When walls fall

For the past week, Germans have been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the memorable Nov. 9 evening when the gates of the Berlin Wall were opened and people long separated by concrete and checkpoints were able to travel freely between East Berlin, a part of the Soviet bloc, and West Berlin, an ally of the West.

After years of standing as a firm dividing line, most of the wall was quickly torn down. I remember seeing a part of it standing on display at the North Carolina State Fair. Family and friends were reunited after years apart, commercial opportunities blossomed, and the scent of freedom filled the air.

When I remember the excitement of those heady days, I can't help but think of an even longer, even higher wall that the State of Israel continues to construct, confiscating Palestinian land to build a much longer barrier, twice the height of the Berlin Wall, between Israel and the West Bank. The primary excuse for the wall is security; the ultimate effect is the isolation and oppression of many Palestinian people who can no longer travel to work in Israel or even farm their own land.

There's a Bible story about how the walls around Jericho came tumbling down for the Israelites. Today, longer walls and fierce fences are going back up.

Physical walls that imprison or isolate also remind me of the ideological walls that divide people of different religions and different political persuasions, as well as the pain-induced emotional walls that keep so many families and former friends apart.

Walls are fed by fear and mistrust, but they fade before open and willing hearts.

We may long for the day when all walls may come down, but that is not enough. Jesus did not say "blessed are the peace-longers," but "blessed are the peace-makers."

We have work to do.


[Top photo from http://www.destination360.com/europe/germany/berlin-wall-museum. Bottom photo is mine, taken from inside the wall that surrounds much of Bethlehem.]

Stretch, don't snap

I wish I knew what to say, what to advise, what to suggest in the light of recent stories in which people with guns fell into a funk and "snapped" before erupting in unfathomable violence.

In Fayetteville, N.C., a faithful church deacon who was to all appearances loving and kind gunned down his wife and two children before killing himself: relatives and friends had apparently tried to boost his flagging spirits shortly before the shootings.

At Fort Hood in Texas, an Army psychiatrist unhappy about an upcoming deployment went over the edge and opened fire on a busy army base, killing at least 13 and wounding 30 fellow soldiers and some civilians. Although he is Muslim, he was a native born American who had been in the service since 1995. Much remains to be learned, but his actions appear to have stemmed more from a personal breakdown than a terror plot.

In the first case, the shooter was a beloved member of a community who cared about him and tried to help. In the second, the gunman was a trained psychiatrist who worked among people who knew that he was unhappy. Did they try to intervene? I don't know.

What internal workings drive someone to the point of losing all rationality and thinking even for a moment that the weight of a weapon, the sound of gunfire, and the cries of victims can salve the screaming soul within? In countless other cases, what inner demons could lead someone to beat a child, strangle a spouse, or drive into a tree?

I don't know. And, while mental health professionals could certainly offer considerable insight, it's hard to imagine that any of us could fully understand what's going on inside someone else's head.

I don't have the answers I'd like to have, but stories like this remind me of the need to be sensitive to others, to watch for signs of stress, and to offer a safe place for troubled folk to blow off steam before they explode. We can't fully know what's cooking inside our friends' and neighbors' heads, but we can care.

We can, and we must.

Lost in wonder

I've been a space nut as long as I can remember. Trying to grasp even the smallest hint of the size and shape of the universe boggles the mind, but it is a good boggle.

Sometimes, when a busy day my head gets bogged down (bogged is less pleasant than boggled), I do a brief mental stretch by checking out the most recent pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble underwent the last of several repair and maintenance missions in May of this year, and the results are breathtaking.

Take the picture above, for example. It's a butterfly nebula called NGC 6302, in the constellation Scorpius. A huge cloud of gas and dust is blowing away from a central star hidden in the dark central cloud. I think it's beautiful.

And this picture of "Stephan's Quintet" -- it's a collection of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus, four of which are colliding. The formation was first described in 1877 (by Edouard Stephan), but never before seen like this. Each of the galaxies contains millions and millions of stars in every stage of growth. Can you imagine?

