Rod Dreher's Blog, page 627

Tamir Rice: No Indictment

You have by now heard the news that a Cleveland grand jury has declined to indict white police officers in the shooting death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black kid who had been playing with a realistic looking toy pistol on a public playground. More:

In announcing the decision here Monday, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said he did not recommend that the grand jury bring any charges. McGinty added that he believes both of the Cleveland police officers involved in the deadly encounter were reasonable in their belief that Rice had a real weapon, and that new analysis of the video of the shooting leaves it “indisputable” that the boy was pulling the weapon from his waistband when he was killed.

“The outcome will not cheer anyone, nor should it,” McGinty said. “Simply put, given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes and miscommunications by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police.”

More:

In a statement issued not long after the prosecutor’s announcement, attorneys for Tamir Rice’s family decried the grand jury process and renewed their calls for the Department of Justice to bring federal charges.

“It has been clear for months now that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty was abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against indictment,” the family attorneys said. “Even though video shows the police shooting Tamir in less than one second, Prosecutor McGinty hired so-called expert witnesses to try to exonerate the officers and tell the grand jury their conduct was reasonable and justified.  It is unheard of, and highly improper, for a prosecutor to hire ‘experts’ to try to exonerate the targets of a grand jury investigation.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio said Monday that federal officials monitored the grand-jury process, and that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is currently conducting its own independent investigation into Rice’s death.

The entire Washington Post account is here. 

Rice had been playing with a fake gun from which he had removed the orange safety tip that signals to others that the gun is a toy. It also emerged that Rice, despite his age, was 5’7″ and 175 lbs., which allegedly caused the two police officers to mistake him for a fully-grown man.

Robby Soave at Reason says:

Never mind that Loehmann [the cop who shot Rice] was previously fired from a police department for incompetence with firearms. Never mind that he shot Rice the very second his car arrived at the teen’s location. Never mind that the officers prevented Rice’s sister from assisting him as he lay dying of a gunshot wound. Never mind that they did absolutely nothing to help him until an FBI agent happened upon the scene.

The only thing that matters is whether Loehmann thought he was justified in killing Rice, and the law is such that no one is qualified to second-guess Loehmann’s decision except Loehmann himself. This is the level of deference we extend to police decision-making, and it is the reason the quest for justice in Rice’s unconscionable murder was doomed from the start.

Well, the cops preventing Rice’s sister from helping may have been wrong, but it has nothing to do with whether or not the shooting was justified given what the police knew at the time. Still, how crazy is it that we are in a situation in which the police might well have acted non-criminally, but still decided to speed up to the scene and start firing almost instantly?

Look, I did not sit on that grand jury, and I didn’t review all the evidence, and hear testimony. I have no way of knowing if its decision in this case was justified, and I doubt you do either. Seems to me that the way people respond to this decision depends heavily — and perhaps even wholly — on whether they are inclined to trust the police as a general matter. I have long been predisposed to give police the benefit of the doubt, but the outrageous conduct of Chicago police and city officials in the Laquan McDonald case makes it hard to know whom to trust.

A white reader who works for a large city, inside the city government, told me an interesting story the other day, one I forgot to blog about. In his city, the violent crime is almost exclusively in the black part of town. He said that the things police in his city have to deal with in terms of drugs and gun violence beggar belief. (I asked him for examples, and he gave me a few.) He also told me that he has personally witnessed police brutality against black crime suspects on more than one occasion. He said the abusive cops that he’s seen are both white and black, and that he fears his city is prime for a riot.

I was startled to hear this because this reader’s city has not been in the news for police brutality. I did a Google search to see if something had come up that I had missed, but nothing did. I verified that this reader really is an employee of his city’s government, and asked him subsequently about the lack of media coverage, given that his city has both a newspaper and TV stations. Said the reader, “I am constantly amazed by the things that go on here that I know about personally, that never make the news.”

The reader gave more detailed information than I’m able to share here, out of an abundance of caution for his privacy. If this reader is correct, then this whole situation in his city is about the failure of institutions. The police are failing. The local media are failing. The family and institutions that shape morality in that city’s black community are failing. I googled information about the public schools in the reader’s city, and with a few exceptions, they’re a disaster.

But about the police. I don’t know about you, but I’m coming to regard the police as an institution with the same mistrust that I have come to have for the church, academia, and the media as institutions. I have friends who are priests and pastors, as well as friends who are police officers, academics, and journalists. All of them are, to the best of my knowledge, good and trustworthy people; if they were not, I wouldn’t be friends with them.

But in observing the behavior of these institutions, I sense a strong defensiveness, and an unwillingness to be self-critical, leading either to a denial of institutional problems, or a private recognition of problems, but a public unwillingness to deal with them out of fear of losing face. I suppose it has always been that way, and we are only now learning the truth of what has been there all along, given human nature. Maybe.

Still, there is no question that the public’s trust in its institutions is at a historic low. Gallup has been polling on this since 1993, and in 2015’s results, found that overall, confidence in US institutions is lower than it has been since ’93.

Where did the Trump phenomenon come from? Do we really have to ask?

Three years ago, National Journal wrote a piece about the decline in confidence in American institutions. They began by telling the story of Johnny Whitmire, an unemployed white working-class man in Muncie, Indiana, who had been pretty badly battered by life. Excerpt:

Muncie is a mi­cro­cosm of a na­tion whose motto could be, “In Noth­ing We Trust.” Sev­en in 10 Amer­ic­ans be­lieve that the coun­try is on the wrong track; eight in 10 are dis­sat­is­fied with the way the na­tion is be­ing gov­erned. Only 23 per­cent have con­fid­ence in banks, and just 19 per­cent have con­fid­ence in big busi­ness. Less than half the pop­u­la­tion ex­presses “a great deal” of con­fid­ence in the pub­lic-school sys­tem or or­gan­ized re­li­gion. “We have lost our gods,” says Laura Hansen, an as­sist­ant pro­fess­or of so­ci­ology at West­ern New Eng­land Uni­versity in Spring­field, Mass. “We lost [faith] in the me­dia: Re­mem­ber Wal­ter Cronkite? We lost it in our cul­ture: You can’t point to a movie star who might in­spire us, be­cause we know too much about them. We lost it in polit­ics, be­cause we know too much about politi­cians’ lives. We’ve lost it—that ba­sic sense of trust and con­fid­ence—in everything.”

