Death & Christmas

This is a poem I wrote in Haiti after watching a newborn baby (the one in the picture) die. I hope it doesn't lessen your joy of Christmas, but perhaps deepen joy with a perspective we all need: the understanding that our hope was bought with a price.

The Incarnation

Why did I ever come forth from the womb to look on trouble and sorrow, so that my days have been spent in shame? -Jeremiah 20:18

Unto us a child is born
Unto us a son is given.
Born of blood,
Born to bleed.
Born into the cold
Born into squalor
Among the filth of animal feces
On the coldest night of the year
Night air carries distant moaning,
The bitter moaning of death vigils.
Many die on such a night.

...and the bloody infant
Miserable yellow jaundice.
Wrap the infant tight,
Lay him shivering in the hay
To be bitten by lice and fleas
And bored through by parasites.
He whines and writhes,
Vomits, then shakes in quiet agony
But the child will not die tonight...

He will live to know more agony
The suffering life of a dirty peasant,
Building with broken hands.
Born of suffering,
Born to suffer.
And pitiful, muffled cries draw
Men of the fields,
ugly and reeking,
Bringing infection to the infant.
Unto us a sickly child is born,
Unto him the plague is given
And the infection of us all
Will be upon his shoulders.
But the wretched one will not die tonight...

He will live to know more agony
To die tormented and alone,
Rather than here in his mother’s arms.
Brought to life this night
Brought to life to die.
In the wretchedness
Of this yellow, shivering body:
Here is the only hope
Of peace and salvation.

Unto us a sickly infant is born.
Through suffering hope is born.
And the weight of the world
Will be upon his shoulders.
And Death will be upon his shoulders
Tremble before your newborn Savior.

…and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.


*

Values and Personality: Part II

An examination of the effects emotions and personality on political beliefs, continued from Part I:

Part II: Non-Violence

The transformation from a hawkish conservative to a pacifist opposed to the death penalty didn't begin with careful reasoning, but with subtle experience. First, I fell in love. I married the most amazing woman. Perhaps it is an accident of natural selection that young males are eager to kill or die for their nation or a cause, but having a wife and now a child on the way have tempered any inclination toward killing. The list of things I would be willing to kill or die for rapidly began to empty. The only thing I would be willing kill for is to save her from danger. The thought that I had once been willing to go to war and kill another woman's husband filled me with remorse. I find now as a husband and father that violence and cruelty depicted in films which had never bothered me before often make me sick to my stomach.

Another thing that happened was that I became a doctor. Suddenly people dying and suffering, which had before been an abstraction, became something I saw frequently and intimately. Before I had rather harshly realistic opinion that everyone dies. Perhaps I have a “thin skin,” but after caring for so many as they die I can no longer have such a cavalier attitude toward the death of a human being. No matter how painful or peaceful, the end of a human life strike me as an immense tragedy. We all still die and suffer, but I can never speak of the death of another human lightly. Even more so willfully killing a person, even a vile person or someone who is a threat, became horrible to my mind.

Medicine also altered my concept of “deserving.” Much of the illness I care for in my patients is self-inflicted through unhealthy decisions made in the past. The conservative idea that bad acts should get what they deserve, doesn't work in medicine. My oath as a physician binds me to care for the suffering and ill regardless of patients “bringing it on themselves” or not. It is my job to prevent (as much as possible) people from getting “what they deserve” from years of unhealthy habits. I should advocate for health, but realizing unhealthiness exists it is my job to forgive and restore. Perhaps it is a stretch, but my job in human restoration after bad deeds made me wonder about humans metering out the justice of God by putting evil people to death. My own experience in my family of evil and redemption again figured in my perspective. Also in medicine I have cared for many prisoners, including several who I know killed others ruthlessly. Did I have the right to tell them they didn't deserve lifesaving care because they were bad? No. They were in chains and no longer a threat to anyone. Why should I want them killed?

