Some Consistency….Please?

Yard art, especially the holiday variety, is ubiquitous in Milwaukee. Over the past few days and weeks, statues and figurines have made the journey from attics and garages, only to find themselves out in the cold for the duration of the season. While driving home last night, I noticed an interesting trend.

Much of the yard art that you will see on any given street involves Santa, in one way or another. He is, generally speaking, unchanged from yard to yard. Dressed in red, with an enormous bag of toys and a white beard, he stands as a reminder of things to come. This post is not intended to doubt Santa’s historicity, as if such a thing was either possible or wise. We know, with fairly great certainty, that this jolly overweight phantom does exist and that he lives at the top of the world, journeying south once a year to reward children for their good deeds. Those who are bad….well, you know the end of that story. They are rewarded, but with rocks or dirt, not toys. How do we know these things? I’m pretty sure the Bible talks about Santa at some point, which makes the story true.

My issue in this post deals not with Santa, but with his mode of transportation. The sleigh, like the man, is generally consistent, wavering only with regard to size and sometimes color. The inconsistency comes in the number of his reindeer. Now, if my memory serves me correctly, and please reprimand me if I’m wrong, Santa has “eight tiny reindeer,” as testified in Clement Moore’s 19th century poem, Twas the Night Before Christmas. I’m not quite sure what people believed before this poem made its first appearance in 1822 (or thereabouts), but I’m going to assume that the eight tiny reindeer are as much a historical institution as the sleigh or the bringer of gifts.

If we all agree that Santa’s sleigh is powered by “eight tiny reindeer,” then where does Rudolph come into play? The last time I checked, he is not in Moore’s list of the eight, and thus he makes nine. Perhaps he was only on the journey once or twice? We know, from his red nose, that he is prone to seasonal viruses, so maybe he was allowed to stay at home while the rest drag around all the presents along with their obese bearer?

In connection to the aforementioned yard art, I’m especially concerned with the historical record of all reindeer. In some yards, I count nine, with Rudolph at the front. In others, there are eight. In still others, there are only two and, in some rare cases, just one! We really should try and get our facts straight.

P.S. — For those curious, I have finished my finals. As a result, I now have time to do other things such as write posts about flying mammals with hooves.

Its Your Mess…You Clean It Up

For at least a month now, there has been a wrecked sailboat sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan. It is an interesting site, and it causes almost everyone on the road to slow down a bit and stare. Apparently it attracts large quantities of photographers in the morning, who like to take pictures of it against the rising sun. Every time I drive by it, I halfway expect for it to be gone. After all, it can’t sit there forever, can it? Today, on my way back from the coffee shop, I noticed it was still there and I figured it was high time that I figured out what the deal was. So, I looked it up in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (our newspaper) and found the following article.

Cast away but not forgotten

It is a sad story, involving an old boat, an ambitious man and some ill-positioned rocks. The owner of the boat spent a good deal of time restoring it, with the goal of sailing to Europe to meet his girlfriend. Keep in mind, this is a 34 foot sailboat, not exactly a trans-ocean voyager. Regardless, these details don’t matter because he apparently didn’t spend nearly enough time learning how to sail his prized boat and, on its second voyage, he wrecked it.

Sad as this story may be, it becomes rather entertaining in its aftermath. The boat is still on the shore because no one can figure out what to do with it and, more importantly, whose responsibility it is to get rid of it. The boat itself isn’t worth much, especially after being thrashed by the lake for almost two months. Plus, it seems to be sitting in some sort of “gray area.” The Coast Guard won’t deal with it because it isn’t interfering with other boats, and the Department of Natural Resources claims that it isn’t enough of an environmental hazard for them to get involved. Milwaukee County doesn’t want the responsibility and neither does the state.

It almost sounds like one of those arguments you have with your parents when a sibling spills something on the carpet. “She spilled it, why should I clean it up? Its not my mess, let her do it.” My personal experience has showed me that these arguments rarely endure and inevitably someone is going to get stuck with a mess that isn’t theirs. Currently, a private contractor has been attempting to pull the boat out of the water, but he has only succeeded in removing the mast. Maybe it will be gone by Christmas?

Spe Salvi

I just finished reading the Pope’s new encyclical, Spe Salvi and, even as a lifelong protestant, I have to say that I’m quite impressed. In this letter, Benedict XVI (henceforth B16) boldly handles the difficult subject of Christian hope with impressive sharpness and enviable grace. This blog post will not come anywhere near doing it justice.

