Saturday, November 1, 2014

Hues...Votes...$260 Million+ for a new Lummi Casino salmon marsh in Whatcom County.

Stars of mercy guiding the mariner on the night seas…
Clouds of dew and shade nurturing the tender plant before the full heat of the sun…
Mountains, unbending standard bearers, dividing fertile plains of loam, sand, and clay…
Seas, whose age old tidal boundaries, swarming coral reefs, green feeding billows, and black silent depths beckon and guard stories of gain and loss…

The natural world is full of spiritual dialectical hues. The question is what spirituality lens is used? A pantheist’s pantheon? A deist’s dream? A humanist’s mirror? A theist’s day in court?

I am reading some books these days. Techgnosis, by Erik Davis. Can technology unleash the age old energies of spirit and searching? Is this for progressive San Francisco yin/yang doctors only? Do Christian conservatives also have an age old connection to technologically driven spirituality in this same old—new age? Whose words or tweets or newsfeeds crackle through the techniverse with Ultimate Power? Is the Book in LED luminescence as relevant as it is on parchment?

I am reading the news these days. Is 2014 the apex of progressive promise? The poster children of dialectical crush, the disciples of Saul Alinsky, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx, grasping the levers of power in government, media, education, business, food production, natural resources, find themselves unable to shake the people in the street of the fear of God. Ebola, ISIS, Benghazi, food stamps, immigration amnesties for foreign street gangs… is this the brave new world order?

I am working in homes these days. The swelling tide of governmental regulation reaches to the neck, the chin, the nose, the eyes. In the daylight, community organizers proclaim the waters of government micro management to be warm and nutrient rich, spawning all kinds of socialist goodness.

In the dark, the burdens of debt, the volatility of markets whose time worn steering wheels are laden with grease and wildly spinning, and the loneliness of a technocracy that divorces the visions of youth from the wisdom of their parents—these whisper fear and loathing.

Where is hope?

For millions caught in the last world war, a dim memory to youth today, hope did not lie in football and turkey, or in a glittering tree, spiced eggnog and lavishly wrapped treasures. 

Hope did not lie in cycling viewsheds, in the return of wolves and cougars and wood rats, in vast tracts of wilderness relieved by reduced carbon emissions and erasure of humankind.

Hope did not lie in proposed Whatcom County tidal salmon spawning marshes,


Hope did not lie in aborting children to secure a fading quality of life lived in cloned, high urban density neighborhoods filled with faux, ever morphing relationships that bruise community and innocence.

Hope for those millions lay down a bloody road, a 20th century cross, finding the blue skies of freedom through sacrificial death and tear laden life. Orphans and widows found meaning and renewal. Our parents and grandparents, they struggled to give us a future. Their prosperity after war, however, fueled a generation of bitter rebels. The most hardened and focused of those offspring now rule, thumbing their nose at both wisdom and folly. Tyranny is no longer a foreign reality.

This is the countdown week to the 2014 American election. Life trajectories pass quickly. Loyalties, graven in the heart in childhood, fuel lifelong conflicts over worldviews. In the end, the old people sit, panting on rocking chairs, still arguing over ideas.

Where is wisdom in this? Why vote? Why struggle to define and build community?

If you are wise, you are wise for yourself. If you are a fool, you alone will suffer. Prosperity is relative. Happiness is both a crust of bread in famine, and chicken cordon bleu in prosperity.

Discontent also knows no class boundaries. Enough is never enough. Percieved success and failure, a cup half empty or half full, can co-exist in the same house.

So, why vote? Why care? True, unshakeable, quiet contentment comes in deliberately choosing to share, to bear a communal cross, to feed one’s neighbor before the mocking foe. Contentment lies in the hope of life after death, in the promise of the just Creator that the dialectic will then be over. And, hope lies in his quiet hand of provision during days of turmoil.

Until then, there will be many hues.

Stars of mercy guiding the mariner on the night seas…
Clouds of dew and shade nurturing the tender plant before the full heat of the sun…
Mountains, unbending standard bearers, dividing fertile plains of loam, sand, and clay…
Seas, whose age old tidal boundaries, swarming coral reefs, green feeding billows, and black silent depths beckon and guard stories of gain and loss…


Just go vote!

JK