The ancient rule of medicine is “First, do no harm.” This beneficent rule has restrained physicians for centuries. We are not any better than any human beings, but something as simple as this has given us perhaps the greatest respect among professions. I liked this principle. It made sense and even misanthropic doctors act well when they are reminded of this oath. I sought such a simple principle for my political beliefs. The Consistent-Life Movement is above all things simple: Kill no human. It fit with my pro-life upbringing. It fit with my Christian beliefs. While the holy scriptures don't expressly prohibit capital punishment or war, the commandment to love others with the sacrificial love of Christ certainly makes consistent non-violence seem consistent with my belief.

During this internal transformation of my values, the external world seemed to be moving to confirm my new views. The war I had initially supported had become long, bitter, and pointless. Now our brave soldiers are dying and killing to prevent a cataclysm that our invasion set in motion. Certainly this preemptive war was started with the best of intentions: a fight for security and freedom. This war and my initial support of it leaves a sad stain on my consciousness. How easily I supported sending our defenders to kill and be killed! I now deeply believe that war should always be a last resort and only in self-defense.

My conservative friends and family think me a bit of an embarrassment for becoming a vocal pacifist, and liberal pacifists find my antiabortion convictions to be offensive, but I must admit being consistently pro-life is a relief. I am by no means a perfect person or a perfect Christian, but to my mind this is the most true and honest way to let the mind of Christ effect my politics. “As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” -Romans 12:18 And so my mind is at peace with this. With a personality that impulsively spills my thoughts out to everyone (as evidenced by this blog) it is this piece of my mind that I speak.

Values and Personality: Part I

With all the soapbox speeches on this blog, perhaps I would do well to examine the personal conflicts and influences that produced these convictions. While many essays here are commentary, this site is personal and the essays are personal thoughts.

Political and ethical beliefs are not arrived at in a vacuum with only logical extrapolations from fundamental principles. They arise organically within a mind after mixing with the milieu of experience, emotions, and personality. As Chris often points out the logical arguments for my stances often leave much to be desired. While I must work on more thoughtful reasoning, “one cannot help but believe, that which seems true.” Thus I will try to provide an examination of how these values came to seem true in my mind:

Part I: Pro-Life

I was raised in the Pro-life (anti-abortion) Movement. My mother was a passionate pro-life activist. She had two abortions, before having us, and she had initially scheduled me to be terminated as well. Seeing the wrongness of what had been done, she poured her energy into preventing further killing of innocent fetuses. As long as I can remember there were bumper stickers on the car and we carried signs at rallies. We were taught that if enough people got involved America would come to it's senses and stop the killing. To a child there was an overwhelming sense of optimism and hopefulness in the face of terrible wrong.

The impact of abortion within my family deepened the belief in the rightness of being pro-life, but it also prevented any sense of enmity in my conviction. How could I despise those who have abortions, when my own mother, who raised me to be pro-life and saved me from being aborted, had once done this? I believe this perspective nourished my sense of empathy, and led me to a much more nuanced view of evil. Conservatives often think in terms of good guys and bad guys. Even as a young person I couldn't fully accept such as simplistic explanation.

Being Pro-life and Christian my parents raised me Republican and Conservative. I believe due to this political affiliation I was initially in favor of the death penalty and hawkish about war. I even considered applying for a military academy. While I certainly had a young male bravado, I was never eager for violence, but I was taught it was a necessity for responding to evil in the world. While I couldn't quite accept the conservative concept of bad guys versus the rest of us, I did accept that violence kept order and prevented worse evils. Killing our fellow humans (guilty humans -since I was pro-life) was a necessary evil in this world. I even supported Bush's invasion of Iraq as recently as 2003, but by that time my confidence in the acceptability of violence was already waning.

(for more on becoming a pacifist see Part II)

Buy Nothing Day!

Happy Buy Nothing Day! In response to the mass buying frenzy that happens starting today (an unfortunate manipulation of the traditional thankfulness and giving associated with these holidays) today is declared "Buy Nothing Day" (a holiday that Congress would never dare officialize). So today we remember our humanity and fight the ways that we are defined as and depended on by society to be "consumers." We also reflect on how our own greed and materialism makes us complicit in this sad spectacle.

