Rocky Goes Out for a Morning Run

I don’t want to think about how long ago it was that I watched this scene from Rocky 2--almost another life.  Last week, Andrew Sullivan posted this clip on his blog.  My first response was amusement.  Would such a corny scene work in 2013?  My second response was a sort of automatic emotional feeling.  I found myself being moved by the combination of music and effort.  My emotions seem to have an inconsistent mind of their own.  

Can we have peace in our hearts and still care about politics and what it stands for?

Kindness Matters

Two weeks ago I was returning home after twelve days in Scotland.  My first stop in the U.S. was Philadelphia.  So tiring and tedious, one curling line after another.  The good part was, all of the people who directed me through these lines, examined my passport, and patted me down, all were friendly and polite.  My favorite was the guy who looked at my passport, looked up at me, smiled,  and said, “Somebody’s having a birthday soon; Happy Birthday!”  I’ve thought of these people more than once, especially the Happy-Birthday-guy.  Human kindness does make a difference.  Today’s my birthday.  Wish I could thank that nice guy in Philadelphia.

Belief Is the Enemy of Faith

From the magazine UUWorld: 

The good news is that people, at least in the developed world, are rejecting cultural and religious exceptionalism. By religious exceptionalism I mean the conviction that my religion possesses the truth and, by extension, yours is false. When I grew up I was taught that religion was about what we believed. What made my denomination different (and correct, of course) was our sound doctrine. We were right. This made religion too much about being right, about us and them. Too much attention then goes into defending our beliefs.

I am now convinced that “belief,” in the way we usually use the word, is actually the enemy of faith, religion, and spirituality…. When we dwell on beliefs we ask all the wrong questions. My faith is much more about what I love than about what I think.

Vote for "Obamacare"

“… the right has dominated the Obamacare public debate through blunt rhetorical force,” says Jonathan Chait.  While mainstream health analysis publications are cautiously optimistic about the benefits of the bill, realizing they cannot predict the future, a large group of conservatives express no doubt as to their predictions.  Chait worries that these doomsday predictions of the right may contribute to its failure. He says, "The predictions of a train wreck are intended to precipitate one."

 To me, this extreme effort to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act seems like a repudiation of democracy.  I have written my house representative and requested she drop this obsession and move on to more creative governing endeavors.  I don’t have high expectations for this, but I believe in voting, even when I think my candidate or issue will lose. 

 It’s easy to contact your representative. Google their names and go to their gov website. Usually they have a “contact me” option. Write a few sentences and click send.  That’s it—interesting how long I can procrastinate dong such an easy little thing.

Not Prepared

Ian Leslie writes about our understanding of privacy for the online magazine aeon.  He describes one study conducted by George Loewenstein where college students were asked to make choices about their privacy online.  Leslie says, 

The students were using their instincts about privacy, and their instincts proved to be deeply wayward. ‘Thinking about online privacy doesn’t come naturally to us,’ Loewenstein told me when I spoke to him on the phone. "Nothing in our evolution or culture has equipped us to deal with it."

Adam Gopnik continues to speak eloquently about the problems of guns in the U.S. He points out that in this latest mass shooting the people in the building were not schoolteachers but trained members of the military, many of them armed. The main point of his piece however, is despair.  He believes we will eventually come around to policies that will reduce this violence.  Read his entire piece.  

Hello

It was my first morning in Edinburgh.  I was standing on the balcony outside our rooms when I saw an official looking building flying three flags: the UK flag, the Scotland flag, and…and…a white flag with black letters spelling “Hello.”

It got my attention, but I had no idea how such a strange grouping of flags came about.  During our stay in Edinburgh, I continued to see the Hello-flag flying atop buildings.  It was an enjoyable curiosity.

Today, back in the U.S., I Googled it and discovered it was to welcome visitors to the annual arts festival.  The flag was the idea of Peter Liversidge who specializes in performance art. There was something cute as well as goofy about that flag. It was an incongruous and sweet welcome to my first full day in Scotland and a light-hearted memory to store with the incredible dramatic scenery of the Scottish countryside.

Not Again!

It has happened again—another mass shooting in the United States. There are many other shootings as well, single deaths that don’t make national headlines.  Just a few days ago, the South Bend Tribune, reported the death of three-year-old as the result of a game being played between the mother’s boyfriend and the child.  The boyfriend forgot the gun was loaded.

From time to time, I look at the Slate site’s, “How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?”  The answer as of September 16 was 8,259. I don’t know whether or not that includes the latest spree.

Yesterday David Frum posted the following: 

Resonance

Some friends of mine from here in South Bend attended the 2014 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky, and found themselves listening to Eboo Patel, a Muslim from India, tell this story about an experience he had at a Catholic University in South Bend, Indiana. 

That's an important phrase in my life. Look for the resonances. It was actually formative in my own development as an interfaith leader. It's something that my father told me when I was really just a boy. My family is in this country because a Catholic University in Indiana, Notre Dame, allowed a somewhat wayward Indian Muslim student into their MBA program in the mid-1970s. That man would be my father.

Coming Home

I arrived home last night after two weeks in Scotland.  Nine of those days were spent hiking.  Getting to Scotland, coming home—tiresome and tedious.  Being there—beautiful and wonderful.

A few posts down I quoted Pico Iyer saying, 

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate….And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. 

He also says, 

[F]or me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. 

If I could write like Pico Iyer, I might be truly able to describe what this trip meant.  Scotland is not a country with a different language—not too different anyway.  The culture is much the same as here.  But the landscape is so much more dramatic than Indiana.  I would round a corner or step up higher on the trail and enter a scene that would stop me in my tracks.  Now, back home again, this world seems new and fresh.  Wonderful trip; good to be home.

Music for Sunday, "Loch Loman" on Bagpipe

Many of these scenes in this video look very familiar to me now--one I think even shows the foot path of the West Highland Way.  I discovered that there a lot of theories as to the meaning of this song.  One common interpretation is that the singer is going to die because of Jacobite uprising in 1745 (a bit of history I haven't quite figured out), and so, the low road was death.