Where did Jesus go?

It's been awhile since Jesus walked as a man among us. Given the chance, many would gladly invite him in and maybe serve him a meal or wash his feet like that woman did at the Pharisee's house.

If he was here today, where would we find him?

Then there's the sheep and goat thing. At the end of a string of parables, Jesus talks about those who cared and helped; feeding the hungry, making a place for the homeless ... and he told them they'd done it to him. Stunned, they actually protested his recognition of their good hearted lives; they hadn't known it was him they were caring for, hidden in with the poor and needy of their world.

Too, we could perhaps remember that when he came to live with us, it wasn't as a rich guy.

Note to self -

Of the two, one has a good end ...

... the other passes the time avoiding difficult questions while keeping to the preapproved path.

A classic dilemma.  

One advantage of the passing years; you care less about the expectations of others and more about what good you might do.

Happiness is for pigs.

At least, that was my father's observation.  He was raised on a farm and perhaps his pig encounters lacked the nobility he hoped to find in life.

Joy, he observed, was a grand ballroom, filled with music and meaning.  It came not from getting but from giving.  Not from talking about things but from doing well those things which made the world a perhaps more beautiful place.

As a musician, he had an uncommon bent among the classicists of his generation.  He reached not for perfection but for the magic that music could work in the souls of the performers and the hearers.  With choirs and orchestra, he would paint a musical masterpiece that would persist in your memory for years, change your worldview, your theology, and your life's goals.

From 1960 with one of his college

choirs.  A capella, if I recall this one.

Now decades after his passing, I still remember.  It still brings tears to my eyes as the extraordinary beauty of it and the nobility of it rises up yet again in me.

I'm forever blessed and encouraged by it all.  So are the many who walked that path with him and with mom in those years.  More than fifty years have passed, and folks from those days still call from time to time, students most of them, and they still shine with the glow of what touched them then, and that's joy.

Response to Syria

16 hours ago ...

Should the civilized world respond to the slaughter in Syria? (NC-17)

 

Of course we should.  

More than a hundred-thousand have died. We must intervene and bring the violence to an end.

Innocents have been driven from their homes, their towns leveled and burned; more than a million are in refugee camps.  They've lost everything.

12 hours ago ...

Now in addition to bullets and bombs, there are chemical weapons being used, and the associated extraordinary suffering is upon us.

Should the world step in?  Yes!  Absolutely. 

Is a military strike by the US likely to be helpful?  That's the question in the news.  But what is the likelihood that limited strikes will accomplish what's needed...  an end to the violence...

We need a solution not unlike an elementary school's handling of bullies.  The offending children need to be dragged off the playground, weapons confiscated, and taken to the principles office.  Shooting up the playground isn't likely to help much. 

The question of whether or not to execute a limited military strike doesn't begin to address the circumstance.  While the last two years in Syria appear to be of a military nature, the truth perhaps is that the individual events are murder and the perpetrators are criminals.

The pope has called us to prayer for peace in the nation.  An end to the violence is his concern.  I don't think he's looking for a surgical slap on the hand for using bad weapons.  The list of crimes begins with a hundred thousand people having been killed, and a million have been driven from their homes to suffer for years, having lost everything.  Inexcusable.  Yes, the chemical weapons were also an inexcusable escalation of the inexcusable violence.  Should the world step in? Yes!  Absolutely.

Far, far away

These are not stars!

These are galaxies; about 10,000 of them.  This is a view of just a small portion of the sky; it's what you could see if you looked through a soda straw that was about 8 feet long.

This is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, this galaxy-studded view represents a "deep" core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years.

In ground-based photographs, the patch of sky in which these galaxies reside looks largely empty.  The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004.


Stars gather in galaxies, galaxies gather in local groups, groups gather in clusters, and clusters gather in super-clusters which align in strands that make up the universe.  The strands look not unlike the interior structure of a sponge, strangely enough.  The number of stars is incomprehensible, yet what we see is not even a tenth of what's there.

Astronomers now recognize that the universe is held in place by dark energy and dark matter. The current cosmological model describes a universe that is 68 % dark energy, 27% dark matter, and only 5% normal matter.  That 5% includes everything you can see in this and other pictures of the visible sky.

We don't know what dark energy is, or why it exists. On the other hand, particle theory tells us that, at the microscopic level, even a perfect vacuum is filled with quantum particles that are perhaps the natural source of dark energy. Beyond that, troublingly,  a naïve calculation of the dark energy generated from the vacuum yields a value 10120 times larger than the amount we think the universe consumes. Some further and unknown physical process is required to make use of most, but not all, of that energy, leaving enough behind to drive the accelerating expansion of the Universe.  Wonder what that energy might be doing?

Dark energy is theoretical and of course undetectable except perhaps by inference.  Dark matter, which makes up most of the universe is equally invisible, unknowable, imperceptible, and between the two of them, they make up about 95% of what is.  Our physical reality is 95% unknown.  We suspect that both dark energy and dark matter pass by us continually without our awareness.  We have based all our science and conclusions on that visible and perceptible 5%.  Having grasped the elephant by the tail, we speak confidently yet we have no no grasp whatsoever of 95% of what is real; we can't even point at it or talk about it except by ... faith?

Our sun is one of thousands of billions of trillions of stars which make up perhaps 5% of what actually comprises the universe.  We know so little and live so confidently on that basis.  We hope we're right, but can we support our conclusions with comprehensive science?

Our Milky Way is an average spiral galaxy, perhaps 120,000 light-years across with maybe 400 billion stars.
So how many stars and galaxies are there?

According to astronomers, there are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe alone, stretching out into a region of space 13.8 billion light-years away from us in all directions.  That's what we can 'see' with our speed-of-light limited methods.
That's just the minimum; the universe is perhaps much larger, but we can't see those farther places because they're beyond the light-speed boundary.  It’s possible that the universe is infinite after all.

We have a difficult enough time developing a personal worldview that isn't uninformed.  It's perhaps even more difficult to have a coherent view of 'the universe' and what it might mean.  Whether your faith rests in our '5% science' community and their interpretation of it all, or in something more, the best we have at the moment is as though we were seeing through a glass darkly.

Sweet friends from the 'real' world most of us have never seen ...

There’s a lot of stars in the universe.

And a lot of unanswered questions.  

(The confident fundamentalists in every community could benefit from a breath-taking moment facing the reality of what no one yet knows.  Perhaps we all might.)

1848 again?

As the 21st century settles in, discontent spreads through the developed world. Concerned primarily with government and its uncomfortably close ties to the wealthy, we watch as our politicos play in favor of monied interests at every juncture.

Large segments of the population have come out in protest as the gap between the rich and poor widens.  With information available from international sources, folks have begun to note the decades of spectacular progress for the wealthy while the working class continues to lose ground.

Most recently, the Great Recession cost trillions of dollars.  That price was paid out of middle class retirement plans and investments, out of working class food prices, and out of the developing world's marketplace.  At the bottom of the curve, millions died.

Perpetrators of this most recent mega-theft were insulated from accountability and were paid millions of dollars in bonuses for their crash participation and subsequent years.  Generally, the companies involved and their employees were bailed out and protected by the governments of the countries involved.  While I lost about a third of what I've set aside over the last forty years to care for my wife after I'm gone, they made top-1% salaries plus bonuses.  Despite market recovery, our personal losses are real and will not be recouped within my lifetime.

Galician slaughter (Polish: Rzeź galicyjska) by Jan
Lewicki depicting the massacre of Polish nobles
by Polish peasants in Galicia in 1846

Interestingly, the mid-nineteenth century was much like today.  The world was similarly stirred up with protests in major cities across Europe.  It was the trailing edge of an upheaval that began perhaps with the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the emerging industrialization of the larger economies.

Unskilled laborers spent 12 to 15 hours a day working while living in disease and squalor.  Much like life for today's poor, they spent half of their earnings on food.  Aristocratic wealth (and corresponding power) was synonymous with the ownership of farm lands and effective control over the peasants. Their grievances exploded during the revolutionary year of 1848 with more than 50 nations involved.

The wealthy families were called 'aristocracy' and 'the nobles', but they weren't particularly noble. Their lives were focused on self and power, much like today.  Serfdom died as many of the 'nobles' were killed by peasants in the uprisings.

The European Revolutions of 1848 were a series of political upheavals across the continent.

It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history, but within a year, most
uprisings were crushed.  The revolutionary wave began in France in February, and immediately
spread to most of Europe and parts of Latin America. Over 50 countries were affected, but with no
coordination or cooperation among the revolutionaries in different countries. Among the factors
involved: widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership; demands for more participation in
government and democracy; the demands of the working classes ...

The Gap between rich and poor prompted revolutions across the world aimed at the privileged and their government.  Thousands died but little structural change followed; ideological conflict continues, however, as injustice and inequality boil up and over again today.