detonating the nuclear war we feared. When the communist world collapsed, the United States was, once again, the world’s remaining superpower. We were, however, respected more for our inclusive government, for allowing dissent, for our burgeoning middle class, for our ability to engage in civil discussion, for a democracy that worked for its citizens.

We talked of a peace dividend, but within the decade, attacks from radicals left us little time to enjoy “peace.” Challenges come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, and North Korea, to name a few.

How well will we carry out this round? Do we even realize what the contest is about? Can we manage without unwise resort to power politics? Or can we discipline ourselves as a people and choose the moral high ground, those characteristics that once made us the envy of the world?

Behind the Scenes When a VIP Travels Abroad

President Obama is scheduled to return home today from his trip to the Middle East. The schedule for his trip fits on one sheet of paper. Behind the scenes, complex planning bolsters each phase, as American embassy and consulate staffs direct every detail.

I was never in on a visit from a trip by the U.S. president when I worked at U.S. diplomatic posts overseas, but I remember one by the United States First Lady and several by the Secretary of State. Embassy officers planned official meetings, visits to tourism sites, and gifts to be given. “Control” officers were assigned each major player to guide their every move. You didn’t want an official lost while trying to find the way to a restroom. Security, drivers, and routes had to be plotted in the minutest detail, not to mention interpreters for different languages.

Some of the preparation for a high-level visit made its way into my novel Searching for Home, the story of Hannah and Patrick’s journey toward a deeper relationship while a part of embassy communities. Patrick, a political officer in charge of the visit of a high level visitor, bemoans the visitor’s choice of the time to visit, during a local holiday.

“That’s the way it usually is. They come on our holidays, not theirs.”

Hannah, his new wife, recently arrived to embassy life, asks what’s involved.

“We have to arrange meetings. Photo ops. Every minute, all the logistics, even the drivers have to be plotted like a movie spectacular. Prepare briefings about everybody she’ll meet. Do up talking points. Write up her speeches. . . . We’re thinking about a trip to one of the tourist hotels on the edge of the Sahara. Maybe take her to Kairouan to look at the rugs they weave there.”

Despite the work, high level visits allow face-to-face meetings in local space that can lead to better understanding between nations. The “kitchen” debate between President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in July 1959 remains a classic to this day.

“The shrewd Khrushchev came away from his personal duel of words with Nixon persuaded that the advocate of capitalism was not just tough-minded but strong-willed,” wrote William Safire in The New York Times.

Iraq, Ten Years Out, and Almost Forty for Vietnam

The late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas wrote a book in 1966 called The Arrogance of Power. Fulbright was the longtime chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was respected for his knowledge of foreign relations and was strongly anti-Communist. However, he spoke out against America’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia that eventually led to the Vietnamese conflict.

He did not fear, he said, that the United States would seek to dominate in the manner of a Hitler or a Napoleon. He feared rather that we would drift into commitments that were beyond our capacity to honor. We should, he suggested, confine ourselves to doing only those things that truly matter to us.

Like another senator known for his foreign policy expertise, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Fulbright was eventually defeated in his party’s primary. Politicians risk losing their constituency when they emphasize global concerns. “All politics is local,” U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once said.

Are we concerned only for our, admittedly important, domestic concerns?

Perhaps we would never have committed so much blood and treasure to Viet Nam, now a byword for a failed U.S. foreign policy, if we, the people, took more time to understand the rest of the world. And what about Iraq, ten years out? Was it worth it?

Email in the Afternoon

The Internet entices like a box of delicate chocolates. Once you start, you don’t want to stop.

Our ancestors managed without checking the next six hours of weather every three hours, or following Britney Spears or Lady Gaga’s latest doings, or watching cute videos on YouTube. Do I even need to journey several hours through more serious stuff: the current Washington debacle, the latest on North Korea, or the most recent crisis in the Middle East? The Internet has a tendency to suck you in forever because it is limitless. If not managed, it leaves no time for real life.

A while back, I noticed the time I spent checking email, Twitter, Facebook, and the news. I decided to wait until afternoon and limit myself to less than an hour. In the evening, when I’m less productive, I allow myself to explore, for an hour or so, the unlimited links of the Internet world. Even so, I must guard against the monster gobbling up my reading time.

