Life after death - or life again after death?

"What happens when we die?" is the central question of most religions. Certainly it is the central focus of the New Testament, for it is on the answer to this question that everything else about Christian religion depends - ethics and morals, for example, the question of our duties and obligations in this life.

The reason for this is summarized by a verse from the book of Hebrews: "And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that comes judgment ..." (v. 9.7). Which is to say that each of us survives the death of our bodies in a personal sense and that we are the judged by a wholly righteous God for how we lived this physical life and what we did. The passages emphasizing this point are so numerous that I hardly feel compelled to point them out. Start with Matthew 25, for example.

It would be pretty hard to find a church man or woman - or child, for that matter - who does not know that the church teaches that death is not the end of existence for human beings. Do what we teach and what we believe accord with what the Bible teaches?

Death is an enemy of God, so powerful an enemy that Paul wrote death is "the last enemy [of God] to be destroyed." And this will not happen, says Paul, until after "every rule and every authority and power" that is an enemy of God has already been destroyed.

For about 2,000 years Christians have been waiting for Christ to "put all things under his feet" and vanquish injustice, conflict, estrangement and death. In the meantime, we are born and live and die. Because the first Christians expected Jesus to return very soon, they became distressed when some of them died before Jesus had done so. Apparently, these believers thought that they would be saved by Christ only if they were still alive when Jesus returned.

In response to this fear, Paul wrote (1 Thessalonians 4:13-17),

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. 15 For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, [1] that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.

This is one of the passages some Christians use to support the idea of the Rapture, popularized by the recent "Left Behind" novels, but that topic is outside the scope of this post. On topic, here are some key things this passage points out:

1. Note the future tense of the passage: Paul is prophesying what will happen, not something that had happened or is already going on. Hence, the salvation of the dead is a future event.

2. Because Jesus died and was raised from the dead, we are enabled to look forward to the same grace, including persons who have died.

3. Those left alive at the eschaton (the return of Christ) have no advantage in salvation over those who have died. In fact, "the dead in Christ will rise first," noting again the future tense.

Clearly, we should take to heart that we should not worry whether those who die in Christian faith will be saved. Death of the physical body is no impediment to the saving grace of Christ. So, on the basis of this passage and its correlates in the New Testament, we are able to say with certainty that, as Paul later wrote, "For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8).

This really is the fundamental teaching upon which everything else is commentary.

And yet, the early Christians' question has not gone away. We do await the return of Christ, but in the meantime - and we've had a lot of meantime since Jesus' day - what is the status of the dead?

The earliest Christians were Jews in Judea and pagans outside Judea, plus some diaspora Jews living in Gentile cities such as Corinth, Greece. (The concerns about the status of the dead seems to have arisen from the converted Gentiles rather than the Jews.) Because Jesus was a Jew and the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus still considered themselves Jews, they would have instructed the Gentile converts of Jewish thought about the fate of the dead.

In that way, the Jewish Scriptures are not comforting about the grave. Here are some relevant passages.

Psalm 115:17 - The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence. (Hence, according to my close friend, Rabbi Daniel Jackson, we should avail ourselves of every opportunity to praise God in this life - while we still can! See for example Psalm 34.)

Ecclesiastes 9:5 - For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.

Psalm 39:13 - Look away from me, that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more!

Job 7:21 - Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be.

Isaiah 40:7 - The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass.

Ecclesiastes 7:2 - It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.

There are many other examples. The main thrust of the Jewish Scriptures on this subject is that death is the dissolution of the body and the end of the joys and meaning of this life. From the earliest days, the souls of the dead were thought to be consigned to Sheol, "the pit," an abode of the dead in which they are the merest shadows of their former selves. Sheol was thought literally to be in the depths of the earth and was specifically a punishment place for the wicked: "The wicked shall return to Sheol, all the nations that forget God" (Psalm 9:17), even though there is a thread in the Old Testament that it was the destiny of all who die. However Sheol as envisioned was never presented as a place to look forward to. The Psalmist, for example, repetitively prayed for deliverance from Sheol, which is to say deliverance from death.

Though the Jewish Scriptures view death entirely negatively, they are also are enormously encouraging that being dead is not the final destiny of human beings. A consistent thread throughout the Old Testament is that the righteous will be exempted from death - more precisely, the permanence of death. In the same way that the psalmist prayed for deliverance from Sheol, he praised God for (prospectively) doing so.

Psalm 86:13 - For great is your steadfast love toward me; you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.

Psalm 16:10 - For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.

Again, there are many other passages in the Jewish Bible - which was the only Bible the first Christians had - that echo this hope of deliverance from permanent death. The Jews professed great hope that the grave was not their final fate (at least not of the righteous), though death itself was viewed with abhorrence. At some time in the future, God will deliver the righteous from the corruption of death and restore them to life even more filled with God's presence than ever before.

Over time, this belief developed into a doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Concurrently, a popular Jewish belief developed that the souls of the righteous dead awaited the day of resurrection in the "bosom of Abraham" while the souls of the unrighteous were consigned to a hot, dry place where they suffered from thirst and loneliness.

Jesus may have even believed this himself. In his parable of the wretched Lazarus and an unnamed rich man (Luke 16:19-31) the soul of Lazarus is located next to Abraham while the rich man's soul suffers from thirst and "agony in these flames." The Bosom of Abraham is not heaven, but a sort of halfway house for the righteous awaiting the resurrection.

By Jesus' day this was the majority, but not universal, belief among Jews. The Sadducees rejected this belief because it did not appear in the Books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy). It was, however, firmly affirmed by the Pharisees, who were extremely influential among the Jews because of their studiousness of the Torah and devotion to faithful living as Jews under foreign occupation. Jesus, being sympathetic to the Pharisees even though often at odds with their practices, also affirmed the doctrine of resurrection (being its first practitioner, this is hardly surprising!).

Now we are ready to tackle the question, "What is the status of the dead until Christ returns?" On this question, the Church has responded in three major ways.

First: those who have died in Christ endure a Sheol-like place, without the punishment, until the eschaton, when Christ will raise them to new life. This is reflected in the Revelation of John, where the evangelist writes (6:9-11),

9 When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; 10they cried out with a loud voice, ‘Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?’ 11They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number would be complete both of their fellow-servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed.

Revelation is, of course, an apocalyptic book, written in highly visionary language. It would be a stretch to claim that its visions and beliefs were typical across all Christians of the day. Even so, there is a a good indication of belief here that the dead are basically "warehoused" until the fulfillment of the eschaton.

This belief did not survive in the Western wing of the church long. When Emperor Constantine gained control of the entire Roman Empire in the early 300s,he made Christianity the empire's official religion. The number of church people rocketed, leading to the formation of what know now as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. (These churches already existed, of course, but not in the full bureaucratic splendor they had to adopt to deal with explosions of numbers in the fourth century.) And this notion of "warehoused" souls of the dead did not survive in the Roman Catholic Church after its transformation into a bureaucratic church.

However, in the Eastern church the doctrine did survive and continues to this day. In their thought, the souls of the dead simply await the day of resurrection. The souls of the saved await in a pleasant abode of light and the souls of the unsaved suffer in darkness. But salvation is not finally accomplished until the resurrection and judgment.

Second - the souls of the dead pass immediately into heaven, purgatory or hell.

The church before Constantine was necessarily concerned foremost with literal survival. The two worst persecutions it suffered were in the 250s and very early 300s. These were quite severe. While important doctrinal issues did arise and were dealt with before Constantine, the explosion of converts after 300 more firmly established the institutionalization of doctrine and practice.

In this light, the 4th-century church was faced with two predominant tasks. One, how shall the life of Christians be ordered according to Christian principles? Two, what shall be the authority of priests and bishops in doing so?

At the 4th century's inception, about 10 percent of the empire was Christian. At century's end, about 10 percent was not Christian. To deal with this explosion of adherents, and to teach them the basics of Christian faith, the church developed its systems of catechism and sacraments, not from scratch, though, since both already existed. But they became deeply entrenched as a way of ordering the lives of the legions of new converts. They enabled the church not to have to "reinvent the wheel" over and over to cope with the influx.

The sacramental system also established the church (meaning the Pope and the priesthood) as the gateway to salvation after death. Two sacraments in particular were key to that purpose, baptism and penance.

From the earliest days, and continuing until now, the Catholic Church has held that baptism remits the guilt of original sin. And baptism also remits the guilt of volitional sins committed up until the moment of baptism. But sins committed after baptism had to be remitted another way. That is done through the sacrament of penance.

Penance consists of confession to a priest and the faithful carrying out of deeds he prescribes to remit the sins confessed. The nature of these deeds is not the issue here; suffice it is to say that baptism followed by faithful practice of confession and penitential submission were seen to guarantee that one could die with all, or almost all, sins remitted.