Perhaps with enough reflection we can realize that the gift of Christ on Christmas would be less honored by unrestrained buying of things that people don't need, but by giving to those we love by serving those whose need is deepest.


PS: Perhaps I should clarify the preachy tone of this blog, by pointing out I am not some monk or Daniel in Babylon who is not soiled by such things. My own guilt in this love of things makes me need a day like this more than anyone.

When Dreams Become Responsibilities

The last few weeks I've been having the same dream: I am working in the Emergency Room surrounded by patients I can't cure with problems I can't even understand. In the bizarre logic of dreams, my patients seem both real and somehow blurry enough that their illnesses never make sense. These dreams last all night. I awaken, realize I have been dreaming, but cannot shake off the anxieties of the dream; “What would I do if that really happened at the hospital?” (Unable to realize that dreams present problems to which there are no solutions.) I fall back into fitful sleep. My wife says I talk frantically in my sleep. These dreams only come on nights before my shifts at the hospital.

It is interesting that I once would have said it is my “dream” to be a doctor. Although I love my job, my former dreamy idealism has been replaced with heavy duty. Before in residency, I was in a group of many training doctors and was never the one finally responsible for the care I gave. Now as I work 24 hour shifts in this rural Emergency Room, I alone am responsible for the life and safety of every person who enters the doors.

Fortunately in my waking work, even my patients with complex problems eventually make sense to me, and I believe the care I provide really is quite good. People I know occasionally bemoan not reaching ambitious goals they set for themselves. My daydreams are the opposite: I think how nice it might have been if I hadn't passed my medical school entrance exams. I could work a regular job without weary nights, death, suffering, and weighty responsibility. My brother recently left nursing school. He told me, “I like working with people, but if I give the wrong medicine someone might die. I don't think I want a job like that.” A few years ago I would have tried to talk him out of this. Not now.

My wife reminds me that I had similar dreams during my first year of residency. I grew out of them, as I became more confident in my new role. Hopefully I will also grow stronger under the burden of this dream I have chosen for myself—strong enough to carry it's weight with grace and patience.

Is Violence Effective?

This post originally started as a response to this post on Turn the Clock Forward.

A book a few years back called “Freakonomics” claimed that legalized abortion in America is responsible for decreasing the crime rate. (We aborted future criminals.) Since then much pro-life debate has focused on discrediting this argument. Similarly and more recently in the news the administration has been claiming it needs the ability to torture and hold people indefinitely without charges if it might save American lives. Pacifists and civil libertarians seem only able to counter with the claim that this behavior might be harmful in the long run because it hurts our image in the world. People of conscience seem bound to a debate that judges right and wrong based on utility.

I think we should be careful not to focus our pleas to stop violence on outcomes. Do I believe the argument that abortion lowers crime? While I don't want it to be true, it could be! Could torture prevent a terrorist attack? Quite possibly? Even if certain types of killing and violence does make the US people safer we still must stand against it. We should be committed to non-violence because it is right, even if it isn't always safe.

Even if preemptive wars and bombing civilians saved lives, even if capital punishment prevents crime, even if euthanizing the severely disabled does ease burdens on society, even if racial profiling gets drugs off the streets, even if embryonic stem cells do cure diseases, even if torture prevents terrorist bombings, even if aborting poor babies prevents crimes --these things are inherently wrong; wrong even if done for all the right reasons. Violence is an excellent way of enforcing peace and stability. Violence works even when it is wrong.

Our job (a difficult one) is to show people a better way. Forgiveness and love are better than violence, but people have to seek peace because it is right not because it is effective. (We Americans have a bad habit of mistaking efficiency for rightness.) Some hopeful idealist point out that if everyone practiced non-violence the world would be perfectly and effectively safe. While this is true in theory, there has never been a fully non-violent society this side of heaven, and in this world non-violent people often end up nailed to crosses.

Peaceableness wins the hearts and minds of people not by proving better outcomes, but by living out a truth that people will want to follow despite any danger.

