Not My Plans

Chocolate covered bacon, Christmas, and other wonderful things

2010-12-26T14:09:00.007-05:00

The older I get the more I realize that there is an enormous amount that I do not know and, despite what my children and grandchildren think, I really am not very wise. My son-in-law Jamie already knows this because he is a wise-guy and, as a 6th grade Science teacher, knows A LOT, even more than his students.

For example, he knows that I like bacon, everyone I know knows this, and I like chocolate, yet no one, himself included, got me chocolate-covered bacon for Christmas. Chocolate-covered bacon is all the rage as is anything having to do with it. Even Lady Gaga knows this, I think, or was it someone else who wore a bacon outfit recently? No matter, it is common knowledge. When something is popular and you know someone who likes it, it is customary to fete that loved one with the delicacy, de rigueur! Get with it Jamie.

Other than that, I have liked having them here for the last six months. Even if the Grand-children wake me up early every morning and insist on my getting them drinks and cereal it is tolerable.

Anyway, it has still been a lovely Christmas and there is more to come between now, New Years, and the Epiphany.

Evolution, Evil, and Original Sin

2010-05-02T09:28:00.003-04:00

This article addresses pretty well some of the core questions that Darwinian theory raises. http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=1205

The Lambert's Cove Inn

2010-03-02T23:15:00.003-05:00

I thought it would be fun to show you where I spent part of my life growing up. Click on this link http://www.lambertscoveinn.com/ to see the Bed and Breakfast my family started in 1969 on the island of Martha's Vineyard off of the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The current owners have added a lot but the basic layout is the way it was when I lived and worked there. Mom and Krissy and I lived there for part of 1975 before we moved to Ann Arbor. Abel was conceived there.http://www.lambertscoveinn.com/

In the summer of 1971, after I graduated from The Woodstock Country School (now closed) http://home.gwi.net/wcs/, a boarding school in South Woodstock, Vermont, I went home to work for my family for a year before going off to college at Brandeis University near Boston http://www.brandeis.edu/.

My interest in chickens began when I visited a friend from Woodstock who was living nearby after he left the school. As I recall, Tony was living there alone, raising a small flock of chickens and working on the place.

For years after that, I tried to find him but never could. Then, just a week or two ago, I posted a message on the Woodstock alumni website asking if anyone knew of his whereabouts. I got a reply saying that he had gone to France sometime in the '90s to work on an old manor house. Sadly, I learned, he had been electrocuted and died there while working on a faulty electrical service panel; he was only forty. I always think of him when I collect eggs.

At the inn, in addition to cooking, doing carpentry, making runs to the Menemsha fish market, and starting a little prayer group, I also had my first experience of raising chickens. I don't remember where or how I got them but I kept them, six or seven hens and a rooster, in an old coop on the property.

I was devastated when, early one morning, I came to feed them and they had all been killed and partially eaten by our own pack of dogs. I say "pack" because there were always six or seven of them, mostly German Shepherd-Collies that we kept (I'm still not sure why), and which roamed the place at-will much to my father's dismay.

They would greet our guests as they drove up to the inn, howling and barking and chasing their cars. More than once, much needed patrons turned around and drove off as my dad cursed them (the dogs)in disgust.

It was a good thing that I had decided to stay there that year because in the Fall of 1972 I met Becky while we were both at mass on All Saints Day. (More to come about that

My parents had bought the property on the island while we were living in Yonkers, New York (just north of the Bronx) with plans to renovate and operate it during the summer months. But when my dad was unexpectedly forced to resign his position as headmaster of the Horace Mann School http://www.horacemann.org/home/home.asp by a disgruntled board of trustees, we were forced to move there full-time.

We had only been in New York for two years after moving there from Towson, Maryland where my dad had been head of the Park School since 1956 http://www.parkschool.net/ .

EMU Adjuncts Organize - Eastern Echo Article

2010-02-18T10:24:00.002-05:00

Here is a little piece about our comments to the Board of Regents on Tuesday of this week.

http://www.easternecho.com/index.php/article/2010/02/regents_listen_to_union_pitch

EMU Adjuncts Organize - The New Faculty Majority

2010-02-17T09:41:00.010-05:00

Here is the full text of my five minute address to the February 16, 2010 EMU Board of Regents

For more on our efforts see:

http://thenewfacultymajority.blogspot.com/

Good afternoon. My name is Peter Thomason and I am a part-time instructor of Construction Management and Building Technology in the School of Engineering Technology. I am also happy to say that I am a member of the EMU alumni association.

