Hopewit

  Our balcony fig-leaf; just in case. In an essay I wrote once upon a time, I used an illustration meant to focus on the nature of believing as an act of choice … or as gift.                Two seven-year-olds are walking home from school when one, Devon, says to the other, Earl, “What is Santa going to bring you for Christmas?”                “I don’t believe in Santa Clause,” Earl says.                “Why not?”                “I can’t. We don’t have a chimney,” Earl replies, and leaves poor Devon to contemplate an existential question that lies well beyond his reach.                An adult equivalent might take place in a ...

  A sixtieth wedding anniversary is occasion for talk of time . “Seems like yesterday” and “Where have the years gone” and “My you look young in your wedding photos” all point to an awakened consciousness about how time past, present and yet-to- come is experienced. Time drags in the dentist’s chair, seems to speed by while clinging to just a little more of it, please Lord.                 I read some websites on Physics research, but I can’t claim to know how time and space are related and can be mathematically shown to be the same thing. It belongs in the same bin with the theory that space is curved, that time is relative, and that time slows or accelerates slightly depending on gravity. I can take the scientists’ words on these, but don’t ask me to explain what they mean.                What I think I get is that accurate time measureme...

  I frequently listen to John Oliver on This Week Tonight . He  primarily  tackles hypocrisies in American life … with an Englishman’s flair for language but with a bit more vulgarity than seems necessary. Nevertheless, he’s a personality under whose influence I voluntarily place myself occasionally. And given that, I am aware that I’m opening myself to having my values subtly shaped by the choices made by the writers of This Week Tonight. I think we all (except for Jordan Peterson who is smarter than everyone else on all subjects) tend to “hitch our wagons to stars” whose modeling takes the place of independent, painful thinking. So tightly can people harness themselves to a human idol that no amount of evidence, no information can shake loose the traces. Donald Trump: need I say more? Well, OK, Tommy Douglas, Muhammed Ali, John Wayne, Martin Luther King, Lady Gaga, Menno Simons, Jordan Peterson , Billy Graham … I will be forever wary of a speaker on a dais shouting o...

  Gay Pride Parades were suspended during pandemic days , as were most sporting, entertainment, patriotic, religious festivities. But the news purveyors told us that they were back in June. Not that it mattered one way or the other if you weren’t living in an urban area with enough people—gay and Cis—to mount such an event or, conversely, to complain about the disruption to traffic or the assault on decorum. I think I get the need for a pride display, for saying in an in-your-face way that “this is who I am and whether you like it or not, I’m not apologizing for it.” Considering centuries of outright and open abuse of non-cis persons—queers—the acceptance as whole-and-equal human beings has been a monumental struggle for which the building and maintaining of a support community has been vital. We don’t have Straight Pride Parades for a very simple reason; straight peoples are not facing the threat of persecution or discriminationon account of their sexual orientation and/or gende...

  A Brian Hicks Watercolour   Romans 13:8 -   Pay everything you owe. But you can never pay back all the love you owe each other. Those who love others have done everything the law requires. (NirV) Matthew 5:17 - Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. (NIV) It’s pretty much a cliché by now that the expression, Ordnung muss sein , (there must be order) typifies German culture. This implies, of course, that establishing and maintaining order in society is obsessively/compulsively held to be foundational to Germans in any and every situation, that it somehow explains a penchant for meticulous record keeping, for the establishment of rules and enforcing them without exception and for seeing the world as too fiercely binary, where every action is either right or wrong. It has become a stereotype, of course, and like any stereotype, hides as much as it illuminates. As Christians, we’ve kn...

  “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” – Matthew 6:34, KJV   Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal …”- Matthew 6:19, KJV My grandmother’s and my mother’s autumn “laying up of treasure upon earth” included shelves and shelves of jars of canned meats and garden produce. This preparedness for a harsh winter was both their pride and their security. It was an investment of time and effort that paid off in reducing the “what shall we eat, and what shall we drink” anxiety.                Stored food is treasure. Stored money likewise. Not surprising is the feeling that if stored food reduces stress and makes us feel happier, much stored food (or money) should makes us feel super-secure and super-happy. Bu...

  Moscow skyline Do we all have shackled streaks of cruelty lurking in our deepest selves? Is war capable of breaking the chains that hold the tiger down in peace time? A friend who did some prison chaplaincy before becoming a pastor remarked to me that what struck him was how similar the murderers were to himself, or "there but for the grace of circumstance, go I."      In the Russian Revolution and through WWII, innocents were made to suffer grievously at the hands of Russian soldiers: in Ukraine, in Germany in its retreat. The pattern is being repeated; some of the most virulent victimizing being reserved for Ukrainian cousins. Why has that been the case? Why is it the case again? There's a considerable body of opinion that NATO--the West--is responsible for the current debacle, and certainly their mistakes vis-e-vis Russia must be called out. But to excuse Russia's destruction of Ukraine on the West's failure to do what it should have is playground, ...