Messed-up Lent and Messed-up Pascha

This has been a messed-up Lent and now we’re headed for a messed-up Pascha. There’s no other way to say it. I have been frustrated by a lack of sources of inspiration for how to deal with a Lent and Pascha like this one, stuck at home, not going to church, not going to Communion. Most years as Pascha is approaching, people start sharing “Pascha in Dachau,” a first-hand account by an Orthodox prisoner in a German concentration camp liberated a few days before Pascha in 1945. It’s an inspiring story of coming together to celebrate the Resurrection no matter what the conditions. Greek, Serb and Russian priests and monks turned towels in to vestments and sang the Paschal Matins from memory. Most years that story gives me chills with how amazing it was, but this year not so much. And the problem isn’t who had it worse (they, obviously) but’s it feels like an apples-and-oranges comparison, with me feeling like an ugly, lonely turnip. A theme of coming together no matter what doesn’t help much in a year when your priest and bishop are telling you to stay home no matter what, no “heroes” allowed to “tough it out,” as they’re warning that the church’s liability insurance could be revoked if we hold a gathering and then we would lose the property to a lawsuit if the bug went around.

So what are we, recluses and hermits? No, monks are only allowed to engage in that kind of struggle after years in their monasteries and only under the supervision of the abbot.

Are we catacombs Christians? During long services, I used to look around at other parishioners and wonder how many of us would stick with it if we were persecuted, put to flight. I looked over them and thought some pretty judgmental thoughts: This recent immigrant is here for Old Country nationalism, that new convert likes the priest who educated him but will be gone the instant a new one is assigned. This woman, dressed up like she could host Good Morning America is here to be the most stylish in church, that extrovert is here because it’s fun to talk people’s ears off at coffee hour. Take away their superficial reasons for coming to church and what’s left? In me, not much. I’ve become despondent, having a difficult time praying, feeling darned grumpy about being stuck in my cluttered bedroom watching services streamed on-line. I’d make the worst catacombs Christian ever.

Are we disaster helpers? That’s one of the things that helped establish the early church, that Christians fed people during famines when the Romans had given up on them. In this disaster, shouldn’t we be visiting the elderly, the sick? Three weeks ago, I called one of my college professors, who’s retired and in his 80s. He spent the whole call trying to convince me to come visit, but I kept saying, sorry, prof, I’m not supposed to, that’s why you’re getting the phone call. Last week, his daughter died of COVID-19. And I’m still not visiting, but sending flowers, hoping the FTD delivery person wears a mask.

A statement I’ve seen go around on social media lately is “This is the Lentiest Lent I’ve ever Lented,” which I don’t find inspiring at all. I’ve been to church three times this Lent and haven’t been to one Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. What were these people who call this “Lentiest” doing last year, having rock concerts of 300 people on their front lawns on Sunday mornings where people licked each other’s faces? No, this is a messed-up Lent and a messed-up Pascha, and I’ve spent a long time trying to think of something that compares.

And, I have, sort of, and that’s why I’ve written this essay. And it’s this: Baptism is our personal Pascha (dying and rising again) and Chrismation is our personal Pentecost (the gift of the Holy Spirit). And I know someone who had a messed-up Baptism: my son. Born at 22 weeks and 6 days of gestation and weighing 1 pound, 6 ounces, I baptized him myself with a syringe of sterile water in the delivery room. I read the “Brief Form of Baptism” from page 34 of the Small Book of Needs. It was the only time I’ve baptized someone and I have ever since been worried I’d messed it up somehow. There was no priest, no choir, no cake, no godparents, no special suit for the baby. It was a messed-up personal Pascha.

And then the thing we had to look forward to was his Chrismation, his personal Pentecost, which we knew would be many months away if it happened. And in the meantime, there was no Communion for him. If he made it, we could celebrate and have a cake, and dress him in a suit and have godparents.

I’m hopeful for some kind of change to the social distancing rules over the next seven weeks so we can do something on Pentecost. Or for St. John the Forerunner. Or Peter and Paul. Or Dormition. Or Exaltation of the Cross (although that might not be as fun on a strict fast day). Or whenever it is that darned “curve on the graph” starts to go down. But the point is we have to stick it out to the end, whenever that might be.