We’ve been through this be­fore, and Muncie is again in­struct­ive. Nearly nine dec­ades ago, so­ci­olo­gists Robert and Helen Lynd moved here to doc­u­ment the trans­ition away from an agrari­an eco­nomy. Amer­ic­ans were battered by un­bridled com­mer­cial­ism, sty­mied by an in­com­pet­ent gov­ern­ment be­hold­en to spe­cial in­terests, and flustered by new tech­no­lo­gies and new me­dia. The Lynds found a loss of faith in so­cial in­sti­tu­tions. But, some­how, in­sti­tu­tions ad­ap­ted or gave way to vi­brant new ones. The Cath­ol­ic Church took on poverty, ill­ness, and il­lit­er­acy. The Pro­gress­ive move­ment, em­bod­ied by Theodore Roosevelt, grappled with the so­cial costs of mod­ern­iz­a­tion and equipped the gov­ern­ment to off­set them. Labor uni­ons reined in the cor­por­ate ex­cesses of the new eco­nomy. Fraternal or­gan­iz­a­tions, a new concept, gave people a sense of com­munity that was lost when knit­ting circles and barn-rais­ings died out.

Per­haps the prob­lem is merely cyc­lic­al. “To a de­gree un­like any time since the Lynds’ time, we’ve lost trust in one an­oth­er and the in­sti­tu­tions that are sup­posed to hold us to­geth­er,” says James Con­nolly, dir­ect­or of the Cen­ter for Middletown Stud­ies at Ball State Uni­versity here. Yet un­like that earli­er era, vi­brant new in­sti­tu­tions are not gen­er­ally spring­ing up to re­place the old ones. And even when they do, they don’t al­ways re­store Amer­ic­ans’ faith in in­sti­tu­tions and each oth­er. Schools are worsen­ing (es­pe­cially re­l­at­ive to com­pet­it­ors abroad); politi­cians are lim­ited to small-bore, par­tis­an meas­ures; and cor­por­a­tions’ power over people like Johnny Whit­mire is rising. What if, this time, in­sti­tu­tions don’t re­cov­er—and our faith dies with them?

I think it is entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that the Cleveland officers committed no crime in the Tamir Rice situation. That it’s just a terrible tragedy. If so — if so — then the legal system worked. That said, does anybody in Cleveland — black, white, or otherwise — come away from this event with more confidence in the Cleveland police force? Can we at least agree on that?

Father Marty McFly

In the Philippines, a not-at-all-undignified priest concluded Christmas midnight mass by cruising the aisle of his church atop a Hoverboard.

Why do clerics do this kind of thing? I will never understand it.

The Spiritual Value of Material Culture

“THIS is why we need a Christian culture,” says Erin Manning, citing a column in the New Haven Register. The author is Norm Pattis, a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer. Pattis and his wife were in Italy for the Christmas holiday. Excerpts:

And, all at once, I am dumbstruck by the foolishness of the cross.

Paul wrote of this foolishness in his first letter to the church in Corinth: “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God,” he wrote.

I am not saved. The cross is foolishness to me. Or so it seemed …

You can’t escape the cross in Italy. It’s everywhere. There are churches seemingly at every square. In recessed alcoves on street corners, religious figures peer out onto passersby. Works of art proclaim a story of sacrifice, salvation, and damnation.

Walk a street in Italy and it as though the statuary keeps an eye on you, reminding you that you are not made of the same enduring stone.

More:

Yes, the Coliseum impresses, and the Forum is endlessly fascinating. Rome is a proud city; it is the seat of a civilization that has endured now for millennia.

But what drove me to tears was the sight of the Vatican, this from a sinner, a man of unclean lips, as the prophet Isaiah might say, who never darkens the door of a church, who never prays, and who is tone deaf to the sound of the divine.

Why so moved?

Yes, the Sistine Chapel is a marvel. Michelangelo’s frescos tell a familiar Biblical tale, and the Last Judgment is a powerful statement about a moral order to the universe. But these works of art are almost too overwhelming to move. I kept saying “wow,” over and over again, as we turned each corner.

But there’s something more substantial than the eye candy, something lingering in the silence. Just what it is, I cannot say, but I know enough to want more of it.

It is easy to scoff at the Church until you stand inside one. There’s a silence in the air, the intimation of something holy. All truly is calm. This story of a virgin and her child is so wildly improbable, yet it speaks a truth I can almost hear: Almost, as if a lover’s glance fell just askew and did not meet my eye.

There is a safety in the confines of the Church I found stunning. Amid the world’s chaos, something stands, and has withstood, the test of time. I imagine finding a place there, if such a thing were possible.

I am suddenly the father of a child in need of healing: “I believe, help thou my unbelief,” the words of Mark in his gospel, come to mind.

Read the whole thing. Pattis goes on to reiterate that neither he nor his wife are believers, but there was something about the beauty of these Christian places in Italy that surprised him — and to be precise, surprised him by something that was within himself. I well know the feeling, from my life-changing stumbling into the Chartres cathedral.

Erin Manning adds:

I honestly can’t understand the people who respond to a call for the Benedict Option by saying that, oh, well, Buddhists and pagans are virtuous too. They’re not even grappling with the big questions such as “What is virtue? Why is it good for a Buddhist culture to have cultural Buddhism but not (allegedly) good for a Christian culture to have cultural Christianity?” etc.

Christ built a Church, after all. One presumes He knew that people would need an actual tangible place to go and do actual tangible liturgical things as a way of encountering Him through the sacraments’ actual tangible words and signs, and so on, because He knows what we’re like. At the least excuse half of us would stay home and drink hot coffee on Sunday mornings while prattling about how we’re spiritual, but not religious, with no idea at all of just how far from the Holy Spirit we might be at that given moment.

Yes. He knows what we’re like. If you haven’t yet read Robert Louis Wilken’s “The Church As Culture” essay, let this post be your encouragement. In it, the historian said:

Can Christian faith—no matter how enthusiastically proclaimed by evangelists, how ably expounded by theologians and philosophers, or how cleverly translated into the patois of the intellectual class by apologists—be sustained for long without the support of a nurturing Christian culture? By culture, I do not mean high culture (Bach’s B-Minor Mass, Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew); I mean the “total harvest of thinking and feeling,” to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase—the pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities encoded in rituals, law, language, practices, and stories that can order, inspire, and guide the behavior, thoughts, and affections of a Christian people.