Long, long before the Protestant Reformation of the early 1500s, Catholics were taught that for those who died within the grace of Christ, mediated through the Church, there were one of two immediate destinies. First, if someone died with no sins left unremitted then that person's soul would fly directly to heaven. But heaven was exclusively for the sin free. The souls of those dying with some sins still unremitted went directly to purgatory where penance continued until all sins were worked off. (The only exit from purgatory led to heaven.) Not all sins can be worked off in purgatory. Based on 1 John 5.16-17, the souls of those who died either unbaptized or with unremitted "mortal" sins went directly to Hell, from which there is no exit or escape.

Protestants who adhere to this belief discard the notion of purgatory but affirm the ideas of immediate reward in heaven or punishment in Hell (although a large number of Protestants don't really believe anyone goes to Hell).

This teaching did not actually become official dogma of the Roman Catholic Church until the Catholic Counter-Reformation that began in the mid 1500s. Its pronouncement as dogma seems to have been impelled, at least in part, by Martin Luther's doctrine of "soul sleep."

Third - "Soul sleep." In the Eastern church's doctrine of a sort of afterlife waiting room, the souls of the dead are aware and in either pleasant or suffering circumstances, depending on their state of grace at death. And they know it.

In the doctrine of soul sleep, promulgated by Martin Luther and a feature of some Protestant denominations, the soul survives the death of the body but with no awareness. Think of its state as a sort of deep unconsciousness. It endures neither reward nor punishment, but simply awaits resurrection at the eschaton.

One step further than this is the idea that the human person consists of a fully integrated being of body and soul and that the soul dies along with the body. In this idea the person concerned is re-created at the resurrection by God.

"How are the dead raised up, and in what body do they come?"

Its seems clear to me from the New Testament that the apostles Paul and John did not even consider, much less affirm, the second of the above doctrines, that the souls of the dead go right away either to heaven (even with detour) or Hell. Both apostles were Jews and their apostolic calling did not change that identity as far as they were concerned. Although the concept of the soul going to heaven exists among Jews today (at least some), it's not clear that this was so 2,000 years ago or before. Heaven was seen as the place of God and his heavenly beings, not of mortals. John echoed this idea thus, "No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man" (John 3:13). In this understanding (and I am reluctant to argue with John!), mortals do not go to heaven. Instead, heaven comes to us. Hence, Revelation 21:1,

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

There were some exceptions. Paul, for example, wrote,

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. (2 Corinthians 12:2-4)

And the prophet Elijah was taken directly to heaven.

And as they still went on and talked, behold, chariots of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven (2 Kings 2:11).

For both Paul and John, the destiny of the dead is to be raised up in the general resurrection, after which comes eternal life with God.

Paul observes in 1 Corinthians 15 that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." In the resurrection, we are not raised as the bodies we enjoy in this life. "The dead," Paul writes, "will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality."

So, "If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. ... Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Paul is referring to Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [the risen Christ]." And so in Philippians Paul wrote that Christ "will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body."

While neither Paul nor another apostle actually denounce the idea that at death our souls go either to heaven, neither do they promote or affirm it. They do emphasize resurrection into eternal life, but this is always presented as a future event.

Since that is the actual hope of Christian faith, the status of the dead awaiting the resurrection seems seemed to be of no concern to the apostles. After all, "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's."

Good enough.

Postscript: What about Jesus' words to the thief on the cross, Luke 23:43? Here is the verse in its context:

39 One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." 42 Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." 43 He replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (NRSV)

There are a couple of points here. First, the term, "Paradise" is extremely rare in the New Testament, appearing only here and two other places. One is the Pauline passage I quoted above and in Rev. 2.7, where Jesus gives permission to the faithful "to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God."

"Paradise" is used in other Greek literature, referring to a cultured park or on occasion an orchard. The word was probably borrowed from the Persians where it had the same meaning.

"Paradise" does not mean heaven. In its use of Jesus' day, Paradise would have meant something close to the Bosom of Abraham in the spiritual sense, a pleasant place where one awaited the final redemption of God. The Essenes, who left us the Dead Sea Scrolls, described Paradise as a land across the sea where breezes were gentle and weather mild. (Think of Hawaii without the high costs or crowding.)

In any event, whatever Paradise meant 2,000 years ago, it did not mean the resurrection or the final fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. And we are clued into that by the thief's plea and Jesus' response.

The thief's supplication is not oriented on that same day, but to the future. He pleads to Jesus, "Remember me when you come in your kingdom." (Some translations say "into" rather than "in," but I think "in" is correct.) On the face of it, this plea makes no sense at all. Jesus is dying on the cross right next to the thief. If Jesus is merely a man, then the thief has lost his mind!

But if the thief understands that Jesus will survive crucifixion in some sense and return to establish his divine kingdom, then the question does make sense. And so the thief begs Jesus to remember him when that day comes. But clearly, the thief expects nothing on crucifixion day except death. In his plea, he is looking forward to the end of the age, the eschaton, when Jesus as Lord brings all unholy things into submission and the righteous are brought into eternal life.

And it is in this sense that Jesus answers him: "Truly I tell you today you will be with me in Paradise." In the Greek manuscript, there are no commas or any other punctuation. But English syntax demands them. So where to put the comma?

Consider: "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise."

Now compare to, "Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise."

There is a difference in meaning, is there not? On the basis of what "Paradise" probably meant in that day, Jesus would have meant the former. An expanded way to phrase the answer would be, "Truly, I tell you: today we will both die and I will take you to Paradise where I will remember to redeem you when I come in my Kingdom's power." This also would be consonant with the meaning of Paradise in Rev. 2, where Paradise is the state of being from where the redeemed enjoy the fruit of the tree of life and then enter into eternity, this being highly poetic language, of course.

Paradise cannot have meant heaven because Jesus was clear in his own prophecies about his passion that he would "be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40) which is certainly not heaven. And on the first Easter Jesus told Mary Magdalene, "I have not yet returned to the Father."

However, the meaning of Paradise is, at bottom, deeply ambiguous and without exactitude. Jesus' answer to the thief simply assures him that he will be redeemed when Jesus comes in his Kingdom. (If Jesus had simply replied, "Okay," we would not be wondering what he meant.)

Like the thief, we still await that day.

Joining the Crackberry Legion

I broke down late last week and retired my Palm Treo 755P in favor of a Blackberry Tour, left. (I use Verizon.) It is an improvement over the long-in-the-tooth Palm, but for my purposes not really a huge improvement. A data plan is required with the Blackberry, of course, while it was not with the Palm. I did not have one before nor did I wish for one. Besides, the Tour is a 3G phone while the Palm was not. So the Palm was slow using the Internet during the very rare times I logged on.

I played with the touchscreen Blackberry Storm for some time in the store, but it seemed clunky to me, slow to respond to commands. The larger screen would have been nice (the Tour's is a little smaller than the Palm's) but the Tour seemed more usable.

I was much concerned about getting my data moved from the Palm to the Tour. The Verizon guy told me he could transfer my contacts using their SIM-card data transfer gizmo, but not the calendar, tasks or memos. However, according to the Blackberry web site, the desktop software included with the Tour had a "device switching" function that would transfer all of that, either from a Palm OS or a Windows Mobile OS (or, needless to say, from another Blackberry).

Blackberry lied. When got the phone I discovered that yes, there is such a selection on the Blackberry desktop menu, but there are two show stoppers.

First, it's in a foreign language (click image for larger view). I discovered that Blackberry's site has no number for tech support, referring you instead to your service provider. So I called Verizon, where the collective response from the several different persons I was bounced to was, "Huh?"

Second, a Google search of the problem (not translating, but the data transfer) did result in useful info that finally solved the problem. I learned that the device switcher won't work with Palm desktops newer than version 4.X while mine was v. 6.7. So, said the Blackberry forum I was reading, sync the Palm with the existing desktop, uninstall the desktop and install v. 4.X. Then re-sync the Palm device with the older version of the desktop, then run Blackberry's device switch.

Well, not quite. The last step did not work since the Blackberry device switch function was still (of course) in Sanskrit or whatever and besides, it still wouldn't import when I guessed which buttons to click.

There was, however, salvation of the transfer. The Blackberry desktop's sync function will sync with Yahoo's calendar, contacts and tasks. And Yahoo will sync with Palm 4.X (though not with later versions). So I synced between the Palm desktop and Yahoo, then between the Tour and Yahoo. Voilá, my Tour had all my data.

Well, not quite. The Palm's contacts, calendar and tasks came through cleanly, but not the memos. It seems Yahoo has no memo function. It does have a notepad function, but the Tour has no equivalent and nothing on the Yahoo notepad will sync over to the Blackberry. I have a lot of memos on the Palm and so far have been stymied as to how to transfer them over.

The other concern was my password safe. On the Palm I used a free, and excellent, Palm program called YAPS (Yet Another Password Safe). This little jewel will export all its data into a Palm memo and will import from the same. You can copy and paste this memo from the Palm desktop into Windows notepad and with a little manual tweaking convert it into a CSV file.