Our son did eventually get to have his Chrismation, although it took the priests a while to sort out the service order for an infant who’d been baptized five months earlier. And now he’s an active reader and bicyclist, proof that it is possible to have a messed-up Pascha and a good Pentecost.

Rey's backstory (lots of spoilers)

I went to the premiere of Star Wars and felt like I was 12 again, in awe of this children's hero adventure story. And then I got home at 2 a.m. and woke up the next morning with an awful headache and a sore throat and remembered that staying up late is not as easy as it used to be.

The question that the movie leaves everyone with, however, is, who is Rey? She's an awesome main character, but her family background is unknown. She doesn't have memories before a certain point in childhood, but she simply believes that her family is coming back to the desert planet where she scavenges parts from crashed Star Destroyers.

There's all these hints throughout the movie as to whose daughter she is. In the first half, it seems to be pointing to Han Solo being her father and Leia being her mother, and there's several reasons to think this:

• He seems to recognize her once she says her name, they get along great, which is interesting because at first he thinks she's stolen his favorite spaceship. 
• She's a whiz at fixing the Millenium Falcon, no small feat considering that an entire movie was driven by its mechanical failures. 
• When Kylo Ren is interrogating her with the Force, he says, "You feel like Han Solo is the father you never had." 

But, then, the second half of the movie tries to convince you that Luke is her father and an unknown Mrs. Skywalker is her mother:

• She touches Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, and has a vision of what appears to be Luke's memories. 
• When she's getting interrogated by Kylo Ren, he says she keeps seeing an island on a huge ocean, which is, indeed, where she finds Luke Skywalker at the end of the movie, implying a connection. 
• When she takes the lightsaber to fight with Kylo Ren, John Williams' amazing score overlays Rey's theme on top of Luke's theme.
• R2-D2 perks up at the end and displays the remainder of the map only when Rey is at the Resistance base, making you think that he has recognized her.

In either case, she's got amazing abilities in the Force despite the fact she's never been trained, so she's got to be some famous Jedi's daughter.

So, which is it?

I think, neither. I contend that both are Red Herrings. I think Rey was a student in Luke's Skywalker's Jedi academy at the time of the massacre, and the memories that were conjured up by touching the lightsaber were actually hers. The connection between Luke and Rey is teacher-student. Her parents were likely not major characters we have seen before, they're probably dead, and Luke likely used the Force to suppress her memories as he dropped her off on his way to exile. Maybe at the time of the massacre, she did something Dark to save Luke and prevent complete destruction, and Luke thought that wiping her memories was the only way to keep her from developing on the Dark side.

Here's why I think this:

• Given her skills with the lightsaber and using Jedi mind tricks, she must have had some training, she just doesn't remember getting them. Not even Anakin and Luke were that good with the Force before meeting other Jedis.
• When Leia hugs her at the end, it's warm, I think she recognizes Rey, but she most definitely does not look like a mother seeing her long-lost daughter. Or niece, for that matter. And, I really don't see Leia leaving a relative isolated like that.
• I just don't see Luke violating the Jedi rule of celibacy. 
• The parent-child thing has been used twice in the series already, and it's been pretty good, but I don't see it working well a third time.
• Kylo Ren seemed to recognize her, too, but didn't have quite the family-complicated-issues attitude he had with Han, which makes me think they were classmates.

Ok, so what do others think?

Unrelated complaint: Being suckered in by the marketing juggernaut that is Star Wars, I ordered the John Williams soundtrack on Amazon to come to my house. Which it did. But my absolute favorite musical moment from the movie, which I mentioned above, was not on it. Track 20, "The Ways of the Force," does include the music from that last lightsaber battle, but not the part where Rey takes the lightsaber and her theme is overlaid on top of Luke's theme, which was awesome. ARRRGH! The rest of the soundtrack is awesome, but I think I deserve at least $.50 of my $13.99 back for that.

p.p.s. The part where James Bond is fooled by a Jedi mind trick was awesome.