My life is more productive and more fulfilled after I snatched it back from the vortex. It’s my life. It doesn’t belong to unfettered digital wanderings any more than it belongs to drugs or other addictions.

I can exercise on my stationary bike and read my print newspaper and actually finish it. It doesn’t have a hundred links that tempt me to wander forever down the halls of the Internet.

Like other virtues with a potential to morph into vices, the Internet is a wonderful servant and a terrible master.

Hippies, Flower Children, and Other Heralds of Our Time

“Stories about World War II, Pearl Harbor, and the like, are always popular,” an editor told me. By contrast, I find more intriguing the decades following this war, the decades of the hippies and the flower children. If the child is father of the man, as the poet William Wordsworth wrote, these years spawned the present that we now inhabit.

The turbulent sixties and the years following led to 1989, the watershed year of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The texts and twitters of the Arab Spring in 2011 and beyond mirrored the earlier events.

All wars change the societies that experience them. World War II brought the United States, kicking and screaming, onto the world stage. We have often played our role reluctantly, much more interested in domestic issues. The Vietnam War tore the country apart. The meshing of the antiwar movement and the New Age reverberates with us to this day, precursor of current polarization.

Quiet Deception, a novel of mine billed as a mystery, follows the protagonist, a college professor, from the days, seemingly so innocent, of his childhood shortly after World War II. His participation in the horrifying Vietnamese conflict transforms him. He stumbles into the society that follows, with its loosening of age old constraints.

How he and the other characters resolve the jarring collision of tectonic plates from two eras is the subtext of the mystery’s solution.

Secular and Religious: A Certain Nervousness

A secular professional of the Christian persuasion is careful not to push his views on his colleagues. Yet he senses unease about religion in any form, he says.

Many in our society know little about religion, including Christianity. They are not so much antagonistic toward faith as uneasy. They view religious people somewhat like they view a nice salesperson who loves his product but which the nonreligious person could care less about. To others, all religion seems extreme, full of adherents who are angry and judgmental and want to force the uncommitted to follow their way, as in the days of the Spanish Inquisition.

To the religious, religion seems natural. To the nonreligious, religion seems irrelevant.

Religion to the non-religious isn’t about hope and healing for the hurt and wounded. It’s the hatreds that spawned 9/ll. It isn’t about submission to eternal truths but about women being forced to endure physical abuse because God wills women to be subservient. It isn’t linking to truths about purpose and meaning but ignoring closed minds and name-calling.

A disconnect exists like two ships passing in the night. A suggestion for connection: What happens if those with faith live so that the nonreligious envy what they see?

We Have No Walls Around Our Cities—Except For Gated Communities

Fortified walls surrounded towns of any size throughout history until recent times. Some early towns in the United States began as stockades or forts. Most of us in the United States, however, with our suburban-surrounded cities, never think about walls. We have no ruined walls, no gates to pass through, as do cities in older civilizations as a reminder that bandits and enemies were a constant threat in earlier times.

Central authority in those days was nonexistent or too weak to provide adequate safeguards against wrong-doers. Barons and warlords provided what protection there was. (Today we see the same sort of “protection” by weapons-ruled warlords in countries like Somalia.)

As populations grew in Europe and elsewhere, law-abiding citizens came together to provide, not only publicly supported military and police, but also schools and hospitals and fire halls.

Lately, some note a trend toward the establishment of private good over public good for those who can afford it: gated communities, expensive private schools, nannies for stay-at-home childcare. Even the all-volunteer army might be seen as a way to pay others to do our fighting (usually the less well off) instead of requiring every citizen to serve in the military or perform service work before beginning family and career.

Those with money buy computers and tablets in a world that divides the digitally adept from the digitally challenged, establishing a kind of electronic barrier. We digitally adept join electronic communities in which we never talk over coffee or walk together, listening to the silence as well as each other.

T.S. Eliot died before the age of computers, but his poem “The Rock” is strangely prophetic:

Where is the life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

From Vietnam to Anti-War Protester to Syria and Iran

In his first trip abroad as U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry spoke to a Facebook gathering of youth in Berlin. One questioner asked “And since you have served the Army [actually Kerry served in the Navy], what exactly made you an opponent of the Vietnam War and maybe of war in general?”