Alas, this does you no good in importing it into Blackberry's Password Safe. It won't import a CSV or any other file. I had to enter all my password information manually into the Tour. I'm not complaining; I understand the imperative for security here, and limiting ways to access the data is a big part of that. 'Twas a pain, that's all.

The Tour is still too new to write a review. I haven't used it long enough. Overall it is certainly more capable than the Palm. The Palm is a touchscreen phone, although best touched with its included stylus rather than a finger, and the Tour uses the (in)famous Blackberry trackball centered at screen's bottom. This means I can operate the Tour one-handed (well, I have to) which does work better than one-handed operation of the Palm, which is possible but clunkier than on the Blackberry.

I considered selling my Palm on eBay but the 755P's listed there are not selling for much. So I am keeping it as a backup phone just in case. Since I can always re-sync it with Yahoo, should I require its use again I'll have all my data at hand.

What I really wanted, of course, was the Palm Pre, but it's available only on Sprint. Checking Sprint's coverage map for my area and my business-related travel areas showed that once you get off the interstate, you're pretty much out of Sprint's calling area. Verizon is supposed to get a Pre or a Palm device like it some time next year, so I'll take a look at it then.

How low can we go?

David Warren writes that Western civilization can't get any lower:

The many symptoms of civilizational decay that lay partly concealed beneath the surface of society only recently came into full view, in the open pornography, the open nihilism, the despairing flippancy, visible throughout our contemporary public life. But the pond was long draining, and it is only now we see fish flopping in the mud.

Euthanasia is the final "life issue," the clincher for what the last pope called "the culture of death." Even when legalizing abortion, we agreed only to the slaughter of human beings we could not see. It was still possible to look away, to pretend we were not killing "real people," only "potential people." But when we embrace so-called "mercy killing," we embrace slaughter not only for the sick and old, but ultimately, the "option" of easy suicide for ourselves. It will be hard to go lower.

While I am entirely in agreement with David's position on euthanasia, I am not sure I agree that, "It will be hard to go lower." Euthanasia is not merely a symptom of hopelessness, as David shows earlier in his column. It is also the greatest act of societal narcissism. As others have written about the rise of narcissism in Western life, I'll not belabor it here.

But is euthanasia the lowest depravity? It is, to use David's metaphor, a big, flopping fish indeed, but not the biggest.

For, despite the moral emptiness of a euthanasia-accepting society, the society itself is still focused on life. Now, it is life only under "normal" conditions, not a life stricken by illness or dementia. And, dangerously, not a life that requires expensive medical care to maintain. It is a society that rejects less than optimum life (which is what it means to talk about "quality of life") and wishes simply to shove aside those not enjoying it (whatever it is, which no one define).

Nonetheless, it is not a society that has actually embraced death and glorifies death. Such societies have existed. Rome was one, a very harsh culture in which mercy was a vice, not a virtue, and in which the gruesome deaths of men and women were public spectacles and sports. Not only gladiator combats, of course, but plain execution by means intended to inflict suffering before death. They included burning alive, being attacked by ravenous beasts and cruelest death of all, crucifixion, which was always a public spectacle precisely because it was (and is) the worst way to die devised by man.

David Warren points out the inverse relationship between religion and suicide rates. He cites the work of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. "He was the 20th-century Czech thinker and statesman whose 1881 book, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization, laid the foundation for much later social thought."

It was Masaryk's thesis that suicide rates, already at historical highs, and climbing, in the more industrially advanced parts of Europe by the 1880s, would continue to rise through the decades ahead, with decreasing religiosity and increasing modernization. He predicted that this trend would spread to regions yet untouched, as the symptoms of modernity reached them.

This was not so much a question of religious denomination, as of religious practice. There would be a rough, inverse correlation between church attendance and the suicide rate. Later statistical studies have borne this out, and Masaryk thus stands among the few sociologists whose work retains any empirical value.

Let it be noted that Masaryk was embedded in Christian Europe. As Christian devotion has declined, the "the real self-killer [which] is the absence of hope for the future" has risen, followed by a rise in suicide rates.

There is a specificity to Christian faith - and we must include Christianity's parent, Judaism - that assigns transcendent value to this life even while it remains deeply hopeful in the promise of life to come. God, said Jesus in Matthew's Gospel, is not God of the dead, but of the living. So while Christian faith is no guarantee of immunity from depression, it does immunize against despair and hopelessness (as David briefly discusses).

Is there today another culture that glorifies death and hence enhances enhances hopelessness? Alas, there is, and the fish flopping therefrom are bigger than the ones of the West. It is the lands of the Islamic ummah.



Islam formally infuses little to no value in this life and in this world. Allah is remote and unconnected to this world. Allah has given the Quran to humankind through Mohammed (so goes the story) but Allah is himself not present in human life in any way. There is no chance in Islamic thought that Allah could possibly be embodied among us - this Christian idea is very specifically rejected in the Quran - and there is no concept whatever of the Holy Spirit, or, as the Jewish Scriptures put it, the Presence of the Lord.

Hence, from Islam's formative days, Muslims have affirmed that they love death rather than life:

Another chapter from early Islamic history — serving as a lesson for today's Muslims at war against the West — is the concept of the love of death. This originated at the Battle of Qadisiyya in the year 636, when the commander of the Muslim forces, Khalid ibn Al-Walid, sent an emissary with a message from Caliph Abu Bakr to the Persian commander, Khosru. The message stated: "You [Khosru and his people] should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don't, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life." This account is recited in today's Muslim sermons, newspapers, and textbooks. ...

Leading Muslim clerics often refer to the love of death. Chief Palestinian Authority cleric Mufti Sheikh Ikrimeh Sabri stated, "We tell them, in as much as you love life, the Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and [strives for] martyrdom." Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Qassem in Al-Madina added: "The Jews preached permissiveness and corruption, as they hid behind false slogans like freedom and equality, humanism and brotherhood... They are cowards in battle... they flee from death and fear fighting... They love life."

Former head of the Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee Sheikh Atiyyah Saqr was asked the following question in an online chat room on March 22, 2004: "What, according to the Koran, are the Jews' main characteristics and qualities?" He explained one of their worst traits: "Cowardice and love for this worldly life are undisputable traits [of the Jews]." Hezbollah's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah revealed in an interview after the recent prisoner swap between Israel and his group: "We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death."

An Islamist terrorist taking the nom de guerre of Marwan Abu Ubeida al-Jarrah was quoted by Time magazine thus:

"It doesn't matter whether people know what I did," he says. "The only person who matters is Allah and the only question he will ask me is 'How many infidels did you kill?'"

Is it any wonder then, that al Qaeda and other Islamists embrace suicidism and "martydom" as glorifications? The depravity of Islamism would take more than a single book could document. (Contrast this terrorist's idea of what Allah will ask him with this Christian teaching.)

Apollo 11 took Communion to the moon

Who knew?

Buzz Aldrin had with him the Reserved Sacrament. He radioed: “Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, whoever or wherever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the last few hours, and to give thanks in his own individual way.”

Later he wrote: “In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit.’ I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute Deke Slayton had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly…Eagle’s metal body creaked. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”

OK- this is strange

Reuters: "Turkish TV gameshow looks to convert atheists."

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - What happens when you put a Muslim imam, a Christian priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk in a room with 10 atheists?

Turkish television station Kanal T hopes the answer is a ratings success as it prepares to launch a gameshow where spiritual guides from the four faiths will seek to convert a group of non-believers.

The prize for converts will be a pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen religion -- Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.

Turkish religious authorities are not enthusiastic. Although Turkey's government is formally secular, the vast majority of Turks are Muslims. The TV program may have trouble finding an imam to appear. But its producers are undeterred.

"We are giving the biggest prize in the world, the gift of belief in God," Kanal T chief executive Seyhan Soylu told Reuters.

"We don't approve of anyone being an atheist. God is great and it doesn't matter which religion you believe in. The important thing is to believe," Soylu said.

Now let's take a harder look at that last statement. I've heard it a lot, even here in America.

"It doesn't matter which religion you believe in, as long as you believe."

Really?

Imagine a parent saying to a child, "It doesn't matter what you eat for supper, as long as you eat something."

Child: "Okay, I'll take pizza and chocolate ice cream - forever."

But that wouldn't matter, would it, as long as the child is eating something?

Math teacher: "It doesn't matter what your answers are on the exam, as long as you write something."

Employer: "It doesn't how you spend your time on the job, as long as you show up."

Why are we so willing to dismiss religion with a wave of the hand - "anything I believe is okay" - but won't accept such a non-standard in any other arena of life?

I'm going to give an answer I know in advance will make some readers hackles rise. It's because to the vast majority of Americans today, their religion is a hobby rather than the ordering principle of their lives. Consider that this statement actually is acceptable: "It doesn't matter what your hobby is as long as you have one."