Here's a talk I gave at the beginning of the month on our experience and preemie policies:



For more information, please visit my main blog at http://theydontcry.wordpress.com

Preemie Blog!

My primary blog these days is http://theydontcry.wordpress.com

There, I write about premature babies and the bioethical dilemma faced by preemies born at the very edge of viability. In our case, our son was born at 22 weeks and 6 days of gestation, and the doctors did not want to treat him. I've been organizing a letter-writing and article-writing campaign to get hospitals and doctors to be more willing to treat him. Click on the above link for more information on that.

Onion Dome article!

Here's a humor article I wrote that The Onion Dome published called "Rules for Dating Our Orthodox Son."

For those of you who don't know, The Onion Dome's intent is satire / parody for Orthodox Christians who like humorous writing on religion, so it's not meant to be serious.

This picture is to brag that we made it to Centralia by 12:10 on the Seattle to Portland bike ride. Thank you very much.

I don't want to write about this. Except that I do

Judging from my social media feeds and what's on radio and television, a new national religious practice we have in the United States is interpreting the meaning of mass shootings. I would like to add in my thoughts: Don't. What annoys me the most about responses to mass shootings is when a liberation / control / justice movement (conservative or liberal) views the event and the suicide note as an excellent piece of supporting evidence for their movement. I believe this is a bad idea, and we need to resist it. Allow me to explain, and please forgive the odd transitions:

If you've ever been in a class where discussion of morals or ethics takes place, it's only a matter of time before someone makes a reference to Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. It's the logical extreme to which all ideas go, especially when you're talking about the importance of obeying the law. In college, I found this tendency highly annoying, and if I ever teach a class such as this, I'm going to reward the students with chocolate if they can make it more than 30 minutes without a Hitler / Stalin example.

Why do we talk about Hitler and Stalin? I think it's because they're a concept of abstract evil that can never be negotiated with, will never develop further, but are very easy to oppose. They're universal straw men.

Now, back to the mass shootings, and the criminals who commit them. When a shooting like this happens and the killer writes a suicide note that mentions an issue that the rest of us care about, the note and the event become a similar element of abstract evil that does not change, that cannot be negotiated with. Lately, I've been hearing everyone go on about the Isla Vista killer, who wrote a really, really long suicide note mentioning, among other things, his frustration with women before killing six people, wounding several others and killing himself. And the Internet has exploded with heroes who oppose men who feel entitled to women's affection.

But, let's suppose he had been captured alive. What we would see is a young man showing up at court appearances in various states of demeanor. He might rage at the judge and shout things, he might hang his head and look afraid. His lawyer would probably try to keep him from saying anything related to the suicide note. His lawyer would probably try to keep his Internet activities from getting entered in to evidence, and would probably argue that he was mentally unstable. The young man would be put on suicide watch in the jail. He would continue to develop, or maybe deteriorate. His trial would go on for a while and then end. The flash of ideology and violence would be replaced with exhaustion, uncertainty, and a fade from significance, and the suicide note would not be the central element of what happened. An actual person through time would be what we saw. (Here in Seattle last week, we had a campus shooter who was captured. He appears to be far less interesting.)

The role that these suicide killers and their manifestos play in our lives is something of a satire of time itself. These abstract concepts of evil, this "ultimate gentleman" in California, the "outcast teenagers" at Columbine High School that we feel the need to do something about do not actually exist. They are feelings that fade. But, for those who want a useful straw man for their arguments, a dead straw man in these cases, they do exist, and they remain an abstract evil concept that never changes until enough years go by that a majority of young people don't remember them.

I have my own experience of having my life changed by a suicide killer with a note 13 years ago. He shot someone four times on a college campus before killing himself. I was 30 feet away and had been on the spot where the victim was shot about two minutes before it happened. I want to be careful not to go on too long about the details (and I could for pages) but here's the short version of the effects (at least on me): It changed my religion and I became an Orthodox Christian (still am), it gave me a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder that gave me tremors in my right hand and kept from sleeping well for a year, and it drove me out of newspaper journalism, not because of any ethical problems with covering violence, but because I discovered that writing up gunfights gave me worse PTSD.