When one understands culture in this way, the classical distinction between Christ and culture, popularized in H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1950s book by that title, gives us little help. Some have observed, accurately in my view, that one difficulty with his analysis is that “culture” is really another term for “world,” the unredeemed territory in which human beings live. For Niebuhr the question is how the gospel, Christ, can penetrate the world, culture, without losing its distinctive character.

It seems to me, however, that the deficiency with the Christ-and-Culture scheme lies not in Niebuhr’s understanding of culture but in his view of Christ. For Niebuhr, Christ is a theological idea, and most of his book is taken up by an analysis of Christian thinkers who illustrate five basic types of the relation between this theological idea and culture. Niebuhr is largely silent about the actual historical experience of the Church, about culture on the ground, about institutions such as the episcopacy and the papacy (there is no mention of Gregory VII and the investiture controversy), monasticism, civil and canon law, calendar, and the ordering of civic space (the church standing on the central city square). But Christ entered history as a community, a society, not simply as a message, and the form taken by the community’s life is Christ within society. The Church is a culture in its own right. Christ does not simply infiltrate a culture; Christ creates culture by forming another city, another sovereignty with its own social and political life.

For believers bound together in the early Church, says Wilken, the creation of the first expressions of Christian material culture, in adorning the Catacombs, “Their aim was not to communicate the gospel to an alien culture but to nurture the Church’s inner life.”

And yet, the obvious question: with all that Christian material culture everywhere to be seen in Italy, why are Italians not more faithful to their baptism? Italy is astonishingly rich in Christian material culture, but I think it’s generally true about Europe (even if nothing parallels Italy). At least in Italy there is a tangible presence there to remind us of who we once were, and might be again. On the other hand, there are also plenty of material expressions of the pagan religions of the classical world, yet nobody is tempted to worship Minerva again. Hmm…

Star Wars Open Thread

Sergey Olegovich/Shutterstock

So, I saw the new Star Wars film yesterday. It was pretty good — not great, but pretty good. I’m glad I saw it, and it definitely achieved the most important task in front of the filmmakers, which was to get the franchise back on track after the disaster of the three prequels. The battle scenes were well-executed. I like the new villain, Kylo Ren (Andy Samberg + Alan Rickman as Prof. Snape = Kylo Ren), and I like the new hero, Rey. (Finn was meh, but I expect his character to develop in future episodes).

The worst problem here — and it is a massive one — is that the storytelling is extremely lazy. Extremely. The plot points and devices are so derivative of the first film, 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope, that I thought director J.J. Abrams was winking at us the first time he did it (the film opens with stormtroopers on a desert planet looking for a droid carrying information vital to the Rebel Alliance Resistance). But it keeps happening, over and over. The only thing I can say in defense of it is maybe the filmmakers are trying to make a point about the recurrence of mythological themes in history. But I don’t really buy it. I think they were just trying to play it extremely safe. The real title of this movie should be, The Force Awakens…And It’s ‘Groundhog Day’.

It was disappointing, for sure, but it did not ruin the film for me. I really did enjoy the movie. But I hope that in future episodes, they kick the formula to the side.

I’m going to have an open thread discussion of the film among you readers. I have a few more comments to make, but they will contain spoilers, so I’m going to put them below the jump. Also, if you have not yet seen the movie but plan to, please don’t read the comments, as they will surely contain spoilers. 

Now, about the derivative nature of the new film. Honestly, J.J. Abrams. Honestly. Another exotic cantina scene? Yet another plot in which the Bad Guys build a planet-sized killing machine that can obliterate other planets, but the Good Guys find one tiny flaw they can exploit to destroy it? Another moment in which Good Guy military brass — including Admiral Akbar — stand around a table looking at a hologram of the Bad Guy killing machine? Really?

And the father-son stuff, again. Oy. And: no explanation of what the Republic is, how the First Order arose out of the Empire, and who that giant hologram Voldemort dude is? I know, I know, too much back story could sink the thing (it’s one reason I gave up on the prequels; I couldn’t follow the Byzantine politics, and got very bored with them), but come on, shouldn’t we have some exposition? Would it have killed the screenwriters to have given us some theological background on Snoke, the Voldemortish Führer of the Dark Side? Why does BB-8 look like a cutesy-poo Pixar creation? He’s like a metallic, spherical Ewok.

J.J. Abrams & Co. are giving an uncritical fan base what it wants. Hey, this one is much, much better than the three that preceded it, and like I said, I’m pleased that the series is back on track. We can forget the prequels like we forgot the second season of Friday Night Lights, with its stupid Landry murder plot. Besides, the final sequence, with Luke on the edge of the world, was enough to justify the whole thing. That was filmed at Skellig Michael, and the ruins in which Luke lives are those of an actual sixth-century Christian monastery. All my Benedict Option circuits were overwhelmed by the sight. I could watch that final sequence over and over.

OK, your own thoughts and impressions…

UPDATE: Oh, wow, you have to read this nerdtacular Tolkien/Star Wars mash-up post that Jon Swerens highlights in the comments. It concludes with:

So I think the emerging critical consensus that The Force Awakens infantilizes its audience by re-presenting us with the same images we all saw as children is actually deeply wrong: The Force Awakens condemns Luke, Leia, and Han to actually live inside history, rather than transcend it, and it condemns us too.

You really do want to know how the author arrives at that conclusion. Trust me.

UPDATE.2: I should have added that I think that post above is really interesting, but ultimately a highly complex way to justify, through the philosophy of history, the fact that J.J. Abrams and his team just didn’t give a damn. Moments ago, I found this Ross Douthat post from before Christmas, in which he waylays the movie as a sign of cultural decadence. Excerpt:

Walk with me here: You’ve got an orphaned Force adept unaware of her powers living on a desert planet near an old man played by a famous British actor who probably holds secrets to her past; she then meets up with a droid carrying secret plans that its Rebel Alliance — sorry, Resistance — owner hid inside it just before she — sorry, he — was captured and tortured by the Empire — sorry, the First Order. You’ve got teams of stormtroopers scouring said planet in search of those plans, killing innocents along the way. You’ve got a Grand Moff Tarkin figure who wants to rely on a planet-destroying superweapon instead of the Force and who’s in a rivalry with a masked Darth Vader figure for the trust of a strange deformed Emperor — sorry, Supreme Leader. You’ve got the stop at a Mos Eisley cantina-style watering hole filled with smugglers and crooks. You’ve got the destruction of a planet(s) crucial to the Resistance effort midway through the movie, and then you’ve got the threatened destruction of a rebel base on a verdant planet by the same superweapon, which can only be averted by an X-Wing attack on a single weak point. You’ve got a confrontation between the Darth Vader figure and an older, wiser force for good who knew him intimately before he fell, which ends with the older wiser figure being killed by the Vader figure while our young hero — sorry, heroine — looks on in horror. And then you’ve got the X-Wing attack itself, which succeeds in blowing up the entire enemy super-base literally seconds before the superweapon is scheduled to fire on the base where Princess — sorry, General — Leia and a group of Resistance leaders are watching the attack unfold.

