Today [August 26, 2016] is our 711th mensiversary!
Our 111th mensiversary occurred while we were on board the President Cleveland steamship headed for Japan.
Six hundred months is fifty years, of course, so this year we are remembering those significant, life-changing events of 50 years ago: our appointment as missionaries, the enjoyable 13-day journey to Japan across the Pacific Ocean, the excitement of those first weeks of living in Tokyo, the challenge of language school, etc.
This morning [June 21, 2016]I saw this on Sojo.net’s “Voice of the Day”:
“I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda. I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” (Malcolm X)
I think I’ve got to agree with Mr. X — although I would say that it is because I am both a human being and a follower of Jesus Christ.
April 21, 2016
Finished reading Peace Is the Way: Writings on Nonviolence from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (2000), edited by Walter Wink. The 55th, and last, chapter is “The Global Spread of Active Nonviolence” by Richard Deats, who was the editor of at the time of the book’s publication. He writes for the very last sentenceFellowship of the article and of the book, “. . . as Joan of Arc muses in Shaw’s ‘St. Joan,’ ‘Some people see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not’” (p. 295).
Those closing words are generally remembered now as spoken by Robert Kennedy, but he got them from George Bernard Shaw. Kennedy’s (and Deats’s) words are slightly paraphrased from what Shaw wrote in his play “Back to Methuselah” (1922) rather than his play “Saint Joan” (1923). I have long thought Shaw’s/Kennedy’s words were very good and important—but I don’t know how to interpret the fact that in Shaw’s play they were words spoken by the serpent to Eve.
April 20, 2016
Have been reading The Meaning of Faith (1917) by Harry Emerson Fosdick. In the section I read this morning, Fosdick remarked that “the eternal purpose is not timed by our small clocks” so “we have to confess with Theodore Parker, ‘The trouble seems to be that God is not in a hurry and I am'” (p. 86).
April 19, 2016
Finished reading the large print edition of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila (2014), the third of her Gilead novels. Shame is one of the themes of the book, and at one point in the first half of the book, Lila thinks, “I am baptized, I am married, I am Lila Dahl, and Lila Ames. I don’t know what else I should want. Except for the shame to be gone, and it ain’t” (p. 151). A little later Rev. Ames says to her, “I really don’t think preachers ought to lie. Especially about religion” (p. 159). Even toward the end of the book Lila is still aloof. She thinks, “That’s one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don’t let them” (p. 325).
On the next to last page of the book, Lila thinks, “There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them” (p. 412). So along with shame, grace is also an important theme of the book.
“The Power of Grace” is the title of an article in the October 2014 issue of “The Atlantic.” Leslie Jamison, the author, begins her perceptive article with these words: “Marilynne Robinson tracks the movements of grace as if it were a wild animal, appearing for fleeting intervals and then disappearing past the range of vision, emerging again where we least expect to find it. Her novels are interested in what makes grace necessary at all—shame and its afterlife, loss and its residue, the limits and betrayals of intimacy.”
Maybe it was because all the praise it had received caused me to expect too much, but I was a bit disappointed in Lila. Still, it was a fine book and one I enjoyed more and more as I read through it.
June will be leading a discussion of this book at her “Persian Pickles” book club on Thursday.
Here is an entry on Diary.com for April 18, 2016:
Went to the Liberty Hospital to visit Roy Lee Rinehart, who was hospitalized with head and back injuries from a bad fall on Saturday. The bleeding in the brain area has stopped, so his head injury, which was the main concern at first, seems to be no longer much of a worry. He cracked a vertebra also, so he is going to have to wear a back brace for ten weeks or so for that—or to have it glued together.
Roy Lee graduated from high school in 1949, so we rode the same school bus every day for four years, from the beginning of the school year in 1945. I always looked up to him because he was so smart, but he said he was the salutatorian of his class and that Betty Maudlin (Dunfee) was the valedictorian.
Here is a brief entry I made on Dairy.com in April of this year:
I wish I had used this diary more often; it was interesting just now to see what I had written about my trip to Panama back in 2014.
A week from today, June and leave for what may be our last trip to Japan. We are scheduled to fly to Los Angeles and then leave Sunday for the less than 12-hour flight to Narita. We are then scheduled to fly on to Sendai, where we will spend two nights before flying on to Fukuoka on April 27. (We hope the terrible Kumamoto earthquakes are quieted down by then.)
In August 2014 I made a trip to Panama (by myself) as a celebration of my 76th birthday. I was born on the 24th anniversary of the opening of the Panama Canal on August 15, 1914. Here is what I posted in Aug. 2014:
As I said in the blog article I posted on August 15 [see here], today is my birthday—and it is one I will remember as long as I live, which may not be so many more years now. (How many is “many”?)
I had a delightful visit to the Canal on its 100th and my 76th birthday. I left the hotel about 8:00 and got there before 9:00, which was opening time at the Miraflores Lock visitors center.
Just at that time there were five ships waiting to go through the lock, and the first was quite large. I got to see the lock fill up and all five go through.
it was the centennial celebration there were many TV stations there, explanations in both English and Spanish, free soft drinks for all, etc.
There was quite a bunch of people who I went in with when the doors opened, but when I left a couple of hours later it was just packed in the visitors center. Because of the noise I decided not to stay any longer, but I was able to see and to experience the main thing I had come here to see/do.
