All posts by j'bug

I teach philosophy and build web pages.
friends

today, i met a rainbow

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Don’t let my title trivialize this meeting, this tryst, this unplanned koinonia with a brother. In the middle of our conversation, he gave me a book this season’s people by Stephen Gaskin, the leader of The Farm, one of the most successful communes developed in 1971 intentionally from lectures given by Stephen at Berkeley. I have periodically been interested in Stephen Gaskin, if only because of the phenomena that rose organically from ideas worked out during his lecture series.

Clay a resident, at least momentarily, of Eureka Springs Arkansas, started a conversation across a table that I had set my computer down at in Starbucks on Glenstone in Springfield, MO. I was using a gift card given me by a friend for loaning my car to him to help surprise his wife on her birthday. I only mention these details because they are part of the circumstances that conspired to be one of the most intensive and interesting conversations I have had in years. For intensive, I have to say that after about 2:45 pm when the conversation ended until 7:30 when I went to Barnes and Nobel to read Foucault, I was unable to think of anything else but our conversation, and unable to focus on the work I had intended to do when I went into Starbucks.

He started the conversation by asking me what I thought of the idea that Adam was created out of the dust of the ground. I answered him in my ordinary voice that I didn’t think Genesis could be read as a scientific document. He proceeded to tell me about how it is important that we refocus our world around the earth and the ecological concerns over its preservation, which I agreed with. I told him that I was a theistic evolutionist, and he wove my remarks sympathetically into a discussion of sustainable agriculture, of Father God and Mother earth.

I am not going to say that he was irrationally bent on driving a point home. I didn’t feel that at all. Driven? Yes. He was focussed on one point of view that, as it turns out, I am completely sympathetic with. That was the beginning of a 3 and a half hour discussion, centered on God, that wandered, as conversations between strangers do, through books and authorities, likes, dislikes, truths, conspiracies, and the love of God for us and how God can guide us.

We both told stories of God’s grace, and of our significant others, of chance and happenstance, of words and things, of music and sympathy, of the future and the present, of doom and possible resolutions to the crises of our civilization.

We parted, having had an experience of kinship that comes so rarely in life as to be astonishing. We experienced something of the love of God, something of human tenderness, something of openness and truth. Frankly, I’ve had moments like this with my Christian brothers and sisters, but not ever before with a stranger.

I saw myself judging his trustworthiness to invite to my house. I felt ashamed of myself. Have I become so calloused as to be unable to recognize purity when I see it? No, but I have become suspicious of people in general. But here is a human who asked nothing of me more than my opinion, which I gave him, which I had not intended to give anyone at that time. I opened myself to contact with an alien and found a brother.

But the conservatives will ask whether he was theologically pure. Well, no, but then they aren’t either. His soul was pure, at least pure enough for my blunt senses to see it. I want for everyone to see it. It is a wonder, a sign, a ray of hope.

I know my own story of aiming to please God, and now I know something of his parallel story, of the miracle of guidance, of the grace of God in him, the hope of glory. Is there a way to suggest that in every conversation we should be offering humbly the bread of our life in Christ without also judging the linguistic perfection of their offering.

Clay gave to me, I gave to him, I did not turn his offering away, nor did he turn mine away. We gave each other of God that which we have, and left richer than we came. We ate at God’s table together. I am happy and sad for this meeting. Happy for this unexpected tryst. Sad that the purposes of my life look so impoverished compared to this serendipitous companionship. The fear that he spat on my life in retrospect is rejected as unworthy of the moment of our communion.

This event makes me love my friends and my family even more, and makes me want to be a better man, makes me want to open the doors of my students’ minds to truths unavailable previously, and allow them to look into life. For a human moment, this is one of the best sorts, and for me one of the best. Thank you God. Thank you Clay.

politics

the president apologized

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Today in the New York Times I read something president Obama said. He apologized for making a mistake. He said he screwed up. His critics were doing their best to give him grief. What nobody said was that the practice of big government is so untidy that mistakes are not only possible but inevitable.

What is different about Obama from previous presidents is that instead of betraying weakness by admitting fault, he shows enough strength of character not to fear the attacks of those who would seek his downfall. Admitting error in a system that can’t be freed from them is the position of a realist, not a weak person.

Here is the opportunity to draw more than lines in the sand. We have endured administrations that are inaccessible, furtive, and dodgy while the society around them crumbles. Here is a president who, though faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, is willing to make the White House accountable and make his decisions and discussions public.

What I like about Obama is not his party, which is an accident of history, but his reasonableness. He is the most powerful man in the world, (with some caveats,) but he does not wish to gamble with the people, to put them at risk, to hide his moves, to play Janus.

Democrat, or Republican, or Libertarian or whatever, here’s someone that could dismantle generations of mistrust in federalism.

whatever

i moved

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I have just moved away from the linux server and the company CIHost that my websites and the websites of my customers were on since 2001. At that time, for $99 a month, I had the independence and enough kung fu to manage multiple web sites with a new and fairly secure technology. At times I even made enough money to break even and even profit from it. After enduring one upgrade with that company and because of my ignorance, suffering from their benign neglect, I found that my own web site, olena.com had been cracked and was being used as a platform to send spam. Shortly before that, I had recognized that some spammer was watching over my shoulder. One of my sites, was getting a lot of spam from an email address that was not used publicly. The email that was forwarding to that address was the public one. So I changed it to something else. Within an hour I was receiving spam from that changed internal address. So I worried, but set my worries aside.

Here was my problem. I just didn’t want to spend a lot of time managing or learning more in order to keep that cash flow going. I have loyal customers, and I could still serve their needs without going much further with managing the server. But I got tired of receiving over 1000 spam emails a day.

So I went hunting, and decided to move all the web sites to a single host though not to another dedicated server. This blog is now on that server. The technology is better (newer), and the support is OK, even though there are some rules the host doesn’t mention for people who buy multiple sites. That’s OK. The server is faster, the controls are more powerful, the possibilities for developing interesting sites is really pretty good.

whatever

stirred up

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I am listening to Mae, emo rock. I saw that a young friend on Facebook liked it. I previewed it, and bought it. It certainly fits my mood at the moment. I have found myself worried about lots of things lately, and subsequently I have found confidence in God and my reality that it is all going to work out even if it means that things will crash. I don’t really care whether they crash or not, or whether my plans work out or not, but it is a matter of trust that I’m not going to hurt myself on that account. I am in the middle of my doctoral research, there are very few adjunct jobs for me to teach and the economy is still souring more every day as we speak.

It seems the quick reaction of the public is to draw back and ignore the world, but I think this is a mistake. In this era of uncertainty, we should try to know more about our world. We should read more broadly, experiment with our lives in a way that permits the possibility of substantial growth. This will require unsettling the certainties and stabilities and force real work on our own selves. We should not doubt our intuitions but try them out at every moment to see if they prove true. We will need to be creative to catch up with the chaotic shifts of dramatically growing pools of knowledge. We can’t afford to be still long enough to become stagnant.

Hatefully, this means we will only have little time to refresh and renew, recreate. If we make it part of our practice to renew by learning, then the exhaustion we feel will go toward increased capacity and competence, where we will be able to rest a bit.