Tourist Syndrome as a Feature, Not a Fault

"Learn to renounce your own will in many things, if you want to live in peace and harmony with others. It is no small matter to live in a monastery, or in a congregation, without expressing complaints, and to persevere faithfully until death. Blessed are they who have done this well and reached the end of their lives in happiness. If you want to comport yourself well and continually make progress, consider yourself an exile and a pilgrim upon earth."

Thomas à Kempis

I'm not sure there's a hard, fast definition of "Tourist Syndrome". I looked it up and found patchy references to such a thing. Google wants me to make it "Tourette syndrome"!

But one definition I found fit what I had in mind; it referred to "looseness of attachment". That about captures it. To me, tourist syndrome is that ability to find local habits and culture amusing, provided you're only staying for a little while. You can even live somewhere for a number of months and still hold onto this perspective.

But after a year, it just cannot hold. You start to get irritable and despise those "cute" things that are now driving you nuts.

And I think there's something to be gleaned, spiritually, from all of this. We can tolerate a day, a month, even half a year, perhaps, of weirdness: just so long as the rest of our life feels untroubled by what we are encountering. But as soon as the irritant starts feeling like part of the fabric of what we'll be experiencing indefinitely, well that's a problem.

But what we read in 2 Peter 2 ("I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires...") and what we read in the opening quote suggest that Tourist Syndrome, applied appropriately, is precisely what we need for this life. We need to remember that "it's just a short stay."

When we remember that our visit to this planet in these frail bodies is bounded by some pretty strict time constraints, and that eternity is, well, a bit longer than that, we can more easily be gracious with the locals. Endure more hardships with a cheery disposition. Avoid the sins that entrap us.

Now on the one hand, this observation is not new and described well enough elsewhere. I've not discovered new lands, here. On the other, I know for a fact that I'm nowhere near applying these truths to my life. I am acting, most of the time, like an entitled foreigner stuck here with some irritating locals. 

What's ironic about it all is that I'm part of the irritating landscape that others here have to deal with. Some of them consider me to be the problem. And they're not wrong.

So I wrote up this reflection as an admonition to myself. Try to be a more gracious tourist, Pilgrim. The trip will be more enjoyable if I do. For me. And for the other tourists.

Open Source Software, Christian Faith, and Trump

I don't have time to do this post justice, but I will jot down a few ideas. With apologies, this ain't gonna be a polished esssay.

It's interesting how Evangelical Christians are so worked up in their fears regarding socialism that they will vote for Trump. That one word. Trump. It must stand in place for all that is known about the man, and I have made my opinions on the man clear elsewhere. I'll spare all (myself included) the rant.

That one word. Socialism. I'm actually warming up to it a bit of late--in certain regards. But let me walk that back a bit. Communism is a disaster of epic proportions. Socialism (such as seen in Venezuela) is not far behind, unless we're counting corpses, in which case Maduro has a ways to go before he catches up with the tens of millions of people who died under Stalin and Mao.

So, No, (Um, make that NoOOOooOOOOooooOO!) I'm not here to sell socialism proper.

But that said, Luke's description of the early church in Acts is distinctly socialist in flavor. But with Jesus in charge, and people supporting the cause voluntarily.

Pivot point. As I look at my life in recent years, I'm struck by what has blessed me most, work-wise, and top of the list is OSS. FOSS, in fact. FREE Open Source Software.

That's kinda.... socialist-ish, don't ya think?

Yes, it is. Everyone shares in the spoils, and as is sadly often the case, not everyone shares in the labor.

I'll say that again, tangibly. I have contributed just a hair more than zero (0) lines of code to support FOSS. (I'll count a few documentation suggestions as good for one or two lines.) But I have benefited wildly from the stuff. Linux. ASP.NET Core. Visual Studio Code. PostgreSQL. GraphQL.NET. Dapper. How much time ya got? I could list ten more, easily. EASILY. I use this stuff all day long.

So what has this all got to do with anything? Well, it's a fact that we cannot all be superstars. But when the church does what it should be doing, I think the benefits can be a wee bit analogous to some of the benefits of FOSS. For starters, nothing is lost on God. Any efforts kicked in to make the church what it ought to be? There are rewards for that. God will not ever lose sight. We gain his approval. Is there anything better than God's approval to be had in this universe we inhabit?)

So when we serve, those we serve are blessed. And God notices.

That kinda reminds me of FOSS. Recipients are blessed mightily, and for free! But there are eventual rewards also for those who do FOSS. Recognition (and consulting income!) come to mind.

Anyway, I'll say no more here except to note that I live in a more and more socialist world, where software is concerned. And it's working a lot better than the one Microsoft dominated 30 years ago.

I think the church would do well to burnish its socialist credentials. The world would be a lot better off if it did.

