Born again

Former NBC news anchor John Chancellor brought two phenomena to the fore during the 1976 presidential campaign. He was the first to coin "red state" and "blue state" as descriptors for how states voted in a presidential election. He also introduced the American public to what it meant to be "born again." As in "born-again Christian."

Actually, it was born-again candidate Jimmy Carter who brought evangelicals out of the political underbrush and "born agains" into the light of day. But it was Chancellor, in a nationally televised interview with Carter, who elevated the term into public discourse by asking what much of Middle America wanted to know: What exactly is this business of being "born again?"

(Ever the intrepid journalist, Chancellor prefaced his questioning with the reportorial assurance: "We've looked up born again, and it is nothing new." Columnist Cal Thomas wrote years later, "The term wasn't invented by Jimmy Carter, though the one who coined it had the same initials.")

It seems a silly question now. For nearly 30 years, abetted by the success of Carter's successor Ronald Reagan and his political operatives, evangelicals became major players in U.S. politics. Born again was no longer a foreign-sounding phrase.

But like so many religious concepts made into sound bytes, "born again" has been caricatured and delimited until it seems only to define a demographic with a penchant toward conservative politics.

Deep religious truths don't fare well when they become slogans, especially when appropriated for political reasons. It was refreshing, then, to come across these lines this week from Diary of an Old Soul, by George MacDonald:

"But we who would be born again indeed,
Must wake our souls unnumbered times a day."

Being born again is nothing less than committing one's self, day by day, moment by moment even, to being in conscious awareness of God. That is a deeply spiritual exercise. Once engaged, we may or may not say we are born again. But we can always say we hope to be.

Original posts at http://wrigleypreacher.blogspot.com

The Julie/Julia Project

Something about the movie has stayed with me, like the richness of coq o vin that lingers on the palate. Julia Child was little more to me than an easy voice to impersonate until I watched the film. (I've not attempted French cooking, personally, although Chicago's now-closed Ambria made me a fan.)

But it's Julie's story as much as Julia's that intrigues me. Is it because Julie Powell wrote herself out of a cubicle job into fame as a writer? Perhaps. But I think it's more because she connected with her passion, followed it, believed in it even when she questioned it, and somehow – perhaps most miraculously – brought those she loved along with her.

Here’s Julie Powell’s original blog:

http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/08/25.html

And here’s her current blog, What Could Happen?

http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/

Bonne lecture!

Photo of Julie Powell by Salon.com

A pearl in a gold mine

I go looking for gold and instead find a pearl. So it goes every week as I craft a sermon.

You've done it, too, although maybe not sermonizing. You know, you're looking for a missing earring underneath the dresser, and instead you find a $5 bill.

Sidney Harris, a syndicated journalist, used to write an occasional column called "Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things." He also found pearls while he was looking for gold.

So this week's find -- while I was researching Christian unity (or disunity) -- was this bit of wisdom about the church's willingness to change.

It's from the Alban Institute's Daniel P. Smith and Mary K. Sellon, authors of Pathway to Renewal: Practical Steps for Congregations (courtesy of Homiletics Online):

“Your congregation is what it is today not because of what a bad pastor did to it, or because the neighborhood has changed or because our culture is going to hell in a handbasket. Although those occurrences and many others have had an impact, your congregation is what it is today because of how it responded, or failed to respond, to the realities it faced.

"What your congregation will be in the future is up to you and the other members and how you work together to create something new from the realities you face. What you do or don’t do now will make the difference. Your actions will either reinforce the patterns that have become established in your congregation or start to counter and shift them. The leadership provided by your pastor can help or hinder, but it cannot make your congregation succeed or keep it from ultimately achieving the goals you set for yourselves.”

If you're part of a church, that's food for thought. If you're not, and you've read this far, maybe there's a congregation nearby whose newly discovered reality includes you.

Original posts at http://wrigleypreacher.blogspot.com
Image by NaturalyPure

Purls of Wisdom

Today's entry on my wife's knitting desk calendar reads:

"Knitters are frequently accused of being obsessed with the process and the stuff we use to do it with. I think that sounds sort of negative. Instead of describing myself as 'obsessed with knitting,' I prefer to think of my lifestyle as exquisitely focused in a very narrow direction."

Knitting, baseball, God ... fill in the blank. It works.