Kerry answered that he went to Vietnam because he wanted to serve his country, and his country’s leaders said that the conflict there had “strategic implications for the country.” Instead he came to believe that the conflict was NOT strategic to America’s interests but was instead a civil war between Vietnamese. That’s why he led Veterans Against the War on his return.

Some wars must be fought, when America’s interests are directly attacked, Kerry said, but not “wars of choice.” Others have warned against being drawn into war when American interests are not directly affected.

Kerry was careful to emphasize our strong relationship with the European allies he is visiting, because they are based on mutual interests of strong democracies in a dangerous world. For decades we helped protect allies there from the Soviet Union until democracy replaced most of the communist regimes in eastern Europe. Europe was and is a strategic interest for us.

But what about countries like Syria and Iran? The U.S. and Europe have an interest in the war in Syria not turning into a dangerous regional conflict, with terrorists gaining a foothold, and Iran not becoming a nuclear power. We do not, however, want to send troops into what is a civil war.

These will continue to be subjects Kerry and others will discuss with allies. The ghosts of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan will stand as backdrop to their decisions.

At each step on Kerry’s trip, Syria and Iran have been topics of discussion. How do we encourage the non-terrorist opposition without ourselves become too embroiled in this civil war? How do we find the “right” sides to aid?

Work/Life Balance: Which Side Does the Scale Tip Toward?

Hillary Clinton, who recently stepped down as Secretary of the U.S. State Department, spoke in October to a gathering that explored work/life balance. She talked of the time her child was born in 1980, and she demanded and received a four-month leave to be with her new daughter.

During her tenure as Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton advocated worldwide rights for women at the same time she mandated family-friendly policies for the State Department.

Current articles often cite the percentage of women in particular roles, such as CEO’s, or the percentage of women choosing certain courses of study, like the much-publicized STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

Women have long been stereotyped. We now understand that women’s talents are needed as much as men’s, but does that mean the days of the “full-time” wife and mother are over?

If some women choose not to enter the paid labor force (provided they can afford to opt out), their actions will skew the numbers to less than fifty percent of women in it. Is that a tragedy? Should we provide day care so that a mother has no excuse not to work outside the home even if she’d rather stay there with her young child?

Will the choice of staying “at home” lead to frustrated empty nesters later in life, as they, perhaps, search for a career they can no longer have because they are beginning too late? Or is there such a person who enjoys taking care of others, not only children but also the hungry who come to food kitchens, the disadvantaged who need tutoring, and so on. Do some men gravitate toward this calling?

Many of our programs, like one that nurtures at-risk mothers for the first two years of her child’s life, are necessary because we lack natural “nurturers.” Nurturing, it seems, is needed as much as engineering and computer networking.

How shall we work out this dilemma? Where will our nurturers come from?

Send/Receive/Delete

A recent survey found that fewer people use email now. The survey didn’t say, but presumably we use cell phones to text or leave messages more than we send emails.

How long has the general population used email? A little over a decade? And already it’s passé.

We ceased writing letters long ago. For some of us, letters seem on a par with medieval manuscripts. Now email is equated with the old snail mail, as texting takes over.

From both email and texts, we delete much of what we receive, and much of what we send to others is deleted. We live in a send/receive/delete world

We form and delete relationships as well. Americans have always been on the move, changing houses and jobs. Now we pass from one relationship to another with little thought.

Perhaps this generation should be called the Delete Generation.

Yet a yearning seeps from our millions of electronic words—for permanence, for “a city not made with hands.” We seek lasting community

Ritual and Relevance

“While many congregations modify their music, order of worship, and sermon topics in an attempt to make church ‘relevant’ for newer generations, I am more interested in figuring out how I fit into the rich and complicated tradition of Christianity than in asking how Christianity can be molded to meet my needs. My desire to receive Communion . . .wasn’t about the individual act of taking bread and wine. It was about a deep need to connect with God and others beyond myself.” (Anne Marie Roderick, from “‘Relevance’ Is Not Enough,” Soujourners, February, 2013, Anne Marie Roderick and Joshua Witchger)

Recent articles evidence a desire to return to the ancient rituals and disciplines of the Christian church. Perhaps the yearning stems from an age that has stressed individualism to the extreme. Self-discipline has appeared an anathema to this age, hardly mentioned in fact.