One man's hobby is golf, another's woodworking. One woman's hobby is gardening, another's crafts. No one thinks his/her hobby is better than another's, and they're right. Hobbies, in the long run, don't really matter. That's why we call them hobbies.

But rare indeed is the religion whose doctrines don't insist it doesn't matter in the long run - the very long run of eternity. So if someone treats one's religion no more importantly than a hobby, then he simply isn't taking his religion seriously.

To say that what we believe, religiously, doesn't matter as long as we believe something betrays, I think, a covert belief that death is the end of existence. If there is no life after death, then not only is one religion as good as another, so is atheism. Or, as the apostle Paul put it, "If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die'" (1 Cor. 15:32).

However, if one does take seriously the possibility that we survive the death of our bodies in some meaningful sense, then the choice of religion becomes centrally important. For the three great monotheistic religions all teach that right beliefs in this life are of eternal importance for the next. Consider the orienting claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

Judaism: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4), some translations thus: "... the Lord is our God, the Lord alone."

Christianity: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (Gospel of John 3:16).

Islam: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."

Now, one could, I suppose, maintain that all three are wrong and that eternal life, if it is to be gained at all, is achieved another way than taught by them. Yet the alternatives of world religions are not encouraging in that regard.

Buddhism, for example, teaches that when one dies one is immediately reborn as someone or something else until, eventually, final liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth is the attained by entering a state of Nirvana, the literal meaning of which is "to extinguish." Buddha himself made no claims about Nirvana other than that it was "indescribable" and "unutterable." Not much there to stake a hope on, I'd say.

As for Hinduism, its teachings on eternal life don't differ much from Buddhism's, they simply describe it differently and Hinduism does affirm the existence of deity - deities, in fact, since Hindus are generally willing to acknowledge the existence of any god you care to name because specific beliefs about God or gods is not considered essential. Like Buddhism, Hinduism seeks release from birth/rebirth until the Self is ultimately subsumed into universal identity "as a drop of rain merges with the sea."

Frankly, that doesn't float my boat, either. I want to be me in the afterlife - a better, perfected me, oh please, but still me. And I want you to be you, too.

Only Judaism, Christianity and Islam can hold out any hope for me in that regard. But they do not agree on how eternal life with God is to be achieved. Though Christianity is the child of Judaism, there are obviously some starkly defining differences, mainly the affirmation of the divine identity of Christ, but not only that. As for Islam, it formally claims that both Judaism and Christianity are corrupted religions resulting from revelations from Allah, but which were adulterated and changed by human sinfulness.

Each has, through history, excluded the others from validity as a way to life eternal. And yet, in that more than any other thing of life, it is most important to be right.

So how to choose, and on what basis? Well, this post is long enough, so I'll take that topic up another day.

Everything you think you know about Honduras is wrong

Let us keep the people of Honduras in our prayers as they struggle to retain their democracy in the wake of the entirely unconstitutional power grab by their thankfully deposed former president, Mel Zelaya. I traveled over most of the country in 1989 and in this post will explain why the "template" of historic Latin American military coups does not apply here.

First, there has not been a military coup. It was Zelaya who attempted a coup by placing the issue of his own succession in office on a referendum. The country's constitution forbids more than one term for a president or the amendment of the constitution by referendum (amendments have to begin in the national congress). Zelaya's plan to hold a referendum to endorse his own succession was struck down by the Honduran supreme court. The congress, including almost every member of his own party, opposed it. The Honduran attorney general stated it would be illegal.

Even so, Zelaya had ballots printed in Venezuela and demanded the army distribute them, as the army always does for national elections (for why, keep reading). The supreme court ordered the army to retain the ballots under lock. Zelaya ordered the army's chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, to distribute the ballots. The general refused. Zelaya fired him. The supreme court ruled the firing illegal and ordered him reinstated. Zelaya refused.

With the army refusing to help him overturn the constitution, Zelaya literally decided to take matters into his own hands. Last Thursday he led a mob to the warehouse where the ballots were being kept and had his followers start handing them out.

Recognizing that a constitutional crisis was now well developed, the supreme court, with the agreement of practically every member of congress and the attorney general, ruled that Zelaya's term of office was ended. The court directed the army to remove him physically from office if he refused to leave on his own. This the army did, packing him onto a plane to Costa Rica.

Note this well: the Honduran supreme court was the primary actor here. It ordered the army to enforce its ruling. All the rest of the Honduran government supported this.

As I explain below, the Honduran military has historically had a role in its society very different from what we estadounidenses understand our own military's place to be. I'll go into some detail, regarding the Honduran constitution's specifications, as an endnote. Suffice here to say that it is very different from our own Constitition and we err massively when we view events of the past days through our own domestic template.

It must be pointed out that at no time did the Honduran army ever control the organs of government. No military officer ever declared himself el jefe. The Congress immediately swore in its majority leader, Roberto Michiletti - who is of Zelaya's own party! One has to wonder what sort of coup allows the deposed president to be succeeded by the next-leading member of his party!

A post at the mostly left-wing DailyKos blog punctures the media's and administration's template about how a "military coup" has destroyed democracy in Honduras. Says Kos's writer:

You could not be more wrong about what is happening in Honduras; personally I blame the US media. Then again, when have they covered a story, much less an international news item, correctly in recent history? And at the end of the day, that is what this is about, recent history tainting the current situation based on out-dated USA-Latin American memes.

He also cites a blog by Honduran blogger, Rschenkel:

I want to remind everyone that this was not a military coup, this was the arrest and destitution [sic] of a criminal president, with the help of the military. Proof that it is not a coup, is that as of this moment we already have the Constitutional State of Right re-established, with a new president, and new cabinet. Let us Hondurans be, we have already defenestrated what was causing us such stress, division and unrest, and we will reunite ourselves, to again perform our right of suffrage in 5 months.

Back to Kos, which has some penetrating questions:

So why are people here on this site and USA media asking for Zelaya, who was removed per provisions in Honduran law, be restored so he consolidate power under a system that haunted Latin America for most of the last century?

Why does the USA media support the over-throw of Latin American constitutions, why is this site doing the same?

Where are the pictures of the 100,000 people marching against Zelaya in Tegucigalpa? Where are the stories of the local support for the constitution, the laws set in stone, instead of just accepting Zelaya's worth as bond, why is no one looking into the events leading up to his ouster?

Why is everyone here and the media just accepting the old tried but true meme of Latin American coup d'état without realizing this was an action by the sovereign people of Honduras to preserve their constitutional government?

Why, indeed?

The role of the Honduran army in its society

I lived in Honduras for six months in 1989, assigned to US Joint Task Force Bravo, stationed at a Honduran air force base Soto Cano in the Comayagua Valley. I did not live in the nearby town so I didn't rub elbows with everyday Hondurans most of the time. The Honduran civilians working for JTF-B were well educated, from the higher economic levels of society. As director of public affairs, I had a Honduran secretary, a recent college graduate with outstanding command of English.

But I did get around the country from one end to the other, north, south, east and west. My commander, a US Army colonel, was completely fluent in Spanish and had served at the US embassy in El Salvador. Since the principal mission of JTF-B was civil affairs and civil assistance, this colonel spent a lot of time on the road visiting Honduran battalion commanders. (Honduran battalions were posted on individual bases around the country. Honduras has no large army bases like the United States.) My colonel always took a handful of principal staff with him, of which I was one.

Why was it necessary to spend so much time coordinating with Honduran battalion commanders? Because unlike much of the rest of Latin America's armies, the officer corps in Honduras has always been of the people, not the upper, ruling classes. This is in marked contrast to El Salvador's military, as my boss explained, where the officers came from the upper classes and jealouslydefended the uppers' privileges and power.

But in Honduras, going back to the 1840s, battalion commanders had not only a military-command responsibility, but a civilian law-enforcement responsibility. They were closely equivalent to American sheriffs in many regards. Because of their ordinary roots, battalion commanders, officers and their soldiers were much less "classed" than elsewhere in Latin America. There never formed a significant rift between the people and the military.

The Honduran army has long had a traditional role as keeper, and sometimes guardian, of civil order and has been viewed by the people as such. I remember one battalion commander we visited who almost every day went for walks for an hour or two somewhere in his district, mixing with the people, sometimes with a staffer accompanying him, sometimes not. He was highly respected and warmly regarded by the people.

Another battalion commander, whom I'll call Rodrigo, spent about half his time supervising his battalion's construction of civil-building projects in the district, especially schools and water management works. This officer was sharply critical of JTF-B's management of civil-engineering projects for villages and small towns because, he said, we did too much for the people. We needed to involve them more so that they "owned" half the project. We stayed the night at his base, arising early the next morning only to find that Lt. Col. Rodrigo had canceled the morning's activities with us. In fact, he wasn't even there any more.

Most, maybe all, the Honduran lieutenant colonels I met were graduates of the US Army's Command and General Staff College at Ft Leavenworth, Kansas, or of the School of the Americas, then located at Fort Benning, Ga. Many were graduates of both. These schools served to strengthen and deepen Honduras' democratic traditions, especially teaching them of the United States' entrenchment of civilian control of the military. Here's a plain illustration.