I have lived in Ypsilanti for nearly 25 years and been involved in this community as a teacher, a business owner and leader, a parent, and a board member of various organizations. Like all of you, I have a busy life which includes both full and part-time commitments, all of which are important to me and to which I am passionately dedicated.

Since 2005 I have taught between 3 and 9 graduate and undergraduate credits each term. I teach courses that cover a wide range of topics including: Professionalism and Ethics; Building Systems; Analysis of Commercial Building Structures; Analysis of Commercial Blue Prints; and Contracts, Documents, Regulations & Specifications.

Though my original career path was headed in the direction of full-time university teaching, things did not work out that way for me and I went into business instead.

So, when Dr. Jim Stein approached me in 2004 about teaching part-time at EMU, I was delighted to have the opportunity even though I was just too busy to take on one more thing. Then in 2005 my work circumstances changed and I have been teaching here part-time ever since.

I am proud to say that what I bring to the Construction Management program, in addition to my life-long love of teaching, is over thirty-five years of professional experience in the construction and facility management industry.

I am the founder and co-owner of a construction management and consulting business, I worked for many years as vice-president of Building Operations at the world headquarters of Dominos Pizza, and was vice-president of Applied Building Technology for an Ann Arbor-based environmental sciences company.

Like you and my professional colleagues here at Eastern, I feel strongly about and am deeply committed to the success and health of our university community. I believe that one of the most important things that we – you on the governing board and we in the classroom – bring to this community is the diversity of life experience, education, and background that we represent.

The value of what you as regents or we as instructors offer our students and the larger university community in terms of governance or instruction, cannot and should not be gauged or judged by whether we are full-time university employees.

I believe that anyone who thinks or says, that part-time faculty have no common interest with those who teach full-time and are simply doing this for “a little money and a nice experience,” lacks understanding of the dynamics of higher education and the realities of preparing students for the work place.

It is our combined efforts, of all faculty – tenure track, non-tenure track, full-time and part-time - of staff, of administrators and regents that makes the EMU experience so valuable for our students. To say otherwise is to dismiss the enormous contributions that are made to the university by fully one-third of its faculty who are part-time instructors.

This way of thinking, that only full-time instructors deserve to be represented at the university table, is also dismissive, by implication, of the contributions of any of us, instructor or regent, who does not work full-time for the university.

I believe that including all part-time faculty in the EMU-FT collective bargaining unit, no matter how many hours one teaches, is the right thing to do. Endorsing this position recognizes that we all contribute to the commonwealth of the university and that the number of hours taught in a given term is not always an adequate means for quantifying the value of that contribution.

I therefore ask and encourage you to join me in putting your full support behind this effort to make our work place and our working conditions at EMU more equitable, just, and, ultimately, better for us and the whole college community by voting today to allow all instructors the right to be part of the collective bargaining unit.

Thank you for your time.

Introduction to Sustainable Construction Course

2009-05-02T10:27:00.008-04:00

Here is the link for registering for a new course my colleague Bill Moylan and I are developing for the Engineering Society of Detroit Institute http://ww2.esd.org/EDUCATION/SustainableConst.htm

I think that this is critical not just for the construction and development industries but for all of us. We need to be building a sustainable civilization, nothing less will be able to survive. The course will be offered throughout the summer, the first session will be during the second week of June.

This is an exciting topic and the course will provide not only a broad background for understanding the sustainability movement but a seque into other training opportunities offered by our partners at the Detroit Chapters of the USGBC (US Green Building Council) and ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers). We will also be offering CEUs from various professional groups and societies. I look forward to seeing you there!

Building a Civilization of Love in the Face of Evil

2009-04-06T08:37:00.004-04:00

It is, for all of us, I think, very disheartening to see the news every day and to read about the violent and destructive actions of so many of our fellows all over the world.

There is really only one answer to this momentum of evil, that force which seems to swirl uncontrollably and ever faster around the axis of the black hole of death.

Its gravity is strong and, like a great whirlpool sucking everything around it down into nothingness, the only way to counteract its power is to form connections that are strong enough to resist its momentum.

In applied physics we call this a "moment connection," a junction of materials that is capable of withstanding forces or loads of this nature and transmitting their energy into a structure that absorbs, redirects and renders them harmless.