The lack of sexual discipline is often remarked on, but perhaps the increased numbers of obese Americans at the same time is not a coincidence. Both obesity and sexual license became part of the mainstream soon after the mall age began. Our culture of sex, food, and shopping slipped upon us hand in hand.

The antidote may lie less in condemnation of lust, gluttony, and greed as by a call, once again, to a disciplined life.

With that in mind, I am rereading Celebration of Discipline, by Richard J. Foster. Discipline is something to be celebrated. The world waits for it, Foster says.

Meteors, iPads, and Neighbors

My neighbor calls. “Are you all right?” she asks.

“As far as I know,” I reply. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, it’s ten in the morning, and your back light is still on.”

I laugh. “We’re fine. Ben got into the news on his iPad, and we haven’t been down for the paper yet.”

I hang up. Comforting to know, in a age when images of a meter falling to the ground in Russia are instantly beamed to our iPads, that folks still keep track of a neighbor’s porch light.

Celebrating Celibacy on Valentine’s Day

Our culture encourages the young to find a “partner” as soon as they hit puberty. If parents try to persuade their children to practice patience, they may encourage them with the idea that they will be showered with blissful happiness in later unions if they only “wait.”

A study quoted in The Economist indicated that “waiting” may indeed bring added satisfaction in several areas of married life. However, some will never marry because they will never find what used to be called “the right one.” Others will not find in marriage all they were looking for. Some will divorce. Some will enjoy wonderful marriages, but one of the spouses will die early or suffer serious illness.

A few years ago on my mother’s death at 97, we sorted through her papers and found letters she and my father had written to each other. They blazed with passion. My mother and father, I believe, loved each other in every way it is possible for a husband and wife to love. However, at the age of 53, my father died of a heart attack. My mother lived longer as a widow than she had as a married woman. She lived those years to the fullest, enjoying friends, travel, parties, celebrations, and for much of it, a job she loved.

Perhaps we should consider a new standard: that we are called to celibacy until and unless we are called to marriage. Yes, unintended pregnancy and disease are reasons for celibacy, but not the chief reason. Young people need a solitary time to discover themselves, their callings, and their purposes in this life. And for some, celibacy is a life-long calling, a time to devote themselves whole-heartedly to a vocation they may better fulfil without a partner.

Be Fruitful and Multiply and Fill the Earth

So reads the book of Genesis. Some, pointing to resources strained by growing populations, would say we’ve already been fruitful enough. One woman apparently struck a chord when she said she’d considered and deliberately decided not to have children. Apparently, other women felt as though she’d helped them come out of the closet. They said her column liberated them to express their reasons for opting out of motherhood.

We line up on one side or the other, suggesting reasons for or against having children. It’s certainly possible to be fulfilled without motherhood—or fatherhood, for that matter.

The thought struck me from out of nowhere, however, that as I grow older and understand that I’m going to die—in the next hour, the next year, thirty years from now, whenever, that I’m glad I’ve left children for the world. It has nothing to do with support or companionship in declining years. It has to do with my children as gift, with the hope that they will become useful citizens and give something to the world that makes it a better place.

We leave legacies. The legacies may or may not pan out as we wish. Career goals may be met, met partially, or not at all. The point is that, if we reach mature understanding, we live not just for ourselves, who will pass away in a short time, but to serve the greater good.

Motherhood is a career with legacies also. Perhaps our hope in raising children is that they will continue to serve this greater good when we no longer can. We want them to bring love, joy, peace, and other such fruit to a dysfunctional world. Surely we would welcome this kind of fruit and hope that it might fill the earth.

Post-Christian or Post-Christendom?

“Do you think we’re in a post-Christian age, like a lot of people say?” asked Taylor.

Patrick leaned forward. “To talk about post-Christian seems a bit chauvinistic to me—Western chauvinistic, I mean. I think I’d use the term post-Christendom. Christianity seems to be retreating in large parts of what we call the West, but it’s growing rapidly in much of the rest of the world.”