Changing Minds on Climate Change

The problem of Global Warming has been discussed often by those who are much more informed than I, but with Georgia currently in the worst drought in 50 years I thought I might add my two cents:

I find it disturbing that we aren't doing a lot more to stop the damage of Global Warming. I am no climatologist, and thus I am not really able to judge the merits of various climate models. I would imagine that most people (even the intelligent or well-informed) similarly cannot judge climate science. Public opinion, however, is the arena in which this movement will succeed or fail. A large group of climatologists recently issued a statement saying global warming is happening, people are causing it, and it is happening faster than previously thought.

Some people are still skeptical. While I cannot judge the validity of the science, something I have noticed both in most media and private conversation on the issue are some tendencies that seem to accompany skepticism about climate change:

1) A sense of entitlement about consumption. It is the God-given right of every free person to live with bright lights, big cars, and nice things. The threat of climate change must be false because the cuts in consumption required to stop it would kill the “American Dream.”

2) Confidence that the world is impervious. The earth is immense. It was here before we were born and will be here long after we are gone. One can accept that humans can do small damage like pollute a river, but the idea that the ancient earth can be irreversibly damaged by mortal men seems absurd.

While these ideas appear to be a major factor in public objection to action on climate change, I'm not sure they are even addressed the public discussion, or that those that hold them are even quite conscious that such ideas are the reason that they feel that man-made global warming “just can't be real.”

I think I am accepting of climate change because I do not hold to these presuppositions. I find the general level of Western consumption (including my own) to be downright indecent, and having seen plenty of desecration of the environment at local levels I don't see why global damage wouldn't take place.

Climatologists will continue to put out statements based on research that most of us will never understand. While most scientists seem to be in agreement, skeptics will still always have climatologist dissenters to affirm their suspicions. Rather than playing “my scientist vs. your scientist” comparing studies we don't comprehend, perhaps we should look into our basic ideas about the world.

Advocating ideas of stewardship and conservation as wise alternatives to consumption and recklessness with creation, may convince more people than any studies or expert panels. (Even more than Al Gore with his Oscar, Nobel Prize, and monstrous energy consumption with mansions and private jets.)

Marriage and Community

Promising oneself to another person eternally and unconditionally is an inherently difficult vow to keep, even under the best circumstances. Sharing a home and a bed for for a lifetime –no matter how appealing at first– is an extraordinarily difficult task.

I was 21 when I was first a groomsman in Bob Weiger's wedding. To me it was mostly just an enjoyable experience being up front with my friends. The day of the wedding Bob (far wiser than myself at that age) explained that we do the weddings with these witnesses and friends standing around the couple because life is difficult and these people will help them keep their vows. At that time I had assumed that love and dedication could somehow survive in a vacuum.

Now that I am bound to a wife myself I see how difficult it can be. Even thought I love and respect this woman so much, there are days when weariness and irritation are all that can be seen. Without the support of those who love us I wouldn't be certain that we would last the distance

Recently a couple very dear to me dissolved their marriage. I still remember standing beside them at the celebration that was their wedding watching them making promises that seemed so easy at the time. But time can disembowel the best of intentions, and after a while all of us who had stood around them weren't around much and sometimes it hurt so badly that walking away seemed like the best for everyone. I was off studying medicine in a different state when they needed me. Now returning to Georgia too late, I can only help as much as possible as they rebuild their lives more alone than before.

Without encouragement from a community that also makes promises to the marriage, this most fundamental of human relationships, is often pushed to the breaking point.

I'm sorry I wasn't there for you when you needed me.

Select a Candidate (or reject them all)

So I found an interesting tool on the internet that allows you to fill out a political questionnaire and then compares your views to the candidates. In some ways this strikes me as informative since it takes out the factor of popularity and personality and just looks at issues (although only particular issues chosen by those creating the survey).

Click here to take the questionnaire

The problem is that this told me what I already knew: not a single candidate in either party can even come close to representing my politics. I had only 25% agreement with any candidate at all, and my top two candidates with which I even slightly agreed were Sam Brownback and Dennis Kucinich two people on exact opposite sides of the spectrum, both without a snowball's chance in hell of winning. The major candidates of either party faired dismally against my positions.