The Korean martial art of Akido accomplishes much the same thing by redirecting an attacker's violent destructive energy.

Building a civilization of love with God's help is a vision and a way of living in which relationships are the "moment connections" which can absorb and redirect the violent, negative, energy that comes at us.

Apologies to Charles Darwin

2009-02-28T08:22:00.006-05:00

While reading a friend's blog this week http://kenwilsononline.com/2009/02/12/apologies-to-the-memory-of-charles-darwin/#comments
I came across a piece by a contributor who summed up the problem of trying to reconcile evolutionary theory with a biblical worldview. In his mind, the problem was original sin and atonement.

If the creation account in the bible is not true, he said, there is no way to explain the Christian belief in original sin. Without original sin there is no need for atonement. If there is no need for atonement there is no need for Christ and the whole belief system falls apart.

To this way of thinking, one follows the other. This system has traditionally been described as "monogenesis" and it is a belief that has been subscribed to by most Christians.

But, what if we reexamine what we mean by evil? What if the notion of original sin is a way of trying to explain the part of life that we find nasty and unappealing?

For one who believes that there is an evolutionary progression taking place in the universe and in our species, the idea of original sin is problematic because it assumes a level of consciousness, self-awareness, and of deliberate action.

The Evolution of Consciousness in the Cosmos

2008-12-21T09:12:00.003-05:00

These photos of small portions of our cosmos come from the Hubble Space Telescope http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/hubble_space_telescope_advent

I can't even begin to wrap my mind around this, it's just too big, especially when you note that one galaxy alone is 50 million light years away in one direction only! The fact that we are conscious of this is equally amazing and leads me to believe that the evolution of the cosmos is somehow directed toward that end.

Happy Christmas 2008 to all of you from the Ypsilanti Thomasons and all of us at the Thomason Family Farm!

Segway Photo

2008-10-17T06:18:00.004-04:00

In case you are wondering about the photo of me on the Segway
http://segway.ypsi.com/2007/07/peter-thomason-historic-southide.html
a neighbor of ours has several of them. I once heard a rumor that he was trying to get a Segway polo team together and wanted to have enough for all of the players. It was not too difficult to balance on it, about as challenging as a Bongo Board if you remember them, and much more fun!

We have an amazing neighborhood here, I tell people it is one of the best-kept secrets in the county. Not only are there wildly divergent demographics within a one or two block area and all kinds of architecture, but it also features the only known urban eco micro farm in the county, if not the state of Michigan see - http://thomasonfamilyfarm.blogspot.com

The Origins of Life on Earth

2008-10-17T06:09:00.004-04:00

Like many of you, I suspect, I have a longstanding interest in the evolution of the cosmos and life on earth in particular and I have written about this in other posts. The little article in the following link is thought provoking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/science/17LIFE.html?ref=us

Pentecost - Who is the Holy Spirit?

2008-05-11T15:01:00.006-04:00

On this day when Jews celebrated the first fruits of the land in the Spring, just as we are already eating rhubarb, spinach, and lettuce from our farm, we also celebrate Pentecost but with a particularly spiritual focus.

The first fruits of the harvest of the new order of Grace are the joy, peace, love and unity that are ours to enjoy and to share as we discover a whole new kind of being alive. I like to call this feast Theophany of the Holy Spirit because it truly is an appearing or a manifestation of the personal presence of God.

It is partly on the basis of this event that we Christians came to believe that God is not one Person but several distinct Divine Persons.

In other posts I have written about my experience of who the Holy Spirit is to me. I recently ran across an interesting piece by a Baptist about his research and work with Biblical languages and his startling conclusions about who the Holy Spirit is revealed to be in Scripture.

I think it is particularly interesting because of the conservative theological bent of Southern Baptists. It seems to echo some of the same things that Dr. Scott Hahn, a former Presbyterian minister and now Roman Catholic theologian has been saying.

Here are some thoughts from R.P. Nettelhorst of the Quartz Hill School of Theology associated with the American Southern Baptist Convention. He asks on his site http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume3/spirit.htm :

Is There a Question About the Gender of the Holy Spirit?