There was a moment, right before the attack succeeds, when I thought, wait, maybe it’s going to fail. Maybe Abrams is subverting our expectations, maybe he’s self-aware about how much this feels like a remake, maybe he’s going to blow up the rebel base this time, and leave our heroes to face the reborn Empire without the exact same rebel-alliance infrastructure they had in the original movies. 

That would have been a good idea. A new idea. (Ben Domenech had a similar thought, which he maps out in more detail.) Didn’t happen. Instead you just had a busy, cluttered, semi-comprehensible, FX-laden version of the attack and outcome that made this a thrilling, flawless fifteen minutes of cinema almost forty years ago.

By “decadence,” Douthat means:

Not the decadence of orgies and debauchery, but the decadence of drift, stagnation and repetition, as defined by Jacques Barzun:

All that is meant by Decadence is ‘falling off.’ . . . . The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.

A Disturbance in the Force

Ross Douthat takes the measure of 2015. Excerpt:

Through the dot-com bust, 9/11, the Iraq war, and the financial crisis, it was striking how consensus held, how elites kept circulating, how quickly populist movements collapsed or were co-opted, how Washington and Brussels consolidated power even when their projects failed. No new ideological movement, whether radical or reactionary, emerged to offer the alternative to liberalism that fascism and Marxism and throne-and-altar traditionalism once supplied. And no external adversary, whether Putinist or Islamist or Chinese, seemed to offer a better way than ours.

Here in the dying days of 2015, though, something seems to have shifted. For the first time in a generation, the theme of this year was the liberal order’s vulnerability, not its resilience. 2015 was a memento mori moment for our institutions — a year of cracks in the system, of crumbling firewalls, of reminders that all orders pass away.

Read the whole thing. 

I agree with this analysis, you will be unsurprised to learn. Here at the end of the year, thinking about the book I’m about to start writing after the first of the year, I am thinking about this in religious and cultural terms. Historian Edward Watts’s remarkable 2015 book The Final Pagan Generation, which I finished last week, is no barn-burner, but it makes a strong impression on how little the elite pagan Romans in the fourth century understood their own times. They thought it would last forever. And, as Prof. Bill Tighe points out, citing a lecture by the eminent historian Prof. Peter Brown, even the Christians of that era didn’t understand what was happening — that is, how the certainties of the pagan Roman Empire in the West were in collapse. Not even Constantine, the first Christian emperor, understood the deeply destabilizing forces at work in his own realm.

Is this us? For me, the most important part of our society is its religious sense and structure of thought. It is impossible for anybody to say with certainty what is coming next. Are Benedict Option people like me paranoids, or are we canaries in the coal mine? Obviously I believe the latter, and am about to begin making the case at a deep level — and, in turn, advancing an argument for a radical response. I do not think I am wrong, but yes, I could be wrong. Eight years ago or so, I was convinced that peak oil was upon us. I was wrong then, and I will undoubtedly be wrong in the future.

What if I’m right, though? Here’s Douthat’s conclusion (by “liberalism,” he’s talking about the Western order):

It’s still wise to bet on the current order, in other words, and against its enemies and rivals and would-be saboteurs.

But after liberalism’s year of living dangerously, for the first time in a long time it might make sense to hedge that bet.

I don’t think it’s safe at all to bet on the current Christian order, as opposed to liberal democracy and capitalism. Observant Christians today had better ask themselves if they can afford to carry on as if the center will hold. I see no reason — not one — to believe that it will.

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

If you’re from Baton Rouge, you know exactly where this is.

Social Gospel Über Alles

A reader who goes by the nom de blog “John Carter” comments on the “Are Christians to Blame For the EU Migrant Crisis?” thread:

So, I’ve moved to Germany in August and let me tell you that your commentator is both right, but also being read (i think) a bit wrong. Having attended a state run Lutheran Church since I’ve moved here, I’ve pretty much written off the state church. What we consider Christianity, and whatever is going on in the Church here are two completely opposite things.

I knew things weren’t going to be perfect (somewhere online, either on the dioceses website or the Evangelical conference everything lines up with what we’d consider orthodoxy except for ‘families’ which made the vague statement ‘We accept families of all stripes” while including a picture of a traditional family over a rainbow…), but I never expected the mind numbing weirdness I’ve witnessed. While the Church for the most part seems to be rather traditional from first glance it’s anything but. This goes beyond the butt-ugly mid-century modern altar piece in the medieval parish a few blocks away from mine, but to things like playing ‘Abbey Road’ and ‘Remember’ as Communion music. When it comes to refugees, it’s the Church’s obsession. Much of Germany is making a lot of noise about being helpful and welcoming (I think the cultural powers want to prove Germany’s more than the purse-string holding sourpuss they get the reputation for), but the Church makes the biggest din. Which would be fine, but the method they go about it chills me.

We had someone from higher up a few months ago (I’m assuming he was a Pastor at a higher level because he lead the benediction and gave the homely) come and as his homely, reminded us that Jesus wants us to love out enemies (good, I can get behind that), that even if there are black sheep we can’t judge all refugees by their actions (ok, I get that to a point), that we need to sit at a table with them and listen (ok, again, to a point). But then he gets to the point where he says we must do this, not because Christ mandates this, or to spread the gospel to those needing it most, but because we had blood on our hands. Apparently Germany is the biggest exporter of guns in the EU to this region, and me (a college student and dual citizen that hasn’t been in the country in years, nor done anything political here) and about 30 elderly people were responsible as well. I was sitting there boiling, “what the heck was THAT??” I fumed. Similarly, Christmas Mass’ homily was awkwardly shoe horned into the worst example of bad ideas. Recycling the really really bad example of the Christmas Story being a parallel for the refugees (Ummm, No. Why do Facebook feeds and everyone always choose this example? There’s a difference going to a strange culture to escape war, and doing a cross country trip and not being able to find a hotel room. If we are going to do a parallel fine, but why the heck not ‘The Flight to Egypt’? that would make much better sense…), a lot of the congregation looked around with annoyed faces but they continue.