Am I such an odd person? Or are the national political parties so inbreed with group-think that sets of values that don't fit nicely into Right/Left politics end up ignored all together? Perhaps my own vanity would make me more likely to say the second, but I think I'm not alone in being annoyed with my Republican and Democrat choices. I really don't want any of these people to be president.

It is such miserable list of choices that forced me to vote for Bush twice. (The sad thing is that despite his rather pitiful presidency, he was actually the best choice I could make given the options both years.)

I am seriously thinking about voting for third parties this round. I don't think it would be a wasted vote. It may not win anything this election, but I think that breaking the stranglehold of Republicans and Democrats on this country is in the long run the best way to improve the quagmire of American politics.

Southern Racism: Community and Evil

While I am quite glad to be back in the deep South, I cannot help but notice the racial tensions, which -while improving- still exist in communities here. I expect that someday I will need to teach my children how to live with an injustice that will focus particularly on them as children of mixed race.

This is an piece I wrote in my gridbook back in 1999:

I saw a documentary on the Ku Klux Klan last night on television. I was disturbed as an American and as a human being watching the history of the Klan, but as a Southerner the disturbance struck a deeper cord. It is a history of my own crimes.

Although have lived in the South my whole life, I have never even seen a Klansman, but I have always heard about them. They dwell in the recesses of our thoughts like some endangered animal on its way to becoming a mythical creature. There were a couple of boys in middle school that told everyone they were Klansmen to try to impress people, but we all suspected they were lying. Even the Klan wouldn’t want thirteen-year-old boys with cracking voices. But maybe the Klan was accepting pubescent boys; according to the documentary their membership has been rapidly dwindling over recent decades. Most Northerners seem to assume that every white Southerner has a white-hooded costume in his closet and just can’t wait for a black family to move into his neighborhood so he can light a cross on their lawn. Misconceptions constructed from made-for-TV movies frame our problem incorrectly. The Klan has been a minuscule fraction of Southerners ever since Reconstruction ended. Like all problems of Southern life our Klan problem is more insidious and ambiguous.

Growing up in Georgia the only times I have seen images of Klansmen outside a Hollywood production were the rare public rallies, which never failed make the evening news. These rallies never lived up to their film counterparts. They were pitiful little groups of bland looking men wearing white sheets carrying Confederate and US flags. They would stand up and give grand speeches for the news cameras as if they were rallying troops. The ranks, however, were never more than a dozen men, who were doing their best to look bold and determined, acting as if they didn’t notice the group of onlookers that gathered around them to watch the rare spectacle and disapprovingly shake their heads. The existence of the Klan itself wasn’t much of a shock for me. They were nobody I knew, and no one approved of them. The Klan may be a part of us, but only a small and insignificant part. I realize that that tiny cancerous growth among us is responsible for much evil. Those few hateful men have done horrendous and shameful acts that make us all shudder, but I suspected that every human society has within it some comparable vicious element.

No, it was not the Klan among us that disturbed me, it was our toleration of it. I fear that we in the South have developed a strange ambivalence toward evil. The South is somewhat unique that we still sense our connection to the past. Northerners associate themselves with the past, but they are not connected to it. They can read a history book and commend all the good things and denounce all the bad. That seems to be the only level at which the American individualist can associate with the past, as if changing your name could make you no longer a descendant of your ancestors. But our Southern soul, in spite of our American mind, is reluctantly tied into the idea of a culture, which was given birth rather destroyed at Appomattox. Our minds are all American: bold and iconoclastic, democratic and unsuperstitious. But our reluctant hearts are haunted by the ghost of a defeated nation, in which we all retain citizenship. And it is no loose confederation, but a union so strong that it somehow diffused through the humid air we breathed as children. Lost causes and the defeated nations are the secret framework of our minds. Like most ghosts, it is ethereal and usually invisible. Love it, hate it, or deny it, a Southerner can no more exorcise the haunting of the past and present South than he can drain his body of its blood. It comes to him when he walks at night or in the back of his imagination during an account of history. Somehow he is tied to it all: the guilt of slavery and lynchings as the well as the stubborn glory and resilience of the great Southerners. The ability to simultaneously experience both pride and self-loathing is both the talent and the burden anyone raised within Southern culture. Our heritage comes as a package deal, and even if the Southern son consciously rejects it all and moves away, it will secretly follow him all his life, like a disturbing dream that he can’t quite remember, but cannot forget either.