And maybe evangelicals (don't count me under that name!!) will one day be forgiven for appointing Trump to the top job in 2016, if instead they stopped obsessing about socialism (which is not what Joe Biden is about) and voted for Biden in 2020.

They won't however. They'll vote for Trump. And so they won't be forgiven by history. If they're lucky, best case scenario is that their actions will be forgotten. By people, at any rate. But not by history and not by God.

I will have to answer for much when I face God, but one thing I don't envy many of my peers for is the fact that they will have to explain to God why they thought, twice in a row, that Trump was the best choice on the ballot. If it weren't sick and scary (and that will be a terrible moment, indeed), I'd suggest that I'd love to see the look on Jesus's face when they try. But really, that truly is a terrifying thought, once we're past the humor. God help the Evangelicals. Republican senators are fleeing the Trump ship like rats. Evangelicals are still sitting in the galley getting drunk.

"The fact that the rats are starting to abandon the sinking ship now doesn’t change what they did and who they are."

Those are fair words regarding Republican senators. But when the same words apply to churchgoers, it's time to find a nearby toilet.

So Joseph Biden will win. The nation will swing *toward* socialism from the freakishly dark and Nazi-ish tilt of the past four years. And that will be a good thing. And the pendulum will never get close to what's going down in Venezuela. It will eventually be recognized universally for the good shift that it was. And Evangelicals will be remembered (as we also remember the footage of whites spitting on blacks--or doing worse--in the 60's) for having tried to stop it from happening. Which brings me to pivot yet again back to FOSS.

"Former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer once considered Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source itself as a cancer on Microsoft's intellectual property. But no more."

Ballmer eventually admitted that he was wrong. I doubt he ever admitted that his hatred for FOSS was driven by personal greed and ulterior motives. But he at least admitted that FOSS is not communism, but a rather benign and good form of socialism, so to speak.

I wonder if it will take Evangelical Trump-lovers twenty years to realize how wrong they were about him and in thinking Joseph Biden would be an even worse president. He won't. You heard it here first.

Joe Biden is not my hero. I'm pro-life, and he's not. He should be, as a practicing Catholic, but for political gains he has abandoned what his church preaches.

But neither Trump nor Joe is going to change the abortion scene in America. Let that sink in. Neither of them can change that scene. Americans will have their way. If we want change where abortion is concerned, we'll need to work on attitudes from the bottom up. Not laws from the top down. Isn't that an obvious home-spun truth straight from the book of Romans???

Meanwhile, Joe is a decent man who will help preserve democracy and respect for the constitution here in the USA. The same cannot be said for Trump on any of those counts. Not one. And this is... news? Yes. Twenty years from now the Evangelicals that voted for Trump today will cringe at the yellowed papers and try to say they never liked him. But many did. And even those who didn't... voted for him all the same. It will be remembered.

The Post article link above? I could have written it myself. Spot on. One comment at the bottom that I particular liked: "After May 1945, you could not find a single Nazi in all of Germany." Well, consider today to be "March, 1945". And by the year 2050, "June, 1945" will have reached full bloom. Trump will rank below Senator McCarthy and above Hitler in the annals of political figures. And it will be nearly impossible to find a single Evangelical in America. But when any are found, they'll just be ignored along with irrelevant Fundamentalists and Dispensationalists.... Which is a fitting fate for those who elected Trump because they feared being ignored.

[Sidebar note: People voted for McCarthy because they believed the shit he was serving up in the name of protecting America from Commies. But it turned out he wasn't protecting America from Commies. He was just amassing power by means of endless lies and skillful fear manipulation. Any similarity between McCarthy and Trump is strictly in the minds of those wise enough to see the parallels.]

You heard it all here first.

We All Believe in Resurrection

I believe the header for this reflection is accurate. I haven't thought of any exceptions, at any rate.

For starters, and all the more obviously so as Easter approaches rapidly, you've got your Christians. We celebrate the resurrection of Jesus in a few days, and believe his fate is a good harbinger of what lies ahead for us: hope beyond the grave.

Now I confess I'm placing a rather large portion of humanity into the bucket of Other, but then we have those who do not believe Jesus rose from the dead. That's a rather motley crew, not easily described. But for sake of brevity I'll focus on the vast majority of them (and as of recent months, the largest religious group in America): those not affiliated with any religion.

Those who fall into this bucket are not by any stretch all atheists. Probably most of them have some sense of God and spirituality. But if you don't believe Jesus rose from the dead, it's a fair guess you don't believe anyone rose from the dead, ever.

And here's where I beg to differ with that accepted (I think) assumption. I contest that it's not been adequately examined.