It has been amazing how few gringo/as I have seen here in Panama City. There were not even many at the Canal, and many who were seemed to be Europeans, not USAmericans. I don’t think I have seen even one on the Metro, which I have ridden several times now.
This is what I wrote on August 14, the day before my birthday:
Well, it was an interesting morning/midday. I went out to take a walk right after breakfast. I found the Metro is not far from the hotel, so after coming back and resting a bit from my first walk I set out by Metro for the old part of the city—that dates back to the 1500s and some of the buildings still there are from the 1600s.
After walking for a long time, I bought a Coke and sat down on a park bench to rest. Soon an older man greeted me in English and sat down beside me. It turned out that he was my personal guide for the next couple of hours.
His name is Conrad Grant (his cell number is 6832-9350). He was born in 1936 and his grandfather came from Jamaica and helped build the Panama Canal. He remembers his grandfather, for he lived until 1944. Conrad grew up as a Zonian with dual citizenship, and his English was quite good.
One sad thing about his story is that his wife was killed and his house destroyed in the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, and he lived for several in a refugee camp.
Nothing was said about him becoming my tour guide through the old city; it just happened. I offered to buy him lunch, but he said he only wanted a bottle of beer—which he knocked over and spilled on me while I was eating.
When I was finally too tired to go on any longer, I told him I had to go back to the hotel to rest. Since he had told me that Panamanians, like the ones working in the restaurant where I ate and he drank, made $10 a day, even though nothing had been said about me “employing” him, when I started to leave I offered him a $10 bill. But he quickly said he wanted $20—which I gave him without arguing. It was a very enjoyable, and educational, tour. (I just wish I hadn’t been so tired and could have continued a little longer.)
On Sat. afternoon, Aug. 16, I flew from Panama back to the U.S.
The flight from Panama City left on time, or a little early. It was mostly clear and I had an aisle seat, so I could see quite clearly the mountains between the oceans, and then about 3:20 I could see the north coast, the Caribbean Sea, quite clearly.
Later on I saw what was no doubt the south coast and then the north coast of Cuba. I could even see a highway running east and west across the island.
And then a while later I was also able to see part of the west shoreline of Florida. It sure was interesting to be able to see so much from the window.
After three years of not using this blogsite, I have decided to switch it to a public diary/journal. Two years ago I started posting somethings on Diary.com, but have decided to re-post those few entries here and to continue posting ideas and some happenings here for those who might be interested. So, let’s see how this works.
Some of you probably have seen a certain YouTube video making the rounds. If you haven’t seen it yet, you need to click on this link and watch the 1 min. 42 sec. video before reading the rest of this posting.
Written and produced by Jason Headley, the above-mentioned video is titled “It’s Not About the Nail.” It was sent to me by a family member who referred to it (on the email subject line) as “Fun (and short) video clip — worth watching.”
Online comments include such words as “hilarious,” “LOL,” and “cracking up” – along with many more serious and some sarcastic comments.
In my reply to those on the family distro, I wrote, “Well, I thought this video was interesting, but I didn’t think it was funny.” And, “It seems to me that sometimes just listening/understanding isn’t enough and not particularly helpful.”
The response from the one who initiated the conversation: “Sometimes no matter how right you may be, if you cannot connect empathically with the other person, it is all for naught and they will not hear your truth.” I agree. But sometimes people will not listen to reason even if you do connect empathically.
That’s the reason I didn’t think the video was funny. The guy seems to have listened quite well. But that didn’t seem to help overcome the pain the woman in the video was experiencing. As my oldest granddaughter wrote, “Maybe it’s just that sometimes people just have to face facts in their own time.” Probably so. But sometimes we may need to confront others.
This discussion brought to mind the fine book “Caring Enough to Confront” (1973; 3rd ed., 2009) by Mennonite theologian David Augsburger (b. 1938). In the Preface, Augsburger writes, “If I love you, I must tell you the truth” (p. iii).
Of course, the truth must be expressed carefully and with compassion. That is why Augsburger’s first chapter is called “Care-fronting: A Creative Way Through Conflict.” Putting care and confrontation together provides “the unique combination of truth and love that is necessary for building human relationships” (p. 9)
Empathic listening is important in showing others that we care about them, and usually any communication is enhanced by really paying attention to the other’s pain and fears. Once we help others know that we really care about them, then perhaps we can help them solve the problems they are facing or the fears they are wrestling with.
The old saying is doubtlessly true in many cases: “People don’t care how much we know until they know how much we care.”
Empathetic listening is important in families and among close friends. And certainly it needs to be practiced wherever, and especially whenever, there are conflicts—at home, among friends, at work and elsewhere.
Is that how I should respond to those who strongly disagree with my opinions expressed in this blog (or on Facebook)? Perhaps to a certain degree. But I don’t make these postings as a pastor, counselor, or mediator. I am trying to encourage serious thinking, and thoughtful dialogue.
When there are disagreements with what I write, I welcome people expressing their opposing viewpoints. But I don’t think my primary response should be, “Yes, I understanding how you feel.”
There is a time and place to deal with feelings, of course. But this blog is designed primarily for dialogue, which occurs best when opposing viewpoints are expressed and discussed. Often, indeed, it is the nail needs to be talked about.
The View from This Seat (supplementary blog) 