But none of this had that much to do with the actual person who committed the crime, or his reason for doing it. He was a stalker, and the behavior got started in Hawaii in 1968 and continued stalking until 2001 when he killed someone vaguely acquainted with the person of his obsession. I suppose a national movement for stalker control could have gotten started here. Or, I suppose we could have called it part of a national mental health crisis, although the man's suicide note said that he understood what he was doing was murder and that murder was wrong. I doubt he was a paragon of mental clarity that day, but I don't think he was crazy. He was a person who decided to commit a crime, and it's very important to remember that it was a crime, like other crimes -- not a moment when God breaks the rules on us.

I was, of course, angry about what had happened. But I never felt the need to oppose him, to prove him wrong, or anything else, mainly because he really was not around any more. I saw the red hole in the back of his head, I saw him carted in to an ambulance, and I learned that he died that night at a hospital. This man had all the personality of a tornado.

I suppose there's a few other things I ought to say before leaving the topic:

Mass shootings are not an actual trend. We just think they are. Every time I hear of a killing similar to the one that nearly missed me, I think, "Oh, no, it just keeps happening," but I have to remember how rare they are. There are 30,000 gun deaths in the United States every year. I think something like 300 people have been killed in mass shootings in the past 15 years. One thing I learned early on in my stats class is that you can use statistics to describe and predict things about large numbers of events (such as 30,000 of something) and you can even use such statistics to make goals for legislation, but the outliers aren't helpful. When we focus only on the scariest shootings, we're trying to turn a group of outliers as if they're the center of the curve. Every public place needs to have an "active shooter response" plan nowadays, but they're really, really rare.

 Places such as Detroit or Puerto Rico have murder rates of around 50 per 100,000, which are more than 10 times the national average, and put them on par with developing countries that have very weak governments, or are actually having a civil war. For whatever reason, we're willing to tolerate that. The somewhat common occurrence of drug dealers having gunfights in the "bad part of town" is something we hear about and forget about, but a rare motiveless random shooting with an ideological suicide note that happens in a public place where middle-class white people ought to feel safe, and the American dream just died, and we're living in the "post-Columbine America." It's true that one death is too many, and that grief does not know proportion, but if we're going to have a meaningful national response, we have to think differently. It's like we're trying to stop car accident deaths -- we also have about 30,000 of those each year -- by focusing just on Chevrolet Corvettes because they have a somewhat higher accident rate than other cars.

This isn't to say there's nothing we can do here. But let's step out of the all-or-nothing obsessive kind of thinking that we have -- it's like a national case of PTSD -- and look at the reality of the situation. If we'd like to focus on gun violence and the 30,000 people who die from it, there's all sorts of things we could do, from better law enforcement and courts work, to gun control and background checks, to better social structures that help communities prevent crime. There's both liberal and conservative versions of violence reduction, but we first have to step out of the horror movie our narrow vision has given us.

Waiting for the bus.

Nice pictures. Looks like he is having fun. Thank you for sending them.

We went to the playground today!

The news editor, multiple perspectives, and strong personalities

On most American university campuses, there is a student newspaper. At most student newspapers, there is a news editor. The poor sap. This was I for my sophomore year back in the late nineties.

It was kind of risky having a second-year student do this, but as our university was small, we were often short-staffed, so the advisor, an old news ethicist with years of experience from the Chicago Sun-Times, decided to let me do it. Going in to the job, I thought I was there to think up news stories and assign them. What I learned, though, is that my job was to consider a whole lot of perspectives at the same time and not go nuts doing this.

There’s lots of perspectives that go in to newspaper work, not just the classic liberal/conservative one that gets Americans all stirred up, but those of business interest versus human interest (sometimes you have to write the budget story although it’s dull), of advertisers wanting to be in a decent newspaper versus students wanting to tell it like it is with lots of swear words, of people who liked reading versus those who had little interest in reading and wanted their information fast. The news editor has to not only be able to think about all this at the same time, he or she has to care.

