Disturbing the World

Archive for December, 2009

Christopher Columbus rattled the establishment. In 1492 he sailed west from Spain to discover a new trade route to the Far East, but instead he followed the stars to the Caribbean Basin.

At the time, Nicolaus Copernicus was a nineteen-year-old astronomer working on a radical theory that placed the sun at the center of the solar system and not the earth. It was a revolutionary concept because it challenged Aristotle. Scientists and philosophers held true to Aristotle’s principle that the earth was the fixed center of the universe.

Copernicus did not make many friends in religious circles either, but he persevered forward. His ideas outraged both the Catholic and emerging Protestant churches because from their perspective he was contradicting accepted theological understandings; he wasn’t just taking on Aristotle, he was attacking God’s Word. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the time of year when we take stock of where we’re at as we look at the past year, assess our progress, and plan for the new year to see where we can improve. We scrutinize our budgets, especially at the Christmas spending season, to analyze what went wrong, and to prevent similar mistakes in the new year.

While we hope to be careful managing our money, we also need to be especially careful about managing our attention. We have only a limited number of attention units. That is why, in an increasing number of places, there are laws that prohibit talking on a cell phone while driving. A person can only truly pay attention to one thing at a time. Read the rest of this entry »

While Canadian winters are known for their shortened days and darkness, what I love the most about a crisp winter’s day is the quality of the sun’s light when it does deign to shine. There is a blue, piercing quality to the light of winter that doesn’t exist at any other time of the year. It is a purer, truer light that shines on a sunny December morning.

In the same way, winter’s truth is a truth without distraction. The frills and fluff of the leaves and plants have been taken out of the way to reveal a bare bones reality that doesn’t allow for haziness, laziness, or excuses. The glare of the winter’s sun might seem harsh and blinding, but it can reveal things that would otherwise go unnoticed in the shadows. Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer I had the opportunity to spend some time in the beautiful state of Ohio. With its verdant, rolling  hills and miles of scenic roads through lush Amish farm country, Ohio is a motorcyclist’s paradise. One other thing that makes it so is Ohio’s lack of a helmet law. While young bicyclists in Ohio are expected to wear helmets, motorcyclists are free to ride bareheaded.

I admit it caused me to do a double take every time I saw a helmetless biker. Read the rest of this entry »

A certain ruler asked Jesus, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good,” except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

Having heard the story Read the rest of this entry »

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms–it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude.”

There is something within us that resonates with the divine. Einstein was certainly not religious in the conventional sense: he didn’t believe in a personal god and felt certain that physical death was the end for the individual. In his worldview there was no survival of the human personality and no accountability to a Divine Judge in the afterlife. But he couldn’t deny the attraction of the spiritual Power that charges the cosmos:

“Every one Read the rest of this entry »

In the classic Dickens story, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge sees a ghost. Skeptic that he is, he does not believe what he sees. When the ghost asks him why he doubts his senses, he replies:

“Because, a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

Scrooge was making a valid point. Our thoughts and perceptions can be influenced by what we ingest. That is why we have laws about driving while intoxicated. When we are cold sober, however, it is usually safe to assume that our thoughts and perceptions are our own. And so we do.

The adoption of a materialistic point of view questions this assumption. Read the rest of this entry »

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter which fork you use. ~Emily Post

As Emily Post, the guru of good manners, acknowledges, it’s what’s inside that counts. It is possible to conceal a core of evil behind a smiling facade. A woman can be sweet and pleasant to your face and then figuratively stab you in the back with hurtful words. A man of “good-breeding” can politely send millions to their deaths in the misguided name of ethnic cleansing. These are moral infants who have never grown beyond the outward show of good manners to the internalised virtues that they are designed to represent.

A truly virtuous person has learned Read the rest of this entry »

When my grandson William was not yet one year old, his mother was already training him to say please. When William wanted something, she reminded him, “Say please,” and he responded by making a circular motion on his chest in the manner of American Sign Language. What can be the advantage in teaching a child who is still working on “Mama,” “Dada,” and “Nana” how to say please when he can’t even really “say” it?

All around the world parents devote much time and literally thousands of repetitions to reinforce the practice of saying please and thank you, and various other manifestations of what we refer to collectively as good manners.

Politeness is the social grace Read the rest of this entry »

A word is a separate thing from that which it describes. It is also linked by meaning to the thing it describes. Meaning unites the word and its object inseparably. A rose is a rose is a rose. The object gives meaning to the word and the word becomes inseparable from the object. One can no longer exist without the other.

This is so true, that it is safe to say that no thing or concept can exist in our minds without us naming it. How can we have a discussion about pride (or prejudice for that matter!) without having a word to describe it? Words are the means by which we interpret reality to ourselves Read the rest of this entry »