Just after returning from Rodrigo's base in late summer 1989, the other principal staff officers and I were summoned to the task force's SCIF, the Secret Compartmented Information Facility, a super-secure room in the intelligence office area. It was the only place on our compound where were could be positive that the our conversations could not be overheard.

There we learned the reason for Lt. Col. Rodrigo's mysterious disappearance overnight. He and the other battalion commanders had converged on Honduras' capital, Tegucigalpa, to confront the army's chief of staff. It seemed that this general had decided to mount a coup of some kind - probably not the full-scale coup Latin America was known so well for, but a significant seizure of power nonetheless. When the battalion commanders got wind of it, they went the capital, entered together into the chief's office and forced him to resign on the spot. Not a shot was fired and the country's civilian government remained intact.

What the Honduran army did last week in shoving Zelaya, a would-be puppet of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, out of office was not a coup by even the wildest imagination. It was Zelaya who was trying to mount a coup, by using an unconstitutional referendum (with ballots printed in Venezuela!) to justify remaining in office as long as he wanted. No one in government, including his own party, supported Zelaya.

In fact, the Honduran Supreme Court actually ordered the army to remove him, a perfectly sensible development because of the historical role of Honduras' military in civil order. In fact, the army was constitutionally required to do so, see endnote.

If the media and administration had stopped to consider Honduran history and culture (or had the State Dept. paused even to consult its own experts), they would not (one supposes) have been so quick on the trigger to denounce the Hondurans' salvation of their own democracy. But instead, they practiced "ready-fire-aim," though there is no evidence that they actually aimed.

A highly informative site, written by Hondurans, is here. This post by a Honduran writer explains, "What we Hondurans want."

The BBC invited Honduran readers to leave their comments on an open thread. Very revealing.

Endnote:

Ad fontes: CONSTITUCIÓN DE LA REPÚBLICA DE HONDURAS

Translation by Google (yeah, I know). Since I was once reasonably fluent in Spanish, I have massaged it a little herein; my glosses are in brackets [ ].

Let's consider the following facts seriatim (italics added throughout):

Chapter VI, Article 237: "The presidential term is four years... ." There is no provision for self succession.

Article 42 forbids inciting, encouraging or supporting the re-election of a president, which Zelaya was unambiguously doing.

The Honduran constitution makes no provision for impeachment as we understand the process. However, Article 239 provides that,

No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President.

This re-emphasizes that a president may not succeed himself in office - having "already served as head of the Executive Branch," Zelaya was constitutionally inelegible to remain in office. Article 239 continues,

Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [Sp.: reforma, or amendment], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.

Since the constitution strictly prescribes a single term for the president, and since Zelaya was openly campaigning for a second term, the country's supreme court properly ruled, on purely constitutional grounds, that Zelaya must "immediately cease" in his function as president.

Chapter 10, Article 272:

The Armed Forces of Honduras are a National Institution of a permanent nature, professional in essence [character or nature], apolitical, obedient and not deliberative [that is, do not set policy].

They are established to defend the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Republic, keep the peace, public order and the rule of the Constitution, the principles of free suffrage and alternation in the presidency of the Republic.

Consitutionally, it is the military that is charged, in concert with civilian organs of government, to ensure that the one-term limit of the presidency is enforced. It is the military that is constitutionally charged with ensuring the intregrity of national elections.

Therefore, the removal of Zelaya from office by the army was not merely appropriate, it was actually constitutionally required that the army do so.

Furthermore, when the army's chief of staff refused to send Zelaya's ballots to polling places, Zelaya personally led a mob to the warehouse, stole the ballots and had his minions start to distribute them. This act also violated the constitution.

Update: Carlos Alberto Montaner, writing in the Miami Herald:

Almost by unanimity, the Honduran Congress, supported by the Supreme Court, had removed him for breaking the law and ignoring the rulings of the Electoral Tribunal. But that was a technical excuse. The deep truth is a lot more dramatic: Zelaya, obstinate and rash, intent on being reelected at any cost, heedless of all the warnings of the judiciary and the legislature, intended to drag the nation in the direction of Chávez, something that in Honduras would have been the beginning of a huge economic and social Via Crucis. ...

What we're seeing in Honduras is not a clash between uniformed men and civilians, or between putschists and innocent functionaries. Nor is it a return to the lamentable past of military governments. We are witnessing a conflict between two ways of understanding the function of the state and the role of the political leaders. Chávez's way -- an incipient ruling concept that Zelaya irresponsibly assumed in Honduras -- is a variant of state-run collectivism, a political stream that does away with the separation of powers that is part and parcel of republics. It exalts the personalist style, eliminates replacement of the leader, and adopts anti-Western positions that are expressed in dangerous alliances with countries like Iran and North Korea.

As I have written, what happened last week in Honduras was the salvation of democracy and the sovereignty of the Honduran people (also guaranteed by its constitution). Zelaya was a Chavez protege. What would that have meant for Honduran democracy? Well, here's Chavez's record.

Are you in the boat? Who's with you?

One day in the life of Jesus:

Mark 4:35-41 -- On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other side." And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him.

A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?"

He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. 40 He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?"

And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"

This isn't really a story about how Jesus could command storms on the sea. It's a story about remembering that we are in the boat and that Jesus is with us even when it doesn't seem terribly apparent.

Faith, to be faith at all, can't be easy. Do you have faith that two plus two equals four. Of course not. It just is, and that's that. Do we have faith that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown? No, it's simply a fact and that's that.

Faith is what we believe in when the evidence is not necessarily conclusive. Where there is no room for doubt, there is no need for faith. But faith does require evidence and reason, otherwise it's just wishful thinking.

Faith's greatest challenge is when the stakes are highest, when the storms set about us and adversity threatens to drown the old and familiar.

Some the early churches used the metaphor of a boat to describe the church. So the disciples’ boat is the church itself, and the disciples are all believers. We are all in the same boat. Adversity will come, recessions will come, illnesses, deaths, discords, disputes all will come, sooner or later. Such are the seas that we sail as disciples.

We are all in the same boat. And we need to remember that Jesus is with us. We have eternal purposes. Storms will pass and they, like all things of the church, must be surrendered to the lordship of Christ.

What is in control – fear or faith? Faith in Christ is betting your life that Christ really is Lord. That is what the disciples finally did.

But we are deceived to think that if we had enough faith we could overcome all our problems miraculously. Thinking that faith is for miracles is wrong. We are not given faith to be served by God, but that we may serve God. Faith enables us to believe that Jesus is with us in our boat, and to act accordingly. Our faith is not just something we affirm; it is how we act and what we do, and how we live and what we give! We sin, sin even in faith, if we just ask for miracles rather than use what God has already given us to row the boat.

So, what are we looking at, the winds that push us or the Christ who is with us? Paul wrote, “We live by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7). The reality of Christ is discerned with faith’s eyes, says Paul: “we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18 ).

Weddings

Earlier this month, I attended the wedding of my nephew in Pennsylvania. It took place at an Episcopal church. The order of the service was held my attention since United Methodists and Episcopalians are "kissing cousins," having both been born about the same time from the Church of England (that is, soon after the end of the American revolution).

The priest followed the order of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer (BCP), which is their reference work for worship in the same way that we Methodists us the Book or Worship (BOW). I was intrigued at the inclusion in the wedding service of the old "if anyone objects to this wedding, speak now" etc.

Into this holy union N.N. and N.N. now come to be joined. If any of you can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else for ever hold your peace.

Now, this is not religious language at all, of course, but legal language. In fact, a wedding ceremony is really a legal, contractual process that churches have overlaid with religious language. Many people do not know that getting married in a church by a priest or pastor is a relatively late development in Christendom. The great reformer Martin Luther, for example, was not married in a church and the habit did not start to become popular until late in the 16th century.

Until then, weddings were seen as civil procedures that could be (and almost always were) sanctified or sacramentalized by the Church. Couples got married by a civil magistrate of some kind and later a priest would bless the union. Sometimes this blessing took place on the wedding day and sometimes on the first anniversary.

Much of the litany we use in wedding services, both in the BCP and the BOW, reflects contractual language of the age of feudalism, when weddings formed obligations between the bride's and groom's families and were closely concerned with division and inheritance of property. For example:

In the Name of God, I, N., take you, N., to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.

Any lawyer will immediately recognize that this is legal language, and nothing but, with only the name of God invoked at the beginning to put a religious gloss on it. "To have and to hold" is a property-law term of ownership. Then the bride repeats the same words to the groom and voila, the contract is sealed. In feudal days, these vows formed legal contracts between the two families as well.

Anyway, at my nephew's wedding no one objected to the wedding and priest continued thus:

I require and charge you both, here in the presence of God, that if either of you know any reason why you may not be united in marriage lawfully, and in accordance with God's Word, you do now confess it.