—From my novel Searching for Home

Do we live in a post-Christian era or a post-Christendom one? The difference in naming is critical. One is oriented toward previous Western dominance, the other is more inclusive.

The term Christendom denotes a time when European countries espoused a common faith. Christianity may or may not be thinning in Europe and North America. It is certainly not diminishing in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Fiction and the Believer in the Post-Christian Era

“Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.”

–Paul Elie, “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith,” The New York Times, December 23, 2012.

Mr. Elie has written such books as Reinventing Bach and The Life You Save May be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage . In its review of his writing on Bach, The Economist stated:”Mr Elie deploys considerable scholarship (the more notable since his previous book, about four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God, had nothing to do with music), and he writes beautifully.”

Mr. Elie says in his article: “. . . if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called ‘Christian convictions,’ their would-be successors are thin on the ground.”

So should this lack suggest despair?

“People of faith,” Elie states, “see decline and fall. Their detractors see a people threatening a rear-guard political action, or a people left behind.” Elie, however, seems excited by the new place Christian writers find themselves. “This development places the believer on a frontier again, at the beginning of a new adventure; . . . ”

We Christians, whether writers or not, can avoid acting as though our feelings are hurt because Christian culture no longer occupies the dominant position in our society. An old adage illustrates the times we live in: Some see crisis as danger; to others, it is an opportunity.

New Secretary of State; Thoughts on Christian Conscience and Diplomacy

John Kerry is now slated to head the Department of State, home for U.S. diplomacy.

An age ago when the Cold War with the Soviet Union was at its height, a famous American diplomat made the following observations:

” . . . while Christian values often are involved in the issues of American conflict with the Soviet power, we cannot conclude that everything we want automatically reflects the purpose of God and everything the Russians want reflects the purposes of the devil. . . . We must concede the possibility that there might be some areas of conflict involved in this cold war which a Divine Power could contemplate only with a sense of pity and disgust for both parties, and others in which He might even consider us to be wrong.”

The diplomat, George F. Kennan, advocated that his beloved country take the high ground, that it develop its moral principles first and that military power only be used when absolutely necessary.

Further, he said:

“A government can pursue its purpose in a patient and conciliatory and understanding way, respecting the interests of others and infusing its behavior with a high standard of decency and honesty and humanity, or it can show itself petty, exacting, devious, and self-righteous. If it behaves badly, even the most worthy of its purposes will be apt to be polluted, whereas sheer good manners will bring some measure of redemption to even the most disastrous undertaking.”

These quotations are taken from “Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience” which The Atlantic Monthly published in May, 1959.

The U.S. never fought the Soviet Union directly in a war that may well have involved nuclear weapons. Kennan’s influence in no small part led the country to wait patiently. Eventually the Soviet Union caved from its own weaknesses, as Kennan had predicted.

Religion’s Major Role in the New World Order

In the late 1970’s, Iranian students, inspired by Islamic leaders, seized the United States embassy in Tehran.

Thumbing their noses at international law, they held U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days. Religion entered as a major actor on the world stage. Over three decades later, the murder of American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, by religious terrorists indicates that the religious script is still in play.

What happened? Though at the time of the Iranian revolution, the Soviet Union would not tumble for a few more years, the Cold War was thawing. The United States and the Soviet Union signed agreements limiting nuclear weapons. Egypt and Israel endorsed the Camp David accords. Optimists saw glimpses of an upward march to worldwide peace, individual freedom, and economic advancement.

Not all were buying in. The money from Iran’s oil industry allowed Western-style consumerism that seemed empty to many Iranians.

The student revolt was nationalistic, an attempt to root out foreign influence and government brutality, but it included yearnings for a less secular culture. Now recent revolts in Tunisia and Egypt have dethroned secular governments and elected Islamists.

How can the United States, which prizes freedom of religion for all its citizens, deal with states whose laws favor one specific religion?

In recognition of the need for more understanding, the U.S. State Department created the position of an Ambassador for International Religious Freedom in 1998. Its mission is to promote religious freedom as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy. The report for religious freedom in 2011 is now public.

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective