TAPAS

Excuse me. I've been away, here on the ranch, reading The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy and listening to Tom Waits. It is the Strange Season for a self-employed of my sort: enough work to keep me in cigarettes, if I smoked 'em. But not enough to buy that big boat. If I even wanted it.

Anyway, not a cultural diet for the faint of heart, nor for the committed romantic. But both artists I listed are amazing in their own creative, dysfunctional way. I'll get around to writing more about them soon.

Back in my transcendental meditation days--Hey! Did you hear Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died?--I spent a lot of time listening to the old Hindu master talk about ways to approach life whilst awaiting Enlightenment.

One of the cooler terms his most divine and majestic self spoke of was the concept of Tapas. I've been looking for a parallel idea here in the west. Here is what I remember of it: It is, of course, a Sanskrit term, but don't let that unnerve you. I've been there. There is a lot of awful stuff and some dangerous stuff and then there are a few things you can take away with you, should you escape. I think this is one of them.

Tapas. A simple translation would be "withdrawal" but not what you're thinking. It is better described as the sort of angst--spiritual or whathaveyou--that occurs when one leaves or is forced from one area of activity, for another. It is the discomfort of stepping away from what has engaged you. You stop sleeping and wake up. Captain Video (as we used to call Maharishi) spoke of it as a sort of harsh spiritual discipline that fostered flexibility, a gift life gives. Fasting would be a good example of the tapas he's speaking of. It is not normally associated with something pleasant, but is instead a rough, somewhat tearing experience. There is a separation from the norm; there is unsettling and disorientation. Extreme Tapas would be described by the bitter, sudden experience many Jews had when hauled away from their lives to go live and die in Nazi concentration camps.

Tapas is seen as an injustice to the mortal, fleshly man. It flies in the face of entitlement, position, accomplishment. That is why it is so startling, so resented. Maharishi would speak of it when we would complain of boredom, discomfort, disillusionment with the results of meditation--this would be months-long residential meditation. "Whatever tapas you are going through", he'd say, "Just remember to stay the course", and blah, blah, blah.

I know a man who lost his wife recently after a several-months-long battle with brain cancer. His tapas endured throughout her illness as the inevitability of her condition became apparent. It continues as he wakes up each morning to a new , strange life.

Tapas does not go on and on. It is the experience of the process of change, but life settles down again for most of us. I believe Jesus was speaking of something like tapas when in John 15 he spoke of the pruning that goes on in the life of a disciple of Christ. "I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit." I've always been struck by the fact that the action for the believer and unbeliever is very similar: in one case the unfruitful unbeliever is pruned away. In the other, the believer is pruned in order to be fruitful. Tapas is the experience of being pruned, I think.

My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
Nor faint when you are reproved by Him;
For those whom the Lord loves he disciplines,
And He scourges every son whom He receives.

Run the straight race
Through God's good grace,
Lift up thine eyes, and seek His face:
Life with its way before us lies,
Christ is the path, and Christ the prize.

Global Warming Two-Step

A couple of things have, as they say, crossed my desk today.

But first: we need a new term for the position that yes, there may be global warming but no, it is probably not PRIMARILY caused by human dissipate activity. Yes, there is human dissipate activity on a widespread, sinful, and absolutely astounding scale. No it is not even close to the main cause for global climate change. Hmmmm.

How about: Scientific Skepticism?

Nigel Lawson, former Secretary of State for Energy and Chancellor of the Exchequer (No, really.) has this to say in a new book entitled An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming:

So the new religion of global warming, however convenient it may be to the politicians, is not as harmless as it may appear at first sight. Indeed, the more one examines it, the more it resembles a Da Vinci Code of environmentalism. It is a great story, and a phenomenal best-seller. It contains a grain of truth--and a mountain of nonsense. And that nonsense could be very damaging indeed. We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting. It is from this, above all, that we really do need to save the planet.

I also received today a DVD put out by the Idea Channel entitled Unstoppable Solar Cycles, The Real Story of Greenland. (The video arrived attached to the latest issue of National Review magazine, should you like to obtain a copy yourself). The gist of the video is that Greenland was once a green and lush farming island. It was actually greenland. And when the climate began to grow colder and the animals died and the people died, the survivors wondered if there was something they had done to cause God to make Greenland into a frozen arctic. Here we are today, wondering if "there is something we've done" to cause the earth to heat up or--twenty years ago--to cool down. And here we are today, beginning to speak in almost religious language about our effect on the planet.

The cold coast of Greenland is barren and bare;
No seedtime or harvest is ever known there.
and the birds here swing sweetly in mountain or dale.
But there's no bird in Greenland to sing to the whale.

Farewell To Tarwathie

See? Even popular folk songs testify to the wretched conditions on Greenland. What happened?

Two scientists are interviewed in the video, Dr. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Dr. David Legates with the Center for Climate Research at the University of Delaware. Both make the same general point: the forces at work to cause climate change are so enormous, so overwhelming, that to point to man as a main cause is laughable. The primary cause?

Legate: "The sun is the key ingredient to climate."
Soon: "The sun in terms of its light energy output is probably the only true external driver of the earth climate system, because there are no other forces on earth that will supply that amount of energy..."

They ask the question: what comes first, temperature change, or a rise in carbon dioxide? They answer, that always earth's temperature rises first--sometimes hundreds of years before a rise in CO2. The question becomes, what is the driver and what the effect? They argue that it is likely the impact of solar change on earth's climate that puts us through these 1500 year cycles of cooling and heating.

Dr. Soon: "Most of us still have that nagging question in us, you know. Yes we have emitted all this carbon dioxide. Are we really really melting all the ice cap? Or is it something even more powerful than that, I mean meaning that could it be even the sun which is doing it?"

At the end of a long, cold winter, I am of the mind that we really don't know what impact our profligate lives have on climate change. We have become homocentric in our paranoia.

Strange Asian Photos

This is one of the milder ones
from a weblog referred to me by Colin
the son with a special taste for the out-of-the-ordinary.

His email referencing this was entitled
"Normal Around Here"

Ah, Seoul.

The Crucible of Rome and Jerusalem

The Arch of Constantine in Rome

I'm reading book reviews today.

This one, JEWS AS THE ROMANS SAW THEM, by Robert Louis Wilken, reviews a book by Martin Goodman entitled ROME AND JERUSALEM, THE CLASH OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS , in the latest issue of First Things.

It occurs to me that as inheritors of western Christian civilisation, we also inherit this "clash" that took place a few millenium ago. It was in the crucible of Roman occupied Jerusalem that Jesus Christ was slain, after undergoing a hearing carried out by a Roman proconsul goaded on by a Jewish mob.

This is the strange past that we are a part of; we can't escape it. Can we learn anything from it?

Wilken has this to say:

"Romans and Jews had different conceptions of what the state is for. For the Romans, the state was res publica, public business, a coming together of people united for common good, with freedom for political activity. But, for the Jews, 'neither individual liberty nor the popular mandate of a majority vote carried the same weight' as it did for the Greeks and Romans. The Jews had no formal public assemblies to match those of Rome. 'Our lawgiver,' wrote Josephus, was 'not attracted to these forms of polity' but 'places of sovereignty and authority in the hands of God.'"

In America, we are about balancing these two ideas of public life. While Luther was careful to rightly divide public life into two kingdoms, he also carefully noted that both kingdoms--the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of the world--were under the Creator's divine jurisdiction and jurisprudence. Modern America seems to have been headed toward the Roman way of understanding "public business" i.e, no religion in the public square. That's for the private lives of its citizens if they so choose. Freedom from religion seems to be a trend.

Of course, American Christianity, such as it is, doesn't generally acknowledge an idea of two kingdoms as a way of understanding how to be in the world but not of the world.

Nevertheless. Christianity has a way of pushing back just when you think it is dead. Christians as individuals in vocation have time and again brought faith and the moral law back into the public square, where it is always an uninvited guest.

Wilken's essay points out that, for a time, the relationship between Jews and Romans reached a kind of equilibrium. The Jews were ferocious for their religious beliefs and practices, and the Roman rulers learned eventually to set aside the set of standards they imposed upon those they conquered, allowing the Jews to worship their God in their single temple, and not imposing the worship of the Roman gods upon them. In so doing, it helped keep the peace--Constantine's great agenda--and made the Jews a kind of "society within a society", a characteristic they have always maintained as long as they remained "religious".

But this was always an uneasy truce, and did not last. By the time of Christ, the hardest job in the empire was being a Roman ruler of the Jews. Pilate had no end of trouble, and the mess the various Herods made of things predates but matches anything the Grimm brothers (or even the Coen brothers!) ever came up with. The uneasy truce between Roman conquerer and Jewish subject was broken many times, culminating perhaps in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and the years following that.

Well, many a year has gone by. The ancient clash may just be a dim memory and have no bearing after two thousand years. Nevertheless, I think we aren't as far away from the conflicts in culture and beliefs that consumed the ancient Jews and Romans as we may think. The culture and values of Americans today is seeming more and more like that of ancient Rome. I feel that slow, inevitable slide into ostrogothic post-empire creeping up on us.

But I could be wrong.

The Doolittle Raiders

WAR II did not start well. 1941 was a period of constant loss and withdrawal. The Phillipines Islands were lost, and thousands of American soldiers taken captive, making the famous Bataan March that killed so many thousands of them.

Jimmy Doolittle's famous Tokyo Raid using B-25's in April 1942 did little to hurt the Japanese war effort, but did great things to American morale. It was one of the earliest positive stories of the war.

The bombardier for flight 16 of the raid was Jacob DeShazer. After delivering their bombs, with four other crewmen he bailed out. Two were executed. The others spent the rest of the war in a miserable Japanese prisoner of war camp. During this time DeShazer got his hands on a Bible and was able to keep it for about three weeks. He wrote, "I eagerly began to read its pages. I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity."

After the war, DeShazer spent his life doing missionary work--in Japan. One who he introduced to Christ was Mitsuo Fuchida, the lead pilot in the Pearl Harbor attack.

Jacob DeShazer, aged 95, has died in Salem Oregon.

Meet PHOBOS

FEAR, incarnate.

Say hello to Phobos, the inner of Mars' two moons. This photo was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter late last month. It is either a mere, large hunk of floating rock, or something created in my third grade ceramics class. It does look a bit familiar, so...