Neither of these charges are found in the UMC's Book of Worship. I have never included them in any wedding I have officiated nor, for that matter, would I agree to do so. By the wedding day itself, it's a little late for someone to pop up and say the couple shouldn't get married! What am I supposed to do, tell everyone to have a seat while I hold a hearing and render a decision? Sorry, "not my yob." And as for either the bride or groom self-disqualifying, I figure that if they show up at the altar, that answers the question.

In fact, nothing demonstrates the feudal source of wedding services today more than these two charges. They were included, 1,000 years ago or so, not for the benefit of the marrying couple, but to demonstrate publicly at the ceremony that all was legal and proper.

As I said, though, neither of them are included in the UMC's service. Nor, for that matter, is there any nonsense about asking "who gives this woman to be married to this man." The bride is not property and therefore cannot be given to anyone. However, I am quite comfortable with including "who presents this woman to be married to this man," which is altogether different. I have never officiated a wedding when the bride didn't want dad to hand her over to the groom no matter how "liberated" or financially independent she was. If dad was not there (deceased or deeply estranged) she still wanted a male relative to do so. Which is fine!

Finally, I do not "pronounce" the couple husband and wife, I "announce" that they are now husband and wife.

Is the duty of the wealthy is to be robbed by the government?

At least, that's what I glean from this letter to the editor (link may be perishable):

My philosophy is simple. If an individual or a family has a disproportionate part of the wealth, money or whatever you want to call it, they have the responsibility to pay a disproportionate part of the federal taxes.

Well, they already do. To be in the top one percent of annual income, you need make only $208,000. I say "only" $208K because while that is an awful lot of money, it is quite within the reach of ordinary Americans who work hard and invest wisely, especially if they begin an IRA young.

Contrary to populist belief, One Percenters actually pay more in taxes than others and have done so for years. And while liberals have long derided the notion that tax cuts lead to more tax revenues, experience proves otherwise. When President Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 70 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1988, the tax burden of the top 1 percent increased from 17.6 percent of total taxes to 27.5 percent. Today, the top 1 percent pays about 30 percent. Two Percenters pay a lot, too. So do Three, Four and Five Percenters. In 1998, the top 25 percent paid 80 percent of the total tax burden, according to the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based research group. Even more sobering, the top half of all taxpayers (with taxable incomes exceeding $100,000) pay 95 percent of all state and federal taxes. [link]

The letter-writer betrays what seems to me to be a common misunderstanding: that because paying taxes is a civic responsibility, hence a civic virtue, it is therefore also a moral responsibility and a moral virtue. Not so.

Taxes are exactions by force by the government from the people. Taxation is the coercive appropriation of private property for purposes held to be the public good. But the government does not have a right to the people's money, it has only a need for it. We established a government of limited, delegated powers, and have authorized the government to exact taxes - but the government has no right to do so, it has only the authority to do so. All rights remain solely the possession of the people, who may, if they wish, revoke the taxation authority of the government altogether. (In theory, of course, since in practice it could never be done.)

Everyone is legally obligated to pay the taxes s/he rightfully owes - but not one cent more. As Justice Learned Hand wrote in Helvering v. Gregory (1934),

Anyone may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.

The wealthy always pay more in taxes. They have to, because, as Willie Sutton famously explained why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is." Government is expensive and only the comparatively wealthy have enough money to fund it. Hence, about half of all citizens pay practically nothing. In large measure, the federal revenue system is designed to transfer money from the top half to the bottom half. 

In fact, the federal government really is a money-distribution organization. We govern ourselves by the way we spend each others' money. How much gets spent and for what is determined by how much agreement can be reached by a majority. But whether Left or Right, whether Democrat or Republican, the only real questions of American government and governance are, "Who will be be the beneficiaries of government spending? How much shall we exact from the public for it, and by what means?"

In 1984, the Grace Commission was formed by President Reagan to examine where tax revenues disappear to inside the great government money maw. The commission reported that none of the money collected by income taxes paid for services - all income-tax revenue serviced the national debt. The commission said that one third of income taxes,

. . . is consumed by waste and inefficiency in the Federal Government as we identified in our survey. Another one-third of all their taxes escapes collection from others as the underground economy blossoms in direct proportion to tax increases and places even more pressure on law abiding taxpayers, promoting still more underground economy - a vicious cycle that must be broken.

With two-thirds of everyone's personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government.

According to a slightly breathless web site owned by an outfit called The Solutions Group, income taxes were never intended to pay for services. Although personal income taxation dates to the early 20th century, income-tax withholding was instituted in World War II, conceived of by then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Beardsley Ruml.

To explain the new tax, and its purposes, Chairman Ruml wrote an article which appeared in the January 1946 issue of "American Affairs," the "newsletter" publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. Appropriately enough, the article was entitled, "Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete." . . .

So taxes aren't needed for running the federal government anymore. This leaves many asking, "Why does the government take so much of what I earn?" Chairman Ruml, under the heading "What Taxes Are Really For," gave the following answers:

"Federal taxes can be made to service four principle purposes of a social and economic character. These purposes are:

1. As an instrument of fiscal policy to help stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar;

2. To express public policy in the distribution of wealth and of income, as in the case of the progressive income and estate taxes;

3. To express public policy in subsidizing or in penalizing various industries and economic groups;

4. To isolate and assess directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways and social security."

Our government has used our federal tax program consciously for each of these purposes. In serving these purposes, the tax program is a means to an end.

So, here is what IRS taxes are -- and -- are not used for:

1. They are used to help implement economic policies designed by the federal government,

2. They are used for social purposes (meaning, to determine who should or should not, in the opinion of Congress, have certain amounts of money -- commonly called redistribution of wealth), and

3. They are used to subsidize various groups and interests, such as private banks.

-But-

4. They are NOT used to pay for any government services!

These are the reasons I say that no one has a moral duty to pay taxes, just a social-contract and legal obligation to do so. The moral imperatives pertaining to the wealthy lie elsewhere. But that's a topic for another post.

Update: President Obama has said that the point of raising taxes is not to raise revenue, but to be more "fair," whatever that means. Here's the cite:

[A]fter ABC's Charlie Gibson noted that the record shows increased taxes on capital gains -- which would affect 100 million Americans -- would likely lead to a decrease in government revenues: "Well, Charlie, what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness."

During the campaign the Brookings Institution's Tax Policy Center examined Obama's Tax Proposals' Impact on Tax Revenue, 2009-18, which further proves that actually funding the government's operations is the furthest thing from the president's mind when it comes to tax policy.

Memorial Day, Veterans Day - don't confuse them

Flags at Arlington National Cemetery for Memorial Day

As a retired Army officer, I tend to get pretty exercised at the widespread notion in the media and public commemorations of Memorial Day that this day is set aside to honor living veterans. It's not. That's done on Nov. 11, Veterans Day.

Memorial Day is to honor and give thanks for the service, dedication and sacrifice of members of the American armed forces who gave their lives in the service of their country. We also honor those who survived their service but have died since.

Which is to say that Memorial Day is set aside to honor the memory of dead, not thank the living.

Memorial Day as we know it grew from diverse strands of decorating the graves of Civil War dead, begun in various towns just after the war ended. One tradition says that Southern women, mainly widows and bereaved mothers, began laying flowers on graves of Confederate dead before the war ended. Many people today think that this tradition continued as a separate Southern practice called Decoration Day, while it was the North that practiced Memorial Day.

While not exactly wrong, it's not altogether true. Beginning with a proclamation by Gen. John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, Memorial Day was first widespread observed in 1868 to honor the dead of the Civil War. Graves of both Union and Confederate dead at Arlington Cemetery were decorated with flowers.

By 1890, all the states of the former northern Union recognized the day, but it still honored only Civil War dead. Southern states did not join in observing this day, continuing to honor Confederate dead on other dates (not uniform across the South). People generally think that this day was called Decoration Day, but I cannot find any citation to confirm it. (The old CSA memorializing of Confederate dead is still on the books of many Old South states; it is June 3 here in Tennessee.)

After World War I, the dead of that war were added to the honor roll of Memorial Day, then almost immediately the dead of all American wars. At that, the Southern states joined in and there has been a unified observance since.

Memorial Day was generally an observance by the several states until President Lyndon B. Johnson issued a proclamation in 1966 designating May 30 as national Memorial Day. There the day remained until Congress passed legislation in 1971 called the National Holiday Act. The Act made Memorial Day and most other federal holidays always occur on a Monday. Whether this served to strip the day of its solemn meaning I'll leave it to you to evaluate.

Unlike Veterans Day, Nov. 11, Memorial Day is a unique American holiday. The other English-speaking nations observe Nov. 11, the date World War I ended, just as we do. However, the observance is called Remembrance Day in Canada, Australia, Bermuda and some other lands of the former British Empire. New Zealand observes Nov. 11 in a low key way, the main observance being ANZAC Day, April 25. In the United Kingdom Nov. 11 is also commemorated in a low-key manner, the main observance being the second Sunday of November, called Remembrance Sunday.