I love the colors (digitally assigned though they are) in this stellar jet from a nebula in the southern constellation Carina, taken with the Hubble's new Wide Field Camera. It took 7,500 years for light from the nebula to reach the earth -- a relative neighbor in the vastness of the universe. The jet, which itself is three light years long, is a stellar nursery, a hot cloud of dust where new stars are born. Amazing.

When I ponder images like these and try to imagine a God who could create such marvels and still care about humans on our puny planet, I always find myself humming the last line of Charles Wesley's hymn "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," for I inevitably find myself "lost in wonder, love and praise."


[Photos from www.hubblesite.org, credit NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team. Click on any of the photos for a larger image, or follow the links to the Hubble site, where high resolution images can be found.]

Hope is my oxygen

With our son visiting a friend, Jan and I boycotted the Hallowe'en candy scene and drove down to Elizabethtown for a concert where local folk had arranged a youth event featuring contemporary Christian groups Chynna and Vaughan, Bluetree, and Newsong. We went early to grab a burger before Melvin's closed and to get a good seat, but the gym at Elizabethtown Middle School was more than large enough to accommodate those who attended.

We were there mainly to hear Chynna (pronounced "China") and Vaughan. Chynna Phillips, whose parents were part of the Mamas and the Papas many moons ago, formerly sang with the girl group Wilson Phillips, which had a good run for a while. Vaughan Penn has been known mainly as a very successful songwriter, but long before that, she participated in the Baptist Student Union at Appalachian State University, where she and Jan knew each other through involvement in singing and drama groups. Jan had not seen her since, and looked forward to having a chance to chat.

Chynna and Vaughan started the show, but only got to do four songs before turning the stage over to Bluetree, an Irish group who found some East Bladen band uniforms backstage and came out looking like Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. They were very loud and I couldn't understand the words. Only one band member sang, and it took me a while to realize that "High Grit Is Our God" was really "How Great Is Our God" with an Irish accent.

We didn't stay for Newsong, the headliner. I suspect they would have been very loud, too. I did, however, like one of the T-shirts Newsong was selling in the lobby. It said "Hope is my oxygen."

I've known days when hope was the main thing that kept me going, and I suspect you have, too.

Breathe deeply!

No joy in Uzbekistan

Some American Christians claim government oppression because they are no allowed to use public schools or courthouses as means to propagate their particular understanding of faith. I occasionally get Facebook invitations to "Put God back in our schools" or something similar.

Such places must remain non-sectarian, of course, because it's part of our constitutional DNA. Both freedom of religion -- and freedom from religion -- are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. And for every complaint about officials prohibiting Bible verse banners on the field at football games or monuments to the Ten Commandments in courthouses, there ought to be three cheers for a country where citizens are free to follow their own convictions and not impose them on others.

That is not the case in the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, where three Baptist leaders were recently convicted of running a summer camp -- called Camp Joy -- where activities included Bible study. The case has been publicized regularly by Forum 18, an international religious freedom watchdog, but Uzbek authorities seem not to care about international condemnation.

The three men, including Pavel Peichev, president of the Baptist Union of Uzbekistan, were arrested last July and charged with teaching children about religion without their parents' permission, and of tax evasion, since the government doesn't recognize the camp as a religious non-profit. The men were recently convicted, fined about nine times the average annual income of Uzbeks, and barred from administrative or financial activity.

The accused insist that parents know the camp is operated by Baptists, and that the government is mainly trying to disrupt Baptist activity in the country by handcuffing its leaders.

The Uzbek constitution contains provisions guaranteeing religious freedom and separation of church and state, but a separate law restricts religious expression to groups that are registered with the government. In a thinly veiled Catch 22, groups not in favor with the government are not allowed to register, rendering their activities "illegal" despite the official stance of religious freedom. Reportedly, no Baptist groups have been permitted to register since 1999.

Although the population of Uzbekistan is predominantly Muslim, there are many different Muslim groups, and thousands of Muslims who disagree with the governmental restrictions have also been imprisoned. Groups that are not in favor with the government are routinely portrayed as extremists who are dangerous to the public welfare.