I quickly learned that most people’s complaints about a news source being too biased / stuffy / dumb / weird / sports-centered / etc., did not relate to its being any of the above, rather that the complainer’s one or two perspectives were not dominant, and that they would not be happy until they were. I, for one, loved The Manchester Guardian back in those days (which published a weekly edition you could get in America) for its willingness to repeat my prejudices back to me, but knew it was practically impossible to create something of that variety on our campus.

As news editor, you’re asking, “How can we write this in a way that would be interesting to MOST of our readers?” That word, “most,” was the part that caused problems to most of the people who come to work for student newspapers – they want to write for people who think like they do, and they’re pretty strong in that preference. Here are some of the stronger odd personalities we dealt with:

-- The film critic. This was a fellow who would review a popular movie for us (like this wasn’t already being done nationwide) and it would show up with a note across the top saying “Do not change one word of this.” On “The Mummy II” an action-comedy with Brendan Frasier, he spent half of the review going on about the special effects in different scenes, repeating a bunch of pointless adjectives such as “stunning” and “amazing.” I wrote in the margin in red ink, “NEWSPAPERS ARE NOT A VISUAL MEDIUM! Write about something that can be described in prose!”

If you asked him to review a local theatre production involving local students, or write a news story on a new theatre program, you would be greeted by a blank stare. That would have involved talking to actual people.

-- The verbosity queen. This was a young lady who at first seemed brilliantly intelligent, but after a while I realized she just had a large vocabulary of words that would every once in a while come out in the right order. She went out of her way to use words like “gregarious,” “passé,” and “loquacious” in conversation. I also discovered that she needed to be the smartest person in the room, and these words helped her do that . . . until someone used a bigger word. She asked me how to keep from crying while cutting up an onion, and I answered, “Don’t anthropomorphize vegetables,” a joke I learned from Calvin and Hobbes. A couple of Latin majors on the other side of the room started laughing, but she didn’t get it. Instead, she got mad and told me I was really stuck up, intimidating people with overly long words.

When you’re writing news articles, you need to remove as many unnecessary words as possible, including “that” as a relative pronoun (most of the time) and you don’t need synonyms for “said” at the end of quotes, such as “stated,” “declared,” “articulated,” or “verbalized.” For two years we tried to get her to stop with all this variety. This didn’t help much. Her junior year, she brought in an article with the word “utilize” in it six times.

“Always say ‘use,’ not ‘utilize,’” I shouted. “They mean exactly the same thing!”

“But,” she said, “when you have two words that mean the same thing, aren’t you supposed to use the longer one?”

“NO!” I shouted, louder, and threw an (empty) file folder at her.

--The alt-ziner. We had this one writer who made it clear that he thought our newspaper ought to become an alt-music weekly ‘zine, full of wickedly hip stuff that older people wouldn’t care about or understand. He was a good writer and highly intelligent, too, but his sentences were riots of five or six dependent clauses each, they were full of parenthetical statements, he had a tendency to drift from reality to surrealism and back in the same paragraph (and sometimes in photo captions, too) and the topics he wanted to write about were all kind of obscure.

He did three articles about the minutiae of the lawsuit that the record industry had filed against Napster, a music-sharing Web site. I did not think these were interesting to the readers because I was pretty sure very few of them actually used Napster. On-campus users couldn’t use Napster because the university had blocked the site because it was such a bandwidth hog, and off-campus users probably weren’t using it because they’d have to use dial-up connections, which really stank for trying to download mp3 files in 1999.

He claimed he was a post-modern writer and that his style and his topic selection reflected his genre, and he had a right to it. I told him to use the damn AP Stylebook and to pick topics that would interest more people than his coffee-shop friends. We didn’t get along so great, but he did put together a cartoon about snails that was funny in an odd, post-modern sort of way.

He’s now a lawyer with a practice in Boston, and he seems to be running a campaign on zoning regulations and casinos or something like that.

--The romantic. We had a handsome, 29-year-old editor-in-chief, and he had no clue how to use Adobe Pagemaker to lay out the editorial pages. Soon, we had a hopeful 18-year-old paginator. She had used Pagemaker at her high school newspaper, and came up every week to help him put together his pages. She had quite a crush on him, and wanted to be quite involved in the paper until the fourth or fifth week of the semester when she found out he was married and had a 6-month-old baby. We were able to talk the paginator in to staying until the end of the semester, but then she wandered off.