In these nations, commemorations accomplish in one day what Memorial Day and Veterans Day do in America.

Cool pic of the day

An amateur astronomer has taken the photo of a lifetime - the space shuttle transiting between the sun and the earth.



That is definitely the cool pic of the day. More here.

"Money doesn't bring you happiness . . ."

Four wealthy Yorkshiremen vacationing on the French Riviera reminisce about how happy they were when they were dirt poor:



Now, Conor Clarke, writing from England, asks, "What Makes Us Happy? Not Jobs.."

Joshua Shenk's Atlantic essay on happiness has gotten plenty of response (see David Brooks in yesterday morning's New York Times), but one thing that I find striking about the piece is how little focus there is on material gains as the right route to happiness. When the doctor in charge of the Grant Study lists the factors that predict happy aging -- education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, maintaining a healthy weight and employing "mature adaptations" -- there is no mention of career success or even career stability. Relationships matter; incomes don't. This comports pretty well with my general understanding of self-reported happiness studies and gives me a chance to print my second favorite graph in the history of economics:

Clarke points out that though this graph portrays Britain, the same results are found around the world. Even though Britons' (and Americans') material circumstances have been improving, often quite substantially and rapidly for the last 50 years or so, we do not claim to be happier now than we did back then.

It would be a mistake to infer, however, that material sufficiency has no relation to happiness. In 1943, Abraham Maslow promulgated his theory of human "hierarchy of needs," a tier of life conditions that Maslow said are necessary for life itself, at the bottom of the tier, and for human flourishing and happiness, moving up to higher-level needs.

At the bottom, of course, are the needs essential to live at all - food, air, water, sleep and other life-essential things. These are physiological needs shared with any other creature. Above them are human-specific (mostly) needs - safety employment, family, and so on. As the tier rises, the needs become steadily less bodily and more psychological - respect, achievement, creativity, and so forth.

Happiness, to Maslow, resulted from being able to meet the higher-level needs, which was in turn dependent upon meeting the basic type of needs. Persons chronically hungry or fearful of their safety are quite unlikely to describe themselves as happy.

Unless ...

As influential as Maslow's work was and deservedly remains, about the same time he published it a man named Viktor Frankl was developing his own theory. Frankl, though, worked as a captive of Nazi Germany, held in concentration camps, where his whole family died. Building on work he had begun before the war, he used his experiences in the camps to refine a psychotherapy built on the hypothesis that the very fundamental human needs are neither bodily ones nor material ones at all. The basic need is to have meaning and purpose in one's life. That is, Frankl turned Maslow's pyramid upside down and claimed that Maslow's higher needs are actually the most elemental.

Frankl's postwar book, Man's Search for Meaning, was named one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century by the Library of Congress. So it is. And therein lies the key to why people on all points on the economic spectrum can say they are happy, or not.

It is simply this: Material prosperity is not a bad thing (as some of Left would have us believe), but neither is it good, in itself, to be pursued as the object of life (as some on the Right would have us believe). Things, even an abundance of them, cannot make us happy (though severe, ongoing lack of Maslow's basic needs can prevent happiness). Frankl is right: it what we make of life that makes us happy, which is why, even in the direst of physical circumstances in the Nazi camps, he was able to cling to the conviction there was meaning in his suffering. He relates another inmate's insistence that if the camps' survivor could not find meaning in life after the war, there could be no meaning to the camps. To the contrary, Frankl insisted, if there was no meaning in the camps, there could be no meaning to surviving them.

A common theme among the writers of the classics is the unhappy, if not suicidal, wealthy man. One need consider only Charles Foster Kane, subject of Orson Welles' 1941 classic, still ranked by the American Film Institute as the best American movie ever. Stupendously wealthy, surrounded by every material blessing money can buy, Kane nonetheless becomes an embittered old man who finally dies alone, as unhappy as a man can be.



What went wrong in Kane's life? As this clip shows, he suffered from self-inflicted deterioration of the relationships that should have been most important to him, the only ones that could have sustained him and provided meaning for his passion.

That is the key: relationships. And I'll take a look at that in the next installment.

Star Trek 2009 not quite a bullseye . . .

... but it's still pretty good.

I may as well jump on the Star Trek review bandwagon and post mine. I went with the fam last evening to see the new ST movie. Is it really a prequel to the other movies and the 1960s TV series? No, it's not, any more than Casino Royale, in which James Bond receives his double-oh designation, was a prequel to the other Bond flicks.

In fact, like Casino, ST 2009 hits the reset button on the franchise. Let me discuss that before I talk about the merits of the movie itself. There are some spoilers here, but get real - how can there really be spoilers when you know in advance that the movie's main intent is to show how Kirk and Co. wind up on USS Enterprise? Yes, they win (as the always do) in the fight with the bad guy and live to tell the tale. So here goes.

James T. Kirk is born in space at the beginning of the show, aboard an escape rocket fleeing the doomed USS Kelvin, captained, for 12 minutes, by Kirk's father, who sacrifices himself to save the crew. We next see Kirk at age 10, having swiped his father's antique Corvette for a joy ride while the Beastie Boy's "Sabotage" plays over all. Kirk, pursued by a cop on a flying motorcycle, drives the 'Vette off a cliff, jumping clear at the last moment.

Herein lie the first clues:

• The Vette is a 1966 model, the same year that the ST TV series debuted. The Vette is destroyed. Does this mean that the legacy is also being thrown (mostly) off a cliff? Why, yes, yes it does.
• The song symbolizes that director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are indeed sabotaging the Star trek legacy in order to sart over.

There is other proof within the storyline of the movie, but that would be giving too much away here. Suffice to say that at movie's end it is literally impossible for this movie's story future trajectory to merge with that of the TV series or the previous ST movies. We'll see how that works out. If this film's sequel is as sorry as Quantum of Solace was to Casino Royale, then the reset won't work too well.

So I suggest enjoying the movie as escapist entertainment rather than viewing it as a true prequel or another in the ST series. There are enough trekkie things in the show to establish a good connection with the series' legacy, such as a tribble sitting on Scotty's desk when he first appears, but in the end they do not matter. The movie should have been subtitled, "Starting All Over."

Leonard Nimoy's appearance as "Spock Prime" (so credited at the end) is a nice touch, as is his uttering a few lines from the older movies. It works just right. I thought it quite satisfying when he identified himself to the young Kirk by saying, "I am Spock." After the TV series was canceled, Nimoy tried to run away from it and establish a career as a serious dramatic actor. He even published a book in the mid-1970s called, I Am Not Spock. But, in the winter years of his life he has come to admit that Star Trek has defined his career (actually, he realized this long before now - the sequel to I Am Not Spock is I Am Spock, appearing 20 years later).

The Villain: Eric Bana as the destruction-bent Romulan, Nero, is excellent. He doesn't top Ricardo Montalban in Wrath of Khan, but nonetheless Nero is a worthy nemesis. And his threat is properly galactic: he wants to destroy every planet of the Federation and thanks to Spock Prime, he can (a zipped lip on that one, too).

The Enterprise crew:

Zachary Quinto as young Spock is excellent. Karl Urban as Bones is "excellent-minus," very good, but not quite as good in his part as Quinto is in his. Uhura and Spock have a thing for each other? Who knew? In the TV series it was Nurse Chapel who was enamored with Spock, IIRC, but her role long ago got beamed away. Zoe Saldana plays Uhura very well. Chekov and Sulu are presented competently, if not exactly inspiringly. Young Scotty, we learn, was a chowhound with an overdone Scottish brogue.

Ah, but what of Chris Pine, paying the major role of James T. Kirk? Sorry, bad idea. IMO, he just doesn't cut it. It's not that he acts the part of space cadet, then Enterprise officer, badly, he just doesn't act them as Kirk. You can pretty easily imagine young Spock maturing into Nimoy's Spock, and young Uhura and McCoy and the rest becoming the personalities we already know. But Pine's Kirk in unimaginable to become Shatner's Kirk.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

But how is the movie as a movie? My wife, who is no sci-fi fan, enjoyed it. My eldest son, who is very familiar with the ST legacy, and my young daughter, who is not, also liked it a lot. As for me, I'll put it this way - I'll probably spring for the DVD when it comes out, but I won't pay hard-earned coin to see it in the theater again. There are times to movie seems too frantic and plot developments too forced. But it's enjoyable and pays enough tribute to the legacy to justify seeing it in theater once. So I recommend it. Overall, I give Star Trek 2009 seven out 10 NCC-1701s.

New Madrid fault earthquake risk downgraded

The Tennessee Conference's listserv email included an entry this morning on the discovery that the New Madrid fault (pronounced MAD-rid, not muh-DRID) does not pose near the risk of catastrophe that scientists heretofore believed. This is good news, for in 1811 and 1812, massive earthquakes along the New Madrid fault literally changed American history. Centered in southeast Missouri, these quakes were near the top of the most violent in historical times in North America. They created Tennessee's Reelfoot Lake and in some places caused the mighty Mississippi River to reverse course.