Honestly, the real point I’m trying to make is that the Church here (I’m becoming more and more certain) doesn’t believe in it’s own message or it’s own story. They want to play interfaith niceness, and operate as a social services office with nice traditions. I’ve seen a lot of weird heretical things in my life, but the cake is taken by the ‘Evening of Reflection’ offered at the start of the church calendar earlier this month.

What I took was going to be prayer and reflection about holy things and preparation for the up coming year, ended up being a new age workshop being run by one of the Diocese’s pastors(!). Making sure our circle of chairs stayed unbroken, telling us about the time he met the spirit of his childhood self in the woods in Canada. Having us meditate and “allow our spirits to float between heaven and earth’ (and yes there was a gong), listening to a Audiobook psychiatrist who explained childhood traumas and then asked us to meditate like we were a baby who had just been nursed and was being lovingly held. It was weird, and despite the repeating of ‘God called the little ones unto him’ there was really nothing remotely related to our supposed common faith. The straw that broke the camel’s back was him pulling out a deck of cards, reminding us that they were ‘powerful’ and that by choosing one we’d discover a true secret of our soul. I don’t think I’ve lied in church in ages, but I quickly excused myself for the bathroom and returned home.

That’s the kind of things you’d expect from your garden variety cult, or weird snake-handling fundies , but this is a STATE CHURCH in a majorly ‘Christian Nation’. What’s worse, is that despite the fact that the churches are usually filled with older people, there’s still a catechism class. Every once in a while, there’s about 12 or so teens or children, with their little attendance cards. Rarely did I see them outside of required visits, but I have to wonder. These kids’ only exposure to the Gospel (unless they’re lucky enough to have good parents who teach them at home) is going to be along the check-list for conformation, and the people doing it don’t behave if they even believe it. Whatever Christianity your original commentator is complaining about, I’ve pretty certain it’s this one. And while I can only speak from what’s I’ve seen the last few months in the Lutheran Church, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Catholicism is in the same boat. This Christianity is Dead, and is a sick monster wearing the robes of its fore bearer, while everyone either doesn’t care or is too blind to see it.

In a few years we’ll be celebrating the anniversary of the Reformation, ironically we’ll be needing another one if things don’t shape up.

And it’s kind of sad really, I’ve really not met anyone my age or even anyone my parents age that seem to take faith really seriously. Ironically, the most understanding people have been the muslims my age. Though it still makes me slightly uncomfortable that as seriously that they take their faith, They may be the sign that my own is going to disappear…

But that’s just from your over-opinionated college boy, whatever my two cents are worth.

Question to European readers: is this what things look like in established churches where you live? If yes, please give details — and if not, what is making the difference?

This anecdote reminds me of church historian Robert Louis Wilken’s 2004 reflection, “The Church As Culture,” after spending some time in Germany. Forgive me for quoting this essay often, but it’s so, so important. Excerpt:

Talking to the young woman in Erfurt and listening in on the debate about the EU constitution I found myself musing on the future of Christian culture. In my lifetime we have witnessed the collapse of Christian civilization. At first the process of disintegration was slow, a gradual and persistent attrition, but today it has moved into overdrive, and what is more troubling, it has become deliberate and intentional, not only promoted by the cultured despisers of Christianity but often aided and abetted by Christians themselves. [Emphasis mine — RD]

It’s not just in Europe, Wilken says, but in the US as well. More:

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life [Emphasis mine — RD], the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.

If Christian culture is to be renewed, habits are more vital than revivals, rituals more edifying than spiritual highs, the creed more penetrating than theological insight, and the celebration of saints’ days more uplifting than the observance of Mother’s Day. There is great wisdom in the maligned phrase ex opere operato, the effect is in the doing. Intention is like a reed blowing in the wind. It is the doing that counts, and if we do something for God, in the doing God does something for us.

I know that some Evangelicals and Catholics instinctively recoil from talk of the Benedict Option, the point of which is primarily “for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life,” because we Christians cannot be what we are supposed to be for the world if we lose touch with our own story and our own life. They are under the impression that the Benedict Option is a turning-inward for its own sake, a refusal to evangelize, to tell the Church’s story to the unconverted in the world.

They are wrong, and their error has consequences. First, no church can be authentically Christian without evangelizing. That is perfectly clear from Scripture and Tradition. So let’s get out of the way the idea that the Ben Op is against evangelization.

The situation becomes more complicated when we ask: “What is the goal of evangelism?”

An Evangelical would say, “To lead unbelievers into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ,” by which she would mean leading them to confessing their sinfulness and need for a Savior, and accepting Christ into their hearts as Lord.

A Catholic would say, though perhaps not exactly in these words, “To lead unbelievers into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, both in and through his Church, which is the ordinary means of salvation He established.” The Catholic would consider her evangelism successful if an unbeliever professed Christ as Lord, and was baptized or confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, and took up its sacramental life.

An Orthodox evangelist would, in general, treat the goal of evangelism as a Catholic would, only accepting Orthodoxy, not Catholicism, as the historical and theological norm.

Here’s the problem with all of these cases: after the decision has been made for Christ (and, if baptism and/or confirmation [in Orthodoxy, called chrismation] has been performed) … what next? 

The Christian life, properly understood, cannot be merely a set of propositions agreed to, but must also be a way of life. And that requires a culture, which is to say, the realization in a material way — in deeds, in language, in song, in drama, in practices, etc. — of the propositions taught by Christianity. To be perfectly clear, at the core of all this is a living spiritual relationship with God, one that cannot be reduced to words, deeds, or beliefs.

In 2009, the Evangelical market researcher and pollster George Barna, talking about the deficits among American Christians in understanding basic Christian orthodoxy, said:

There are a several troubling patterns to take notice. First, although most Americans consider themselves to be Christian and say they know the content of the Bible, less than one out of ten Americans demonstrate such knowledge through their actions. Second, the generational pattern suggests that parents are not focused on guiding their children to have a biblical worldview. One of the challenges for parents, though, is that you cannot give what you do not have, and most parents do not possess such a perspective on life. That raises a third challenge, which relates to the job that Christian churches, schools and parachurch ministries are doing in Christian education. Finally, even though a central element of being a Christian is to embrace basic biblical principles and incorporate them into one’s worldview, there has been no change in the percentage of adults or even born again adults in the past 13 years regarding the possession of a biblical worldview.