--The arguers. We had these two staff members, one male, the other female, who worked together regularly and had an intense dislike of one another. This got especially bad late at night, and student papers regularly required staff members to stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning the night before it went to the printing press to get it all done. This meant they had plenty of time to intensely dislike each other. That is, until one night when they were alone in the office and decided to try the opposite of intensely disliking each other.

When the other staff members found out about this, a blanket was put on the office couch, where it remained for the next 10 years when the building was remodeled and the couch was hauled off to the dump.

--The Hero. The previous strong personalities could frustrate an editor, but The Hero is the one who could terrify him. We had one of these. My second week as news editor, a student got assaulted near campus. The attacker had run up behind her and grabbed her. She screamed loudly, and caught the attention of a passing driver, who called 911 on a cell phone, and the attacker fled, leaving her uninjured but frightened.

The vice president of student life let everyone know about this through a campus-wide voicemail, which I was listening to when The Hero walked in to the office. I had never seen The Hero before, but he assured me he was on the story, he was a regular from last year, had interviewed several people already, and was ready to put it on the front page.

The story he ended up turning in had a little bit of information from the assault that had happened that day, but it also included several other assaults that I couldn’t tell were real or not because neither he nor the cops had talked to actual victims or witnesses of the said other assaults. He used anonymous sources, and made up for gaps in the narrative with adjectives like “blood-curdling scream” and “heart-pounding fear” and created his own profile of the attacker’s modus operandi.

We ran a heavily, heavily edited version of the story (but only after I called a couple of sources to re-do interviews). A few days later, the cops released a poster with four sketches on it that had been created using information from the attacker’s other victims. The sketches to me looked like people ranging in age from 9 to 50, and did not resemble each other. I got a call from The Hero, telling me he had been at a bus stop and saw a guy who looked like one of the sketches, and he called 911 to report it, and he thought this would make a great story.

I said, “You really ought to come to our weekly meetings, be part of the team, take assignments off the list, rather than have you spring in to action when you see the Bat Signal.” The Hero did not like that at all, and demanded a meeting with the advisor. “No problem,” I said, “you’re scaring the hell out of him, too.”

The tense meeting occurred, and The Hero told the advisor how I was holding him back. The advisor told The Hero that he didn’t he was experienced enough for the kind of story he wanted to do. The Hero said this was especially important work that he’d taken on since his sister had been murdered, and that he was dedicating his life to advocacy for domestic violence victims.

That made me stop and wonder whether the arrogance I was getting from The Hero was actually arrogance or grief.  The advisor and The Hero tentatively worked out an agreement where he could bring in an outline on a feature article on domestic violence.

Then, a student-government position came open, and a special election was held. He ran for it and we kind of hoped he’d win and leave us alone. He lost by 30 percent of the vote. He came back and wrote a couple more stories, although he never did bring in an outline to the major feature he had in mind, and then we stopped hearing from him. One of his poli-sci classmates eventually let me know he had graduated and gone to Duke Law School. I wondered what variety of high-fee righteous world-saving he’d do as a lawyer, but was glad I wouldn’t be seeing him again. And, I wondered if he’d find something to do for his sister’s memory.

A few weeks ago, at my part-time job as a bookkeeper for a lawyer who does advocacy work here in Seattle, I was writing up financial reports for the boss. He has three attorneys who work for him, all for pretty low wages. The organization wasn’t doing very well, and we were thinking about cutting people’s hours or laying them off (including me). My experience with them had taught me that law-school graduates have an awful time getting surviving, contrary to their Hollywood image as high rollers. I wondered what had happened to The Hero, and typed his name in to LinkedIn. Up came, “Juris Doctorate, Duke University 2003,” and “I am your true Ford sales professional. No gimmicks, no pressure, and likely the best experience you will ever have buying a car. Contact me for a hassle free experience at Anderson Ford in Fremont, Ohio.”

FWD:

Gabriel pulled "Baby Talk" off the shelf by himself and started playing with it.

FWD:

Sorry we didn't get a real picture befor thr cake was cut!