In my graduate Semitics program at UCLA, one of the languages I had to study was Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic written with rounded letters reminiscent of modern Arabic. Syriac was the language of people living in northern Mesopotamia, from at least 300 BC until the time Arabic became dominant in the region, around 1000 AD. Most of the Syriac documents available today were produced by a Monophysite branch of Christianity, today known as the Syrian Orthodox Church (monophysitism is the belief that Christ had but one nature). One striking puzzlement of the texts, at least to me, was the constant reference to the Holy Spirit as "she". I was aware, of course, that in Aramaic (and hence in the dialect known as Syriac) the natural gender of the word "spirit" was feminine; however, I was surprised to discover that this accident of grammar had resulted in a whole theology constructed around the femininity of the third person of the Godhead.

An example of Syriac theology is found in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas; it is usually assumed that this particular work was influenced by speculative gnostic Judaism because it contains the notion, that associated with God was a wisdom, or creative power - a spirit - which was feminine. In an invocation accompanying baptism, Thomas calls for the Holy Spirit:

Come, holy name of Christ that is above every name;
Come, power of the Most High and perfect compassion;
Come, thou highest gift;
Come, compassionate mother;
Come, fellowship of the male;
Come, thou (f.) that dost reveal the hidden mysteries;
Come, mother of seven houses, that thy rest may be in the eighth house.
(Acts of Thomas 2:27)

Come, silence that dost reveal the great deeds of the whole greatness;
Come thou that dost show forth the hidden things
And make the ineffable manifest;
Holy Dove that bearest the twin young;
Come, hidden Mother;
Come, thou that art manifest in thy deeds
and dost furnish joy and rest for all that are joined with thee;
Come and partake with us in this Eucharist
Which we celebrate in thy name,
and in the love-feast in which we are gathered together at thy call.
(Acts of Thomas 5:50)

After reading such materials I decided that Syrian Orthodox Christianity was somewhat heretical (though perhaps only through an accident of grammar), and so I wanted nothing to do with Syriac literature. I would find something else on which to do my dissertation.

Then came the Spring of 1986.

I was teaching advanced Hebrew, and I had decided to take the class through the book of Judges. As we read along, I noticed something odd about Judges 3:10:

The Spirit of Yahweh came upon Caleb's younger brother...

In English, this passage from Judges doesn't appear startling, but in Hebrew something strange leapt out at me: "came upon" was a third person FEMININE verb, indicating it's subject "Spirit" was being understood as a feminine noun. Hebrew is not like Aramaic in its use of the word "spirit". While the word is exclusively feminine in Aramaic, in Hebrew it is sometimes masculine. Therefore, the question that came to mind was why had the author of Judges chosen here to make the Spirit of Yahweh feminine, when he could just as easily have made it masculine? Oh well.

I just shrugged my shoulders and went on, not overly concerned. Occasionally, I thought, one finds something inexplicable in the Bible: no big deal. But then came Judges 6:34. Again, "Spirit of Yahweh" was feminine.

At this point I decided to consult the concordance. Much to my surprise, every occurrence of "Spirit of Yahweh" in Judges is feminine. As I pondered that, I recalled Genesis 1:2, the first occurrence of "Spirit of God" in the Bible, and realized to my shock that it too is feminine.

Back to the concordance. Out of 84 OT uses of the word "spirit", in contexts traditionally assumed to be references to the Holy Spirit, 75 times it is either explicitly feminine or indeterminable (due to lack of a verb or adjective). Only nine times can "spirit" be construed as masculine, and in those cases it is unclear that it is a reference to God's Holy Spirit anyway. (Please see Appendix 3 for a complete list and detailed discussion of the usages.)

The New Testament references to the Holy Spirit are not helpful for conclusively deciding on the gender of the Holy Spirit, since "spirit" in Greek is neuter, and so is referred to as "it" by the New Testament writers.

The conclusion of all this is that our traditional assumption of a masculine Spirit is questionable; in fact, the evidence seems overwhelming that the Spirit should be viewed as "She", which does seem to make sense, since the other two members of the Godhead are labeled "Father" and "Son".

What are the theological implications of a feminine Holy Spirit? There are four:

A feminine Holy Spirit clarifies how women can also be said to be created in the "image of God". It has long been recognized that he Godhead must include some feminine aspects, since Genesis 1:26-27 explicitly states that both men and women were created in God's image.