High school reunion

Beverly Clark sits on the end of a bed, confessing to an acquaintance her fear of losing her husband. Her deepest lament? “We need a witness to our lives,” says Clark, played by Susan Sarandon in Shall We Dance. “There's a billion people on the planet … I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things ... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying, ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.’ ”

Some of us have been blessed by spouses or partners. Others have led lives as single people. Others have been married, then not, then maybe partnered anew. Which really isn’t the point here.

The point is, who are the witnesses to our life?

Our class is having its 30th high school reunion this weekend. We’ll blow three decades of dust off memories that have accumulated like so many old record albums in some closet of our brain. What is the allure of going back, metaphorically if not literally?

For some, I suppose it’s to be reminded of the days when life seemed simpler. Or of how little we’ve changed. Or of how much we have.

But these friends really are unique witnesses to our lives.

Beverly Clark feared losing her husband because he came home late, night after night. Ultimately, her fears were unfounded. He (Richard Gere) had been out taking dancing lessons in hopes of rekindling their relationship.

Those of us who spent years together through high school and then went our separate ways – we’ve been out learning lessons, too, dancing or otherwise. After being gone so long, we’ll come back home to remind ourselves that in a world of relative anonymity, we are rare witnesses to the long spans of our respective lives.

Photo courtesy of Helen Bryan

Paint it Blue

Photo © Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune

A ball falls between three Cubs fielders in a Friday afternoon loss to the St. Louis Cardinals at Wrigley Field.

Not that it's taken me 38 years of being a Cubs fan to figure this out, but the obvious became moreso this weekend: the reason one remains a Cubs fan is that when they win, Wrigley Field is more fun than any ballpark in America. When they lose, none is more blue.

So it's for the former that I stick it out. I've just got to work on my timing.

Friday, we're in the 10th row, directly behind home plate. The Cubs implode in the 6th inning and lose 8-3 to St. Louis.

Today, we're listening to the car radio on the way home, and the fading crackle of AM-720 is barely audible as the Cubs beat those same Cardinals 5-2. And Wrigley is singing again.

So, we went the wrong day. But that is a long-established corollary of my life as a Cub fan, two others being primary among them:

• The outcome of the game is inversely proportional to the quality of my seats. (I've seen a lot of victories from the upper deck and watched a lot of losses from the box seats.)


• Never get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the game; the other team will hit a home run. (Friday: top of the 5th, I go to the men's room and Albert Pujols parks a fastball in the center field bleachers. Sixth straight game that's happened. Next time, I'm not even drinking water on game days.)

Road trip

What do you take on a two-day road trip? I mean, packing light is sort of the point of a road trip, isn't it? If you have to pack at all? Jump in the car (preferably a convertible), some cash in your wallet, a baseball cap, and you're off. It's not like a vacation, where you need different pairs of shoes, clothes for changing weather, several pairs of socks, toiletries beyond your toothbrush, a lint brush if your hosts have a cat ...

Because I essentially live in two places nine months of the year, I've become an obsessively minimalist traveler. I don't even like lugging my laptop anymore. With cargo shorts, a good pair of walking shoes and two pair of tech-fabric travel underwear, you can be pretty minimalist. At least for five months out of the year.

Don't have a convertible, but I'm heading out anyway.

Madison, Evanston, the El, Wrigley Field, Milwaukee, 48 hours. Begins now.

Why major in journalism?

Those of us who did (30 years ago) found plenty of reasons. But it was always a question worth asking. For example, would it be better to study politics, science, sociology, economics, philosophy, etc., and learn "the trade" as you go?

It's an even more pressing question today, in light of journalism's rapidly changing economics (i.e. who's hiring?!).

University of Florida journalism prof Mindy McAdams tackles the question in her blog about online journalism.

Image: Senthil Kumaran

There are no coincidences

"Mt. Shuksan stands a mile above the Mt. Baker Highway." (Photo: University of Washington Libraries)

Annie Dillard is best known for writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which she explores the intersection of human, divine and nature in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia's Roanoke Valley.

This morning, two weeks after returning from the Pacific Northwest, I unwittingly discovered this passage from another of her writings:

"I came here to study hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea -- and to temper my spirit on their edges. ' Teach me thy ways, O Lord ' is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend. These mountains -- Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula -- are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world ... That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy."

(Taken from A Spiritual Field Guide: Meditations for the Outdoors, by Bernard Brady and Mark Neuzil.)

Seattle/Bellingham

Seattle skyline from the ferry deck at Bainbridge Island ... sps

Car show off Bellingham Bay ... sps

Chief coffee fetcher ... sps

Always look over your shoulder ... jmt