It was this same sense of connection to history that gave birth to the Klan. Now they are a small and pitiful reflection of the Southern pathos from which they took their life. They have fully embraced the evil of their heritage, and thus become a wicked and abortive thing. The problem of the Klan is that it is a wicked and abortive thing that is a part of us, like at tiny cancer growing too deep within our own body to be easily extracted, deeply centered among our most sensitive nerves and vessels. We cannot bring ourselves to fully hate it. So we in the easygoing South have learned to tolerate it. We cannot extract an evil that is part of ourself, so we ignore it.

It was not the acts of violence and hatred from the Klan that disturbed me about our history. It was the Southerners’ protection of this thing within us. Not a protection from any love or respect, but the sort of protection one gives to an infected wound, shielding it from any touch. I began watching the documentary as it was accounting the history of the Ku Klux Klan from the 1950’s. Every once in a while some Klansmen would commit an atrocity against a black person or a young Northern civil rights worker. The Klansmen would get arrested and a famous Northern civil rights lawyer would come down to stand for justice and righteousness in the face of Southern racism, and the juries composed of white non-Klan Southerners would free the obviously guilty Klansmen. Why? I could not understand how such a thing could happen. The Klan at that time had only fifteen thousand members in the whole country: a pitiful amount. Most Southerners wanted nothing to do with the Klan. How did juries of twelve Southern whites always contain so many sympathizers with the evil and hatred of the Klan? I know racism is common here, but almost usually in its milder forms --Southerners are more likely to admit their prejudices and thus must confront them, and fortunately Southerners even manage to be hypocritical even in our racism, often making friendships with those we claim we dislike. Had I been wrong? Do more of us share that deep and soul-destroying hatred that rapes and murders and applauds those who do?

After pondering the shameful acts of those juries, I suddenly saw what I had missed. Just as I had longed to somehow justify these unjustifiable juries in my mind, these juries longed to pardon the unpardonable crimes of the Klansmen before the northern lawyers and northern press. Why did we defended the guilty among us? Because we were family. I cannot know for sure, but perhaps it was the same feelings that made the all-black jury in LA declare O.J. Simpson not guilty. It did not matter how many bloody bodies might have been covered with his DNA; they saw a family member surrounded by outsiders. I used to fear what would become of my stubborn younger brother, and I must admit no matter what horrible thing he could have done, if he had come to me on the run I would have hidden him. I could never betray my own brother to an outsider no matter what evil he might have committed. It would tear my heart out to hand him over to justice.

Look here and see, I have done it: I have rationalized even the mockery of justice, because I had to. I am connected to it. Southernness is a familial thing—a tie that binds us into one culture, which although imperfect, is the only thing separating us from being just like the rest of the country, which would be intolerable. Disowning any time or any one is disowning the whole family. It is both a flaw and triumph of my psyche that I cannot accept my heritage except as a unified whole, and like quite a few of us I can no more disown it than I could disown my own self.

Southerners, of course, are not blind to evil. It seems that we have an acute sense for evil, because we have lived in close proximity to it for so long. Who hates a broken family more than the child who has grown up in one? And who loves his broken family more that same child? He knows better that anyone that his sister is promiscuous and that his father is abusive. And he lives with the anger and the lust that he so hates. He is also close enough to admire his father's strength and his sister's tenderness and to sense that their virtues and vices are tied. Does he wish his sister to be virtuous and his father kind? More than anyone else could possibly know. But bring in an outsider... let someone come in from outside to impose change, pointing fingers, calling his sister a slut and his father a beast. Watch him! Watch how close he draws to them. How the child stands before them to defend them! “Go ahead mess with us! See what happens! My father is old, but strong and brutal enough to send you out on your back. Mess with my sister? I hope you catch every disease she’s got!” See how his shame rises violently to defend the very ones that shame him most!