The earthquake of December 1811 served as the signal to American Indian tribes from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border to send war parties to Ohio to unite in battle against white settlers and US troops under the great Shawnee war leader, Tecumseh.

Tecumseh, accompanied by his brother Lowawluwaysica, had been forming his battle coalition and alliances for many years. Lowawluwaysica had a reputation for prophecy and finally changed his name to Tenskwatawa, "One With Open [speaking] Mouth," better to reflect it. Under his and Tecumseh's urging, many Indian tribes became staunch rejectionists of Euro ways and accommodation with whites. In their long-range travels, they told the tribes that they would receive a signal all at the same time, both in the heavens and under the earth.

In March 1811, a bright comet appeared. Tecumseh interpreted it as a sign that his time to lead the combined tribes against the whites was near. Tecumseh had actually been born the same night that a large shooting star streaked through the sky. "Tecumseh" is of Algonquin origin and means, "Goes from place to place" (I have also seen it translated as "panther across the sky").

Then in December of the same year a mighty earthquake shook the eastern half of North America. So powerful it rang church bells in Philadelphia, it was the signal Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had promised.

With nothing moving faster than a horse in those days, the battle alliance among the tribes did not form exactly quickly. In 1812, the United States became embroiled in its second war with the British, who initially worked well with Tecumseh. Their relationship soured, however, when Maj. Gen Henry Proctor took command in the west. Proctor was not nearly as an astute tactician or strategist as Tecumseh. The result was the Battle of the Thames in October 1813, in Ontario, Canada, in which Tecumseh was killed.

Tecumseh is the most highly-regarded and historically respected person ever to have been an enemy of the United States. During times of peace, he enjoyed excellent relations with white military and civilians alike. He was fluent in English and was regarded universally as a true gentleman, a man of his word and entirely civilized in manner and demeanor. He was fierce and relentless in war, but never cruel, and he never took vengeance against captives. For many decades after his death, the United States heaped honors upon his memory and name. The US Navy named a warship Tecumseh in 1863; three more would follow. The Canadians have also given his memory many honors.

Tecumseh's body was never recovered. There are reliable reports that he had predicted he would fall in the battle and that, knowing what the US troops would do to his body, he shed all the trappings of generalship and went to battle dressed as an ordinary warrior. He told his close guard that if he fell, one of them would have to come immediately to prod his body with a charmed implement, after which he would return to life and lead the Indians to victory. However, the warrior who was running to Tecumseh's body to do so was shot to death en route. At that, the Indian army immediately dissipated.

Just after the battle, the American troops made a concerted effort to find Tecumseh's body, but almost no one knew what he looked like. They also expected his body to be clad in the symbols of a supreme war leader. Reports are that frontiersman Simon Kenton, employed by the US troops as a guide, was tasked to identify the body since Kenton had personally known Tecumseh for many years. Kenton did locate Tecumseh's remains but deliberately passed the corpse by, then found a body dressed as a lesser war leader and said it was Tecumseh. Immediately, US troops set upon this body and abused it in a sickening manner, stripping flesh to cure into leather and confiscating weapons and regalia. Today, only the elders of the Shawnee tribe know where Tecumseh's body was finally interred.

Now back to the New Madrid fault.

Scientists have spent long hours and many years attempting to predict the next big earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, but a study published in the March edition of the journal Science suggests that all the hype may be for nothing. ...

Utilizing data acquired over an eight year period from GPS antennas mounted in strategic locations throughout the earthquake zone, research teams from both Purdue and Northwestern found that the fault system was moving about 0.2 millimeters, the width of a fishing wire, per year. Calais said that sizeable earthquakes could only be expected when there was at least 2 millimeters of movement or more.

“There must be enough movement to accumulate strain for a big earthquake to take place and that just isn’t happening here,” Calais said.

As Clarksville is definitely inside the danger zone of a large earthquake from the fault, this is good news.

Endnote: Most references to Tecumseh refer to him as a "chief." However, Tecumseh, a Shawnee, was never a chief. Chiefs were elected by the Shawnee. Although the Shawnees held Tecumseh's skills as a war leader in high regard, most Shawnees rejected his program of strict rejection of accommodation with the encroaching whites. Tecumseh himself never claimed the title of chief.

The minority of Shawnees who allied with Tecumseh completely broke with him after the disastrous result of Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811. Tecumseh was not present for this battle; it was initiated by Tenskwatawa, who led Shawnee warriors to attack US troops who were trying to recruit neighboring Indian tribes to ally with them. The battle's failure caused Tecumseh to lose faith in his brother, whose influence as a prophetic figure was permanently diminished thereafter.

The best biography of Tecumseh is, in my opinion, Allan W. Eckert's volume, A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh. I also recommend his earlier book on the life of Simon Kenton, The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, a history of the opening of the Ohio River valley. 

The latter book includes the untrue story that Tecumseh became enamored with a settler girl named Rebecca Galloway, promising that if she married him he would adopt the ways of the whites and live as a white for the  rest of his life. Ultimately, they parted by mutual agreement. However, Eckert explains in Sorrow why this story is untrue, even though he had accepted it as historical in Frontiersman. Even so, the legend still has wide currency.

Why do we love Susan Boyle?

Susan Boyle is a an unemployed 47-year-old from obscurity, now with tens of millions of Youtube hits of her appearance on Britain's Got Talent.

In the off chance you haven't seen it, don't delay. Click the play symbol below and be transported.



Now, why has she become such an international phenom? Sure, she sings extremely well, But let's face it, not exceptionally well. Sarah Brightman need not look over her shoulder.

I think Sarah Boyle resonates because she has come into prominence at exactly the right time and context for her. In the past several months the masters of the universe have not only fallen from grace, they have fallen, period. In both Britain and in the US, the elites - financial, business and political - have proven to have feet of clay and have tumbled from their exalted heights. It doesn't matter, within this context, that we should have known all along that they were and are only human. They had both claimed from above and had been granted from below their pedestals.

When they fell, where did that leave you and me? What of the ordinary people, who live ordinary lives? The folk who just go to work every day, try to save for retirement while educating their kids, maybe get to Disney World every few years, and for many months have suffered a tightness of the gut, wondering whether they'll still have a job at the end of the month?

You know, the men and women whose equity assets got slashed and burned when the masters of the universe overreached and the economy tanked? Is there a comeback?

Susan Boyle says yes. Forty-seven, jobless, never married, living the kind of life that Henry David Thoreau would have said was one of "quiet desperation." By her age, the brass ring is not even in sight for most of us. Within our grasp? You must be kidding. We're just trying to get our kids through college, get another year or three out of the clunker and hope home prices recover before we're upside down down on our mortgages.

But take a shot at the top? At forty-seven? Sorry, we missed that elevator long ago.

Then walks Susan Boyle naked onto the international media stage. Not naked as in unclothed, of course, but naked in vulnerability, naked of armor, naked to scorn, naked to ridicule. Naked to derision, which she in fact got at first, though the traditionally reserved Brits choked it down for the most part. A target with no protection.

You, Susan Boyle, are an ordinary woman. What do you think you are doing here? You are one of the little people. If you were destined for stardom, it would have happened twenty-five years ago. But today? At 47? Ain't. Gonna. Happen.

There is no way to misunderstand that such is exactly what judges Piers Morgan, Amanda Holden and Simon Cowell (how well we of the colonies know Simon!) were thinking.

It cannot be overlooked here that Susan Boyle is, shall we say, physically unprepossessing. Her ordinary looks (ordinary? nay, actual homeliness) only reinforced the initial perception that she was a lightweight in the talent department, though not exactly light of weight, if you get my drift.

And then she sang.

And the ordinary Everywoman triumphed.

And everyone knew it within seconds.

They rose from their seats, clapping and shouting in surprise, joyous, celebratory surprise.

Because she was one of them, singing to them, singing for them. Singing about them.

Singing about their lives: her choice of songs can't be dismissed. Of course, she chose one that would best showcase the abilities of her voice as well as hide its limitations. But there are dozens of songs that could have done that, maybe hundreds.

Go read the lyrics to "I Dreamed a Dream." The beginning:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by,
When hope was high and life, worth living.
I dreamed that love would never die,
I dreamed that God would be forgiving.
Then I was young and unafraid,
And dreams were made and used and wasted.
There was no ransom to be paid,
No song unsung, no wine untasted.

The ending:

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living,
So different now from what it seemed...
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed...

The song is a capsule of the Ordinaries' lives of the past fifteen years. It is not an inspiring song, but depressing. The words are of dreams broken and hopes shattered. So why did it lift us up and offer not only solace, but inspiration?

Because Susan Boyle in her person gives lie to the words she was singing. The masters of the universe have fallen, but we're still here. And we will triumph.