If you follow that link (to a Christianity Today account of Barna’s findings), you’ll see that if you are a small-o orthodox Christian, the term “Biblical worldview” is not as contentious as you might suspect, given its use by an Evangelical pollster. I bring it up here because Barna’s research findings mirror exactly the anecdotal accounts I have received over the past three years from a number of Christian educators, both Evangelical and Catholic, in both high school and college. No matter how fervent their faith appears on the surface, there is not much content to it, they say.

Of course from the perspective of people who take Christianity seriously, this is never good. But when the broader culture itself operated from generally Christian principles, it gave a certain margin for laxity. Growing up in the 1970s, in my home, we lived pretty much as nominal Christians, as lots of people we knew did. Yet my sister and I, though only intermittent attenders at Sunday school, learned a lot of the Biblical story from the ambient culture. My parents were by no means unusual in the local popular culture of the time.

It is hard to express to younger people who only know American life in the age of cable television and then the Internet how powerful local culture was at setting the frames through which you saw the world. This could be very bad — for example, it was hard for a white kid growing up in that world to grasp how pervasive racism was, or what it meant — but it could also be very good.

There was very little in the way my generation was raised as Christians to prepare us for the world that was about to be upon us. This is understandable, given how radical those technological changes were. Yesterday I spent 20 minutes FaceTiming my Dutch friend Marnix. When we first became friends, back in 1981, we could only communicate through letters, and the occasional (expensive) phone call. Now, we’re middle-aged husbands and fathers who can communicate through live video links from the comfort of our own couches — and our children can scarcely imagine anything else.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, airlines were regulated, and the cost of flying was astronomical (don’t believe me? Look here). The idea of air travel at all was unusual to middle and working-class people like us, and the thought of traveling to Europe was impossibly exotic. It was not remotely affordable. By contrast, my children have flown a fair amount, and have even been to Europe (my oldest has been four times). The real and (more importantly) imaginary boundaries of their world are far, far beyond what my own were as a child.

It’s like this: when we were kids, the word “atheist” was associated with an aggressively unpleasant woman named Madalyn Murray O’Hair. In my town, many, and probably most, people did not go to church every Sunday, but the idea that there would people who did not believe in God was scarcely thinkable. We would hear about this Madalyn Murray O’Hair woman in the media from time to time, and she was thought of as a bizarre troll.

Now, atheism is thoroughly mainstream. That’s not to say most people are atheists, of course, or that atheism is no big deal in our culture. But it is to say that children born to Christian families nowadays have to confront atheism in ways that my generation did not. Are we preparing our kids for this world?

And not just atheism, of course. As you know, nearly half of all Americans who belong to a church or profess a religion are in another church or religion than the one in which they were raised (I am among their number). I’ve written before about how my father could not understand how I could convert to Catholicism when “the Drehers have always been Methodist.” In truth, any Catholic parent around here of my dad and mom’s generation would have had the same reaction had their child told them that he was becoming an Evangelical. It just wasn’t done.

But now it’s done. It’s done a lot. Again, are we preparing our kids for this world?

The evidence indicates that we are not (::cough, cough:::MTD:::cough, cough:::). Why? That’s complicated, and going into it would make this already too-long post much longer, but both Christian institutions and individuals are implicated. True story: a guy I know’s mother complains all the time about the failures of the churches (not that she attends one faithfully), and especially loves to rail about how “they don’t teach the Ten Commandments in our churches anymore.” He said to her one day, “Mom, what are the Ten Commandments anyway?” She managed to come up with three, maybe four.

And from a certain way of looking at it, the fact that cultural Christianity of the sort in which many of us were raised is dying is not a bad thing. Russell Moore says:

Bible Belt near-Christianity is teetering. I say let it fall. For much of the twentieth century, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest, one had to at least claim to be a Christian to be “normal.” During the Cold War, that meant distinguishing oneself from atheistic Communism. At other times, it has meant seeing churchgoing as a way to be seen as a good parent, a good neighbor, and a regular person. It took courage to be an atheist, because explicit unbelief meant social marginalization. Rising rates of secularization, along with individualism, means that those days are over—and good riddance to them.

Again, this means some bad things for the American social compact. In the Bible Belt of, say, the 1940s, there were people who didn’t, for example, divorce, even though they wanted out of their marriages. In many of these cases, the motive wasn’t obedience to Jesus’ command on marriage but instead because they knew that a divorce would marginalize them from their communities. In that sense, their “traditional family values” were motivated by the same thing that motivated the religious leaders who rejected Jesus—fear of being “put out of the synagogue.” Now, to be sure, that kept some children in intact families. But that’s hardly revival.

Secularization in America means that we have fewer incognito atheists. Those who don’t believe can say so—and still find spouses, get jobs, volunteer with the PTA, and even run for office. This is good news because the kind of “Christianity” that is a means to an end—even if that end is “traditional family values”—is what J. Gresham Machen rightly called “liberalism,” and it is an entirely different religion from the apostolic faith handed down by Jesus Christ.

I agree with this, mostly, but I can’t help worrying about the kind of world that we will inhabit when the absence of general, nominal Christianity makes people feel unrestrained in the face of evil passions, or uninspired to act on good ones. Like it or not, that’s the world we are in now, and rapidly heading toward.

So, to return to the beginning of this post: the churches that substitute the Social Gospel for any kind of real Christianity are plainly dying, because they offer nothing but sentimental humanitarianism. The death of Christianity in the West will be ruled a suicide, for sure.

What about those Christians who do not want to follow their leaders into senescence and dissipation? It’s these Christians I want to speak for, and speak to, with the Benedict Option. The first and most important thing we have to do, per Prof. Wilken, is to start telling ourselves our own story again, and believing it, and living that story out in tangible ways.

What does this mean? I am going to spend the first half of 2017 exploring that in-depth. Your input is requested. Specifically, what would you say to those troubled German Lutherans who, upon hearing the crap sermon, “looked around with annoyed faces but continue”? According to what the German-American correspondent says, they are all elderly. Their children and grandchildren aren’t even there to look annoyed, much less continue. What should they do? And what should much younger Christians who don’t want to be in their place one day, or to see their children in such a place, now do?

Keep in mind that we didn’t get here overnight, but it’s also true that the world we are in today in the West is very different in terms of what you might call the “imagination horizon” than it was well within living memory.