A feminine Holy Spirit explains the identity of the personified wisdom in Proverbs 8:12-31:

I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence;
I possess knowledge and discretion.
To fear Yahweh is to hate evil;
I hate pride and arrogance,
evil behavior and perverse speech.
Counsel and sound judgment are mine;
I have understanding and power.
By me kings reign
and rulers make laws that are just;
by me princes govern,
and all nobles who rule on earth.
I love those who love me,
and those who seek me find me.
With me are riches and honor,
enduring wealth and prosperity.
My fruit is better than fine gold;
what I yield surpasses choice silver.
I walk in the way of righteousness,
along the paths of justice,
bestowing wealth on those who love me
and making their treasuries full.
Yahweh possessed me at the beginning of his work,
before his deeds of old;
I was appointed from eternity,
from the beginning,
before the world began.
Where there were no oceans, I was given birth,
when there were no springs abounding with water;
before the hills, I was given birth,
before he made the earth or its fields
or any of the dust of the world.
I was there when he set the heavens in place,
when he marked out the horizon
on the face of the deep,
when he established the clouds above
and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
when he gave the sea its boundary
so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
Then I was the craftsman at his side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing in his whole world
and delighting in mankind....

Some commentators have tried to tie this personification of wisdom to the idea of Christ as divine "Word" [Gk. logos]. Unfortunately for this theory, the genders of the words in question get in the way. The gender of the word "wisdom" is feminine, and is therefore personified as a woman. This makes a direct identification of "wisdom" with "Christ" virtually impossible.

Other commentators have pictured "wisdom" as a created being, like an angel; better have been those who argue that the personification of wisdom in Proverbs 8 is simply a literary device, without objective reality.

However, if the Holy Spirit is feminine, then the identification is relatively easy: Genesis 1:2 pictures the Spirit of God hovering over the deep, active in creating the world, just as Proverbs describes. Both the Old and New Testament connect the idea of teaching and imparting wisdom with the function of the Holy Spirit (Ex. 31:3; 35:31; Acts 6:3; Ephesians 1:17; Luke 12:12; and John 14:25-26).

The third benefit of recognizing the femininity of the Holy Spirit is that it explains the subservient role that the Spirit plays. The Bible seems to indicate that the Spirit does not speak for itself or about itself; rather the Spirit only speaks what it hears. The Spirit is said to have come into the world to glorify Christ (See John 16:13-14 and Acts 13:2). In contrast, it should be noted that the Scripture represents both the Father and Son speaking from and of themselves.

Finally, a feminine Holy Spirit, with a Father and Son as the rest of the Trinity, may help explain why the family is the basic unit of human society.

News from the Thomason Family Farm

2008-03-25T09:46:00.003-04:00

Please visit http://thomasonfamilyfarm.blogspot.com for the latest news about our urban micro eco-farm in downtown Ypsilanti, Michigan

Who Are We?

2008-03-19T05:41:00.003-04:00

I have finally gotten around to taking a serious look at a book that has been on my shelves for almost thirty years. Man and Woman in Christ by Stephen B. Clark, a self-described philosopher and the founder of several ecumenical Christian groups, has been gathering dust there almost as long as The Prophet by Khalil Gibran which I read in toto just this last year.

This is pretty typical for me because I tend to collect books that look interesting or that people give me and keep them until I feel the need to read them. There will probably be many left there unread by the time I occupy my coffin, the one that is currently being used as a tool storage cabinet in the barn with my goats.

Sometimes I am prompted to read a book by a nagging question that I am trying to settle much like Neo in The Matrix series who, experiences what his mentor and friend Morpheus describes as "a splinter in your mind."

Ann Arbor City Chickens and the Michigan Right to Farm Act

2008-03-17T20:03:00.006-04:00

Though there are undoubtedly some readers of the Ann Arbor News who will question the timeliness of running a front page article about the right to keep chickens in one’s yard while, at the same time, we are getting smacked with daily doses of economic woe from the gas pump and the home-mortgage debacle, I say it’s a good time http://www.mlive.com/news/annarbornews/index.ssf?/base/news-26/120576484810420.xml&coll=2. I

t’s really a very good time because the issue is not about the latest fad in urban chic but about returning to our independent American roots. Raising our own food to feed ourselves and to share with our neighbors is not only one of the oldest activities of civilized people but one of the surest bulwarks we have against hunger in times of economic and social instability.

Anyone who knows the joy of having even a few shelves of canned or frozen fruits and vegetables they have grown, not to mention meats they have raised or hunted, can only feel badly for those who have come to rely completely on the industrial food chain for their daily bread.