A government that gives special privileges to the favored religious group while restricting others is not upholding religious liberty. I hope the U.S. can find a way to pressure Uzbek leaders to allow more religious freedom in their country -- and that we'll be wise enough to maintain true liberty of conscience in our own.

Bad news about news

I found two items of particular interest in Tuesday's News & Observer. Both were distressing.

The first was a front page story, along with several sidebars, regarding shenanigans carried on by former governor Mike Easley. Previous articles had revealed shady real estate deals that got the guv a big discount on a waterfront lot, and too much behind-the-scenes involvement in getting his wife a cushy job planning lectures at North Carolina State University. In hearings before the state board of elections on Monday, Easley's good friend and former chair of the N.C. State board of trustees McQueen Campbell admitted not only that he had provided nearly $100,000 in free but unreported airplane flights for Easley, but that Easley had asked Campbell to arrange $11,000 in repairs and upgrades to his personal home, then had him reimbursed from campaign funds that pretended to be for "unbilled flights." Doubtless, there is more scum to come.

The second story, less prominent at the bottom of a page in the B section, reported that newspaper circulation for April-September 2009 was down 10.6 percent from the same period in 2008, suggesting that the long term decline in newspaper circulation is accelerating. It has already gotten so bad that award-winning newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have shut down their print editions this year, and others are under intense stress as readers migrate to free news on the Internet or display news apathy altogether.

Here's the problem with that: as disquieting as news about the former governor's misbehavior is -- along with previous stories about other officials -- it's something the public needs to know. Public officials need to be held accountable, no one does that better than good journalists. It's likely, however, that none of those stories would have come to light if not for the faithful digging of newspaper reporters. With advertising down even more than subscribers, news budgets are shrinking and so are newspaper staffs: not only are there fewer pages in the paper, but fewer reporters digging for important stories.

Sadly, many Americans still don't appreciate what newspapers do for them: a Pew Trust study published in March 2009 showed that only 43 percent of Americans said the loss of their local paper would be a detriment to the community, and just 33 percent said they would personally miss the local paper if it ceased to exist.

Something's rotten in the state of American minds. Dependable, investigative, community-oriented journalism is essential for an accountable and truly democratic society. If Americans want to maintain real freedom, they ought to be willing to pay the price -- including the minor cost of a quality newspaper.

Old friends

I drove to my hometown of Lincolnton, Ga. this past weekend to visit with old friends and acquaintances at a 40 year reunion of my high school graduating class. It was quite an experience. We've done some changing.

Of the 61 people listed in the program, six are dead, two by their own hand. The rest of us are, for the most part, showing significant signs of aging. Some of us, I thought, looked a bit worse for wear, while others are better preserved.

I was thankful for name tags. Some class members still bear a close resemblance to their high school appearance, but others were harder to recognize, especially if they'd radically changed their hair color -- or lost it altogether.

We are generally 58-59 years old, and while many of us will be working for a while yet, at least a fourth of the class has retired already, most from state or federal jobs that pay full retirement benefits after 30 years. One is retired from several years in prison, and not as a guard or administrator. Locals believe he still has barrels of drug money buried somewhere. He was also the only person there who appeared to be under the influence of something other than the sweet tea and barbecue prepared by a classmate who runs a dairy farm and caters barbecue on the weekends.

That, I found, was a nice change: as we've grown older and perhaps more self-confident, fewer folk felt the need for excess alcohol as a social lubricant. Most of us were quite able to eat and converse and dance a little to music from the sixties, and find in that all the enjoyment we needed.

I was surprised to learn how many of my classmates still live in town, or have moved back after a time away. I was even more surprised, and a bit saddened, by how many of the local folk chose not to attend the gathering, including the three brave African-Americans who integrated our class back in the ninth grade. The way we treated them then remains one of my life's greatest regrets.

I enjoyed catching up with old friends and learning how they have spent the past 40 years. Some have known a lot of heartbreak. Some have surprised their parents by turning out good after all. Some have made a difference close to home, some in the wider world.

I was grateful for the experience, and especially for the small group of "girls" who formed a committee and put the evening together, and who spent many hours trying to locate everyone and invite them to attend. It wouldn't have happened if not for the women.

Some things don't change.