UPDATE: On the previous thread, the (native-born) “German Reader” (his nom de blog) responded to John Carter’s comment by saying that he was baptized in the state Lutheran church, but has stopped going and is going to officially renounce it next year. German Reader writes:

I don’t think the Lutheran church has much of a future in Germany, it’s moribund, and the church leadership is in denial about this. Its membership numbers may still look impressive but that’s just a left-over from a time when almost everyone belonged to a church…my generation will be the last one in which that was the case (and I know people my age who were never baptized and had even less exposure to Christianity that myself as children). In 20-30 years time when its older members have died off there won’t be much left of the Lutheran Church. And considering how that church has become little more than the (somewhat) spiritual arm of the Greens and Social Democrats, I can’t say I feel really sorry about this.

Interesting. You have some vocal Americans saying that the church here is the Republican Party at prayer, which is why they have no interest in it.

Christmas, and Completing the Circle

So, my mother and my nieces — Hannah, Claire, and Rebekah Leming — just left our Christmas dinner, logy and needing a nap in the way all of us do by sundown on Christmas day. They left with a plate we put together for their dad, who had to work at the fire station all day. Now the house is quiet, and I am full of rum cake and contentment, and probably headed to bed soon. The kids woke Julie and I up at six a.m.; you would think that the end of the Santa Claus era with our kids would have bought us more time to sleep in on December 25, but no. We have been cooking all day, and need … a … nap.

But it’s a good tired. I can hardly tell you how good, but I’m going to try.

For most of this year I have expected my dad not to make it to Christmas, and, sadly, I was proved right when he died in August. But this is not the Christmas I expected to have with him gone. If you read my book How Dante Can Save Your Life, or have been following this blog for the past few years, you know how hard I have struggled with family issues, how physically ill they made me, how spiritually oppressed and emotionally depressed I have been by all of it. You know how much God helped me through reading the poetry of Dante, through the spiritual guidance of my pastor Father Matthew Harrington, and through the counsel of Mike Holmes, my therapist.

What God did for me was to allow me to be completely broken by rejection, and to become so lost and confused that I humbled myself, against my nature, to follow a Tuscan poet through the dark wood of my own heart. There were dragons there, and I had to do battle with them. Through divine grace, through repentance, through prayer, through dying to self, and through the love and help of others, I overcame them, and found my way back to the straight path. I told that story in the book and on this blog, and I won’t go into it again here. This is what I said the day Daddy died. What I had dreaded for decades turned into one of the most beautiful days of my life, because holiness and harmony filled all things, a holiness and a harmony that I would not have been able to see or to participate in had it not been for the terrible, glorious, miraculous journey with Dante.

In His will is our peace. I don’t believe that. I know it, because I saw it, I lived it, and I bear witness to it.

I thought being able to hold Daddy’s hand and be at peace with him when he breathed his last was as good as it was going to get for me. But I also believed that when he died, our family was going to dissolve. There was no peace between the Leming girls and us. With Hannah, yes, but not the two younger ones, despite all our efforts. I had accepted that the family bonds had frayed to the breaking point, and that because Daddy was the keystone that kept the whole thing from collapsing, his passing would mean the end. It made me sad, but I had accepted that life is tragic, and some things are beyond one’s ability to control.

And then Daddy entered the last week of his life. Claire was off at boarding school, and we called her, telling her to come home, because Paw was dying. Here, from a post I wrote that night in August, is what happened next:

Claire arrived, and was grieved to the point of sobbing that her Paw could not be awakened to talk to her. But later in the evening, he came around, and they spent time together. After supper, I asked her if she wanted to pray at his bedside with me. “I was hoping you would ask,” she said. And so we went into his bedroom, shut the door, and began our prayers.

After we prayed for a while, I asked Claire to forgive me all the things I had done to her to cause such hard-heartedness in our family. Claire is a serious, observant Christian, and asked me the same thing. We talked about why our family is broken, and how neither one of us wanted to live this way. It was such a moment of healing grace. Paw was in and out of consciousness, and murmured that his legs hurt. I retrieved a bottle of lotion, and each of us took one of his bare, cool feet, and rubbed the sweet-smelling ointment into his skin.

“Ohhhh, that feels so good,” he said.

We sat with him a while longer, telling him how much we loved him, and thanking him for all he has done for us. Claire held his hand, which he squeezed tightly. I am fascinated by his mottled, craggy hands. “Daddy, I bless your hands,” I told him. “Those hands built this house. Those hands tilled the soil on our land. Those hands split the wood that kept us warm in the winter. Those hands held Ruthie and me when we were little, and they have held all six of your grandchildren.”

His eyes did not open, but I am sure he heard me. At one point, I had to stand at the head of his bed and reposition the oxygen tube in his nose. As I leaned in close, I said the psalm in his ear: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want… .” I continued, and saw his lips moving as I recited. Claire’s eyes widened; even through the fog of death, Paw was praying the 23rd Psalm. The grace of that moment! I cannot do it justice.

He opened his eyes at last, and we talked a little bit about Ruthie, whose photo sits beside his bed. “What are you going to say to her when you see her?” I asked.

“Hello, sugar, how you been doin’?” he rasped. “What can I do for you?”

Claire nearly laughed out loud. “Isn’t that just like him?” I said.

“It’s just like him,” she agreed.

It finally was time to let Paw rest, so we stood, and embraced at his bedside, vowing to let Jesus Christ be the mortar that holds us together, and to walk out of this room starting anew. Such a blessing, I can’t even tell you.

He died four days later, with all of us at his bedside. We buried him a few days later, Claire went back to school, and we all returned to our lives.

But something was different. As the summer turned into fall, Claire and I were communicating better, and Rebekah followed her lead. She started coming over to spend time with us more. And we loved it! Especially Lucas and Nora, who think she hangs the moon. Rebekah began to drop by on her own, and even called once to ask if she could spend the night. I was astonished. We moved here hoping for this, and now, at last, it was happening. She’s such a great kid, and now we were getting to know her.

Eight days ago, with Hannah home for the holidays from California, and Claire home from school, Rebekah texted and invited us all to spend the late afternoon and evening at her family’s house, eating and drinking and playing games and watching movies. Just being a family. It was the most ordinary text in the world, but if it had been delivered by the Archangel Gabriel, I could scarcely have been more grateful. We did this on Sunday, and it was great, just great. Just like things are supposed to be.

I’ve been thinking the past week about how this all happened. What opened the floodgates of healing grace for our family? How had we been at an impasse for so long, and suddenly, we were not?

It was Dante.