In the first page, B16 strongly asserts that hope is not simply a part of living a life in God. On the contrary, he claims, “To come to know God – the true God – means to receive hope” (§3). Hope, in his mind, is the center of Christian faith and it is from our hope that all else springs. He then goes on to elaborate on what he means by hope. Is this hope in the present? Hope in the future? His answer is that it is a little of both. Christian hope does involve a looking forward towards things to come, but it also involves a vision of the future in the present. “Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future” (§7)

Basically, the hope that we have for the future should not simply be confined to the future as something that we cannot grasp now. We hope that social injustice will be brought to an end and that suffering and death will be defeated, but this hope must (at least in part) materialize in the present if it is truly good news.

How do we learn and obtain this hope? His answer is threefold. First and foremost, prayer is essential. It is a communication between us and God, “something very personal, an encounter…” (§34) As well, he cites “action and suffering” as essential for the learning of hope. Action is understood as the ways that “we…strive to realize our lesser and greater hopes” (§35). Suffering, “like action…is a part of our human existence. Suffering stems partly from our finitude, and partly from the mass of sin which has accumulated over the course of history” (§36). Lastly, judgement is essential to our learning of hope. Our vision of God’s judgement, while sometimes terrifying, must be seen as “the decisive image of hope…an image that evokes responsibility” (§44).

There are, of course, some difficulties inherent in his arguments; however, the difficulties do not necessarily arise from him per se. Rather, these difficulties are naturally connected to the subject matter that he addresses. Namely, the topic of suffering…the age-old question of theodicy. If God is good, and all that God created is good, then why do we suffer? These are difficult questions with no sufficient answers.

I’m slightly concerned with the way that B16 addresses the issue of suffering as a means to learning hope. He is politically correct in his acknowledgment that we, as Christians, should work to alleviate suffering; however, he is less than optimistic that this can be accomplished this side of the eschaton. By naming suffering as one of the means by which we learn to hope, he implies quite powerfully that it is not going anywhere anytime soon. As well, this statement attempts to answer the theodicy question by saying something along the lines of “God allows suffering to bring about a greater good.” A classic view, but one that I ultimately find unconvincing and problematic.

I do not believe there to be a good answer to the theodicy problem, but I find the use of suffering as a means to a greater good to be dangerous. For starters, it legitimizes and romanticizes the suffering of millions (perhaps billions) of persons around the world. While I do not think that B16 is saying that God causes these persons to suffer or that we shouldn’t do anything about it, his conclusion does help to at least maintain the status quo.

As Christians, I think that we must be more optimistic about the possibility of social justice. Rather than say, “That is something that God will work out in the end,” we need to work harder for it in the present.  There are those like Reinhold Niebuhr who maintain that humanity is simply too corrupt, and others who hold that it is all God’s business and that all will eventually be well. True, our faith proclaims a hope that Christ will come soon, but the reality of the world begs us to take our present situation with more seriousness.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

I was up early this morning because it snowed again last night. This means, of course, that my neighbors were outside with their snowblowers and shovels, clearing their driveways. I went out to join the party and, after an hour or so, I was ready for a little break. I brewed myself some coffee and sat down to finish a book that I’ve been reading for the past few days. It was a wonderful book, fully deserving of a blog post.

The book I’m speaking of is Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. It is a book about punctuation and it is absolutely amazing. Anyone who has ever used an English style guide to write a paper will probably have a negative reaction to the thought of reading a punctuation book, but let me assure you, this one is different.

Truss is an extremely witty British woman who is attempting to defend punctuation as an art form. Her book has chapters on the apostrophe, the comma, the semicolon and colon, as well as the dash and the hyphen. Each chapter typically starts out with a history of the punctuation mark and then outlines the ways in which people have used (and abused) it. Then, she goes on to show how it is supposed to be used. There is honestly not a dull moment in the entire book.

I consider myself to be a fairly good writer who is generally conscious of proper style. This book showed me that I use commas too often and that I was wrong about the semicolon. I would not say that it has made me neurotic about my writing, but it has made me more cautious.

The book is just over two-hundred pages and can be read in a couple of days. If you’re looking for something to entertain you (as well as improve your writing), then this is a book for you!