We all believe in some sort of resurrection. All of us. The fact is, we're here. Alive. A planet teeming with life. And before I go on, let me point out that we all also have our priests. Those unaffiliated with any religion, for example, often treat the priesthood of science with great reverence. Yes, scientists can be priests, too. (I respect science myself, for the record!) But to return to our planet bursting with life, our lab-coated priests inform us that Earth was rather quiet about 5 billion years ago. Not a spot of life. Nothing. A lot of landscape, yes, and plenty of ocean, too.

But no life. None.

So another priesthood rears its sagacious head. Logic raises an eyebrow and notes calmly, "Well, somewhere roundabouts between then and now, something that was previously lifeless came to life."

Well said.

So no one completely denies resurrection, loosely speaking. Christians believe that it's happened before on several occasions. Atheists believe that it happened exactly once, more or less.

My sagacious logician, having spoken his calm sentence, promptly went back to sleep, but I think he would have agreed that this is a category sort of thing. If the well and truly dead cannot come to life, then it can't happen to a decaying human body *or* to a bunch of inert molecules slopping around. If one is prepared to think that primordial soup suddenly takes on an interest in reproduction, that's no less of a miracle in my mind than a body dead for three days deciding to do the same.

So here's to the foolish disciples of Jesus Christ. We believe not only that God brought life to this world eons ago, but also that this same God thought to give us a taste of what else he can do.

And will do.

Jonah, Calvinism, and Pixar's Incredibles

Jonah reminds us that God desperately loves all of humanity. Even the Ninevites.

I was just reading a book on missions that took some time out to reflect on Jonah, and the author asked the searing question: Would we (missionaries) be scared if the whole world came to Christ? "Because it'd put us out of a job?"

In one sense it is of course a preposterous notion... to imagine everyone being a follower of Jesus. No "fears" of that happening any time soon.

But the notion does touch upon a reality in human nature. We do need "others" so as to be reassured of who "we" are. Hegel touched upon it with Master and Slave. (I say that in faith. I never understood that wretched essay which I may as well have read in the original German, for all I could make of what I read in English.) Michel Foucault understood that we need prisons (because the prisoners serve to reassure us that we're free). That may seem an outlandish claim, but the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was horribly real, and it exposes the same cancerous truth: we need a few crazies in order to reassure ourselves that we, at least, are sane.

Anyway, this takes me to Calvinism which carries on the rich tradition of exclusivism expressed so wonderfully by the Israelites who were sure that God loved Jews... and Jews alone. Yes, Jesus grew up among Jews who believed that Gentiles were just dry wood for the fires of hell. Gentiles themselves were worthless, but useful insofar as they reminded Jews of how wonderful it is to be Jewish.

That notion doesn't sound very true or nice to my ears, and I'm eternally grateful (literally) that Jesus didn't stick to the script he was handed.

But we Christians picked up the same hymnal and resumed the tune our Jewish forebears were singing readily enough. We just switched who's in and who's out. And we call it Calvinism. God only calls some people to eternal life. Others he damns to hell... from eternity past. People yet to be born are already today slated for hell. They WILL NOT be saved. God's got that planned out.

Frankly, I am in awe of the comfort with which we tolerate a view of God that assumes God does not actually want all people to be saved. We can phrase it any way we like, but if God's sovereignty is stated as Calvin would have it stated, that's the secret will of God, to use Calvin's own words.

Which leads me to the paradox stated so eloquently in The Incredibles. "Elastigirl" Helen won't let her son "Dash" run on the school track team (for obvious reasons), and he's irritated that he cannot use his special gifts... it's as if being special is bad.

Helen: "Everyone is special, Dash."
Dash: "Which is another way of saying no one is."

Dash looks a bit like Calvin himself... but here I refer to the "Calvin and Hobbes" Calvin. No matter, The comic Calvin was himself named after John Calvin, so the lineage is clear and appropriate.

But yeah. That scowl on Dash's face says it all, and I dare say many a Christian would sport the same look if he knew how many scummy not-church-attending folk were entering heaven ahead of him. (I think Jesus said something about that.) Can we tolerate the notion that in God's eyes everyone is special?

Stated differently, do we, along with God, really want all people to be saved? Really, really?? Think hard and search your soul before offering a quick answer. Speaking for myself, I know sometimes I do not. The missionary writing about Jonah asked the pointed question, "How did you feel when you heard that Osama Bin Laden had died?"

In our better moments, we should share God's (and here I do quote scriptures) desire that all be saved. Our theology should lean toward everyone being special to God. More often than not, our theology leans the other way.

And before we say it's impossible and heretical to strike out against the received theology cherished in our particular church tradition, let us remember that Jesus was brought up in an environment that had its own received, holy theology, too. He just didn't buy all of it.