I remember sitting at Daddy’s bedside, moments after Claire and I finished praying, and he had fallen asleep. I thought about how Dante said in the Commedia that there is no spiritual progress without humility. I was afraid to break the ice by talking about what was on my heart with Claire. It had never amounted to anything. I felt hurt by her actions, but at the same time, I had to concede that I had possibly caused her pain without being aware of it. What did I have to lose by asking her forgiveness? There was my father, her grandfather, dying in front of us. Time was passing. Who knows how long any of us have on this earth? Get over your fear, I thought, and get over your pride. Just say you’re sorry. 

Because I am a vain and proud man, like my father, I did not want to do this. By force of will alone — not my will but God’s, to which I yielded for a moment —  I forced myself to take Claire by the arm, and say I was sorry.

That did it. Claire is fierce like her mother and grandfather, and unyielding in her judgments. At that moment though, by the bedside of her dying Paw, she opened her heart and heard me. She poured out her emotions, telling me things that helped me understand why she and her sister had done what they had done.

And she said that she too was sorry. This was the difference that Jesus Christ made in her life. She knew what forgiveness was, and how Christians are supposed to live. I think that both of us in that moment were aware of how weak we are by nature, and how defeated by our pride. But the way of Jesus — the way of humility, of forgiveness, of love — conquered us both, and in so doing, gave us victory. Daddy was a great man, but a man who could not admit wrong. It was his great weakness. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think somehow, Claire and I, sitting at his bedside praying for him in his final days, grasped the futility of pride. Certainly not consciously, but it is hard to watch a man as wise and strong and  accomplished as my father reduced to radical feebleness, and not to sense that some great and terrible truth about life is being disclosed to one.

My heart took delight in all my labor,

    and this was the reward for all my toil.

   Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done

    and what I had toiled to achieve,

everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;

    nothing was gained under the sun.

That is from the second chapter of Ecclesiastes. My father cared about nothing more than his family — the family as he thought it should be — and yet the particular form of pride he took in his family and passed down to my sister, threatened to destroy it. The ferocious and unyielding nature of it. This was his tragedy, a tragedy magnified by the greatness of his spirit. It was a tragedy we were all caught in, because he was such a binding force among us. That pride worked on us all like a spell.

What broke the spell was humility, Claire’s and mine. I think she would agree that the humility was no virtue of ours, but it was a function of our shared Christianity — and for me, retaining the lesson I learned from reading Dante. Neither one of us understood it at the time, but the family was saved that night at Paw’s bedside. This is clearer to me now, four months later, especially after this holiday we have spent together.

I’m speaking of this to you in an unusually intimate way, because I’m so grateful for this gift that I want to encourage you to offer and to accept the free gift of forgiveness to those from whom you are estranged. In Canto XVI of Dante’s Purgatorio, the pilgrim learns that our fates are not written in the stars, that as long as we have free will, we have the possibility of change. In this is our hope. I had resigned myself to the fact that our family was going to dissolve, that after Paw died, the Lemings would go their way, and we would go ours. Hannah and I had talked about this on several occasions, and she agreed that this was our fate, as much as we both hated it.

It was not our fate after all. Because of humility, and forgiveness, and love.

That photo above is of my mom, me, and the Leming sisters (left to right, Rebekah, Hannah, Claire) on Saturday, after we had a birthday dinner for Mam. Mam and the sisters came over today for Christmas dinner (Mike was on duty at the fire station), and we had a perfectly ordinary, lovely time. Which was, given our tumultuous and unhappy recent history, extraordinary, and a very great blessing.

As I saw them out, I told my mother, “We’re all going to be okay.” It wasn’t an attempt at encouraging a widow at Christmas, but rather a statement of incredulous gratitude. Gratitude for Claire, gratitude for her sisters, gratitude for my family, gratitude for Dante, and above all, gratitude to God for His surprising and tireless goodness. Did I see this coming? No, I did not. Glory to God for all things!

I’m thinking just now about this passage from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, in which I write about the days leading up to our move from Philadelphia to St. Francisville:

I hadn’t been sleeping well in the nights leading up to the move. One night, just before dawn, I dreamed that I was standing in the living room of our Philadelphia apartment, surrounded by boxes, wrapping paper, and all the accoutrements of our impending move. I heard the door open downstairs, and someone walking up the stairs. It was Ruthie. She was wearing a white sweater with a collar gathered close around her neck, and carrying a tin of muffins.

“I thought you were dead!” I said.

“Oh, I am,” she said sweetly. “I just wanted to tell you that everything is going to be all right.”

“Thank you for saying that. Will you stay for a while?”

“No, I need to get on back.”

Then I woke up. The dream had been unusually vivid, far more intense than usual. When I woke up, I wasn’t sure if I was still inside the dream, or not.

At breakfast, I told Julie about the dream. “Of course she brought muffins,” Julie said. “That’s just like Ruthie.”

“Maybe it really was her,” I said. “But I know how much I need to believe everything is going to be okay down there. I might have imagined it. I probably imagined it.”

For most of the past four years, I have been certain that I imagined it, that the dream was not a visitation of my sister, but a projection of my hope and fear.

I don’t think that any more. I believe she did come to me, and that everything is going to be all right. We are fine now. And by the grace of that baby born in a Bethlehem barn, we are going to be fine.

 

 

View From Your Christmas Table 2015

Durban, South Africa

The reader writes:

We kept it very simple this year – lamb roast, steamed veggies, garlic mashed potatoes (made with duck fat and chicken stock instead of butter and cream due to milk allergies – not bad substitutes at all), and red wine (Ernie Els Big Easy, a solid South African Shiraz blend). My mother-in-law is here with us this year – a genuine blessing – but other than that our families are all in North America, hence the computer set up at the head of the table for video calls with everyone back home.

[Note From Rod: I’m going to update this VFYT over the next couple of days as more photos come in, with the newer ones at the top. Scroll down to catch the earliest ones. Please send yours in, but remember the rules: don’t make it a view of your table, but rather a view from your table, capturing some of the context in the room or setting. And as always, no faces; I can’t publish photos with faces.]

O Holy Night

Christ is born*! Glorify Him!

Truly He taught us to love one another

His law is love and His gospel is peace

Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother

And in His name all oppression shall cease

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,

Let all within us praise His holy name

Y’all be good to each other. It’s Christmas. Going to a family party now to eat gumbo and drink beer and be happy, with all the other elves.

(*except in Russia; do not say this till the eve of January 7, 2016)