It is easy to hate evil at a distance, to walk into another’s house and point fingers. It is much harder when the evil is a part of your family, when it is even a piece of yourself. Don’t you know that as he grows older he is haunted by his own face in mirrors? He may be proud of the stubborn strength and longing tenderness he has inherited along with his shame, or he may have run away from them and changed his name –either way he will always recognize them in his own features. By looking into his own eyes he will know both the broken heart of his sister and the fiery rage of his father, and he will dread that some day some vile thing he has hated will arise within himself.

The white Southerners are the past embodied in the present. We are both pride and shame, both the good and the evil. I cannot deny my part in all of this, just as I cannot deny my own brother. I do not wish to deny my brother. There is so much value in him, and yet there is much about him that makes me hang my head in shame. He is a piece of me, and I am a piece of him. We were born from the same womb. Although we constantly shame each other, breaking up the family (dismantling our Southern culture) is not an option I could accept. Yes, we Southerners are guilty of many things. We have loved our sins. We have loved our sins as if they were our virtues, because we have been afraid we might be forced to exchange them for Northern sins. But our sins must be burned away. The modern American may ignore the sins of his culture and his history. But our Southern sins are living and rooted within us all; we must all dig deep and painfully draw them out. Forgive us for our reluctance, we wish to salvage the virtues that are so intricately entwined with the evils. Our strange psychology runs deep, but there is a value there as well, because it costs more this way. No one can have a loathing for racism stronger than that of the white Southerner, because for him to hate racism he must also hate a part of himself.

Memento Mori

This is a picture of some interesting graffiti I saw in Europe. Memento Mori is an ancient practice of constantly reminding yourself that you will die. To our modern tastes this seems morbid, but medievals believed the thought of their own mortality would make them live life better. Now we are encouraged not to think of death, or to think of it in euphemistic terms.

Even as someone who works with death I am surprised at how I go about my life as if I will never die. While avoiding death is universal to all creatures, shunning even the thought of our death is unique to our culture. It reminds me of a fascinating quote I read while at L'abri:

“Today... death has become a taboo: nobody must tell the dying man the he must die, and the funeral cosmetics put the mask of life on the corpse. For us the natural processes of decay have become just as shocking as as the natural processes of copulation and birth were a century ago. Our great-grandparents said that babies were found under cabbage leaves or were brought by the stork. Our children will probably say that those who have 'passed away' are changed into flowers or are sleeping somewhere in a beautiful garden... Man can no longer cope with his finitude.”

-Helmut Thielicke

Covenant College needs help!

If you are unfamiliar with Covenant College you can ignore this post, but if you care at all about the place at all please read:

Covenant has made a grave mistake: the administration has claimed the right to censor all student publications, including "The Bagpipe" the campus newspaper. This document (sent to me by Covenant administration in response to an inquiry) explains the new policy in which faculty "advisors" are now required to act as censors of student publications. All articles must get have permission of the advisor before it is printed, and the advisor can even shut down the publication in order to control "inappropriate" speech.

The stifling effect this could have on free and open discourse would be disastrous for an academic institution. One of Covenant's greatest strengths has been that it has been both seriously and sincerely Christian while encouraging uncensored free thought and discussion on all topics. Now Covenant is in danger of becoming the sort of authoritarian "all Christian students should think the same" type of college that gives Christian education a bad name. Covenant faculty appear to be fighting this as well, but the administration doesn't appear interested in changing. I have Covenant's diploma hanging on my wall. I have always been proud of it, but this raises serious doubts about the direction the college is going.

If you are at all associated with Covenant College as an alumni, a student, or a member of the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) please email Covenant (wallace.anderson@covenant.edu) and let them know that such an ill-advised policy endangers destroying the environment that has made the school great.

You can also sign the online petition here. Password to edit is "freedom"

(click on image for larger view)

The Integrator was a satirical superhero cartoon that I drew for the Bagpipe from 1998-2000. Feel free to email or copy the image to any Covenant related sites in order to spread the word.