Steak Knives In Our Pockets

We wouldn't do it, right? Walk around with sharp steak knives in our pockets? No. Most of us wouldn't.

We don't put them among our bedsheets, either. Not unless we're planning to re-enact one of those scenes from a movie we never should have watched in the first place. No. Most of us wouldn't.

We don't carry sharp steak knives around. It's just not something we do. Steak knives are great in the kitchen. Not so great in our pockets. So many places they don't make sense. So many ways to hurt ourselves.

We tell children, "Don't run with scissors!" Yeah. We keep the scissors in special drawers and try to keep kids from running around with them in their hands. Problem is, scissors and steak knives are bloody useful, if not always useful bloody. That's why kids like scissors. And adults need knives. What to do.

So we came up with the idea of sheaths for the especially sharp knives. You know... those things that make knives hard to use except for those brief moments when you need them? Yeah. Sharp and dangerous things come with protective wrappings. To keep those blasted things from doing their thing on the wrong things.

If only we had as much wisdom with our phones. We don't just run with them. We do everything with them. More or less. Less, too. We do less, and are less, every day on account of them. We arrive at hell unaware of the road we took to get there. Too busy watching the lit screen to realize the ticket we bought a few miles back.

People are worried about rampant opioid addiction? Opioids? They only taken down 1 out of 100.

Opioids and steak knives have got nothing on the cell phones we carry in our pockets. Those phones? They're not sharp, but they sure are smart. And the people who make them, too. They're smart enough to get rich off our stupefying spiritual poverty.

If we were smarter, we wouldn't be so stupid. And we'd be richer for it.

When Programmers Talk Theology

There is a better, longer version of this post. And maybe I'll get to it one day!

In the meantime, let this be a stub for a future post. And here true programmers may call me out for an inadequate understanding of the term stub, but therein lies the stub rub: I'm on a crash course to learn the latest concepts, nearly all of which have been bandied about for 10+ years, and some for more than twice that long. I'm not the person to best explain these terms (or use them properly) from a programming perspective. Maybe next week I will be.

But to the point of this brief placeholder post: two of the terms that really caught my attention are "Dependency Injection" and "Inversion of Control". The former is related to the "Dependency Inversion Principle" which lends itself even more to the intentions of this reflection.

Seriously? Are we talking programming or theology? Well, if you want to know what these terms mean from a programming perspective, here's a link. As for theological uses, that website may not be out there, but I'm thinking there ought to be one. Think of the applications!

For example (and here I am using only headlines taken straight from the website link provide above):

• Inversion of Control — Let God be God, and maybe you're just along for the ride?
• Dependency Injection — See above. (Those word are good for at least two meanings.)
• YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) — Applicable to how we think about earthly treasures?
• Boy Scout Rule — Applies to code and probably to good Christian living, I'd think.

Well, enough on that for now. I don't have to write any theological treatises today, and nobody else has time to read them anyway.

New Lows In A Culture Only Dimly Aware Of How Dark It Has Become

I just saw an ad on YouTube that revolted me. It wasn't difficult to confirm via Google that I'm not the first to have noted that it had searingly obvious sexual sadomasochistic innuendos. This article notes...

"In one spot for Devour, which is aimed at men aged 25-35 and has a marketing campaign rolling out Monday, a boss finds his employee having an intimate moment with his lunch, which the excited man gives a sexy slap with his fork. The brand's suggestive tagline and campaign name is "Food You Want to Fork."

Of course a part of me feels I am giving life to this sickness by including the above quote here in this blog. That said, what disgusts me now will soon be as endearingly quaint (at least by way of comparison with the advertising filth that is yet to come) as the first marriage bed did when it was first permitted to be seen in a television sitcom a few decades ago.

At some point, one keeps arriving at the naive conclusion that "surely the bottom is near?" It's not. Just you wait, Henry Higgins. Just you wait. There is no bottom. It's filth. All the way down.

But I don't want to end this reflection on this note. The above is what Satan would have for us, but God has not given up on the human race yet. In fact, I found myself reaching for a verse and quickly realized the one I wanted hails from the book of Romans.

How fitting! Paul began his epistle to the Romans with a grave indictment no less somber than my own.

Romans 1:18-24 (excerpted)
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness... Their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools... Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

Yes, America may be reaching for new lows, but we have not yet caught up with the depths of darkness plumbed by ancient Rome. Not yet. But we will. And therefore we should, along with Paul, remember the hope we have in Christ. So let us not dwell on the dark assessments of Chapter 1 but rather cling to the promises we find in Chapter 8.

Romans 8:18-19
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.

Yes, times are dark, and growing darker still, at an ever increasing pace. The pangs of labor grow sharp. But one day Jesus Christ our Lord will be revealed. Let us be shown on that day to have carried the weight of his glory within us.