Re-learning the values of home-economics, self-sufficiency, and energy-independence is not easy, I know because I’m still working on it. It has taken me many years to get to where I am today. My own family will tell you that it wasn’t that long ago that they were pulling old Burger King bags out from under the seat of my truck and shaking them at me in disbelief.

I have, at times, been a reluctant radical. Though I enjoy the benefits of living in an urban area like, easy access to cooked or ready-to-cook food in dozens of grocery stores and restaurants, I have come to believe that our basic connection to the sources of that food is usually eclipsed by the commercial mechanisms that deliver it to us.

As a result, in the process, I think we lose something of ourselves because to be human in the most fundamental way, a word which literally means "from the soil or the humus of the earth," also means that we are sustained and nourished by the soil and the plants and animals that share it with us.

Rediscovering my own human roots in the soil have made me richer than I ever thought possible. Finding creative ways of doing this in the city has not only been fun but energizing for us and our neighbors.

Ann Arbor is moving in the right direction by considering a change in its animal control ordinance. However, as nice as it will be for residents to be able to keep three or four hens in their yards for fresh eggs, the ordinance change – and I think it will happen – should not be allowed to obscure another important fact.

Michigan’s Right to Farm Act of 1981 already gives legal protection to a basic human right and activity, the right to raise one’s own food either for subsistence or for commercial purposes.

Though it may be prudent for cities or towns to provide guidelines for food and animal raising activities within their boundaries it is important to recognize that, according to Michigan law, they do not have the authority to proscribe or prohibit them any more than they have the authority to deprive a person of other rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness without due process.

It is also interesting to note that attempts by municipal associations in Michigan as recently as the late ‘90s to limit the protections of the Right to Farm Act fell flat and came to nothing.

Ypsilanti’s city council, when faced with a similar request two years ago, chose to rush the issue to a "NO" vote in the hopes that it would simply go away. However, global economic forces that drive up gas prices or the cost of owning a home or feeding one’s family are not deterred by city councils or mayors or presidents.

When faced with the ever challenging question, "how can I afford to feed myself and my family?" it is encouraging that increasing numbers of Americans are resorting to what we have done for generations.

We are rediscovering the values of ingenuity, innovation, and independence in order to take care of ourselves. The right to raise our own food is already ours. The Ypsilanti chicken population is growing. So is Ann Arbor’s.

Peter Thomason raises chickens, goats, and rabbits on his 1/10th acre Ypsilanti City urban micro eco-farm.

Please Add your email Address

2008-03-16T11:55:00.002-04:00

Even if you have been receiving notification by email of new posts, please do me a favor and add your email address in the little box here on the site. It will enable me to automate the whole distribution process. You will just get an email whenever I post a new item and you can read it whenever you want.

Thanks for your help!

“ Imagination is more important than knowledge." — Albert Einstein

2008-03-14T08:27:00.006-04:00

My son-in-law GEOFF sent me some interesting news items this week that highlight the value of this quote by Albert Einstein on his birthday today. Two prestigious Templeton Prizes of 1.5 million dollars each were awarded to researchers for their work in exploring the convergence between physical and metaphysical explanations of the universe. Both of them have some interesting things to say that emphasize the importance of using our imagination to see that faith and science are not in opposition to each other but are looking at phenomena from different but equally important perspectives.

See for yourself. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/science/13prize.html?ex=1206072000&en=05f8fd66cce9b0b4&ei=5070&emc=eta1

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/science/10prize.html?_r=1&emc=eta1&oref=slogin

What do you think about this? Leave a comment by clicking on the small type below that says "comments."

Who is the Enemy?

2008-03-11T06:52:00.004-04:00

Evil, as much as we can understand it, along with the fear of death, the fear of meaninglessness, and annihilation is, I believe, the enemy we humans have in common. With this comes the awareness, over time, that random evil things happen regardless of who we are, how well we live, or where we happen to be.

The horrible murder of Eve Carson, the beautiful student president of UNC last week is a blatant example of evil at work. Though we do not yet understand why she was killed where she was, it is a fairly safe bet to say that those who did this were evildoers serving only their own selfish interests, motives, and passions without any regard for the rights or needs of others or of the common good. People like this are not only blind to the suffering they cause but have no regard whatever for their own spiritual welfare. They are, in fact, the walking dead who spread death and destruction and no one in their right mind would mourn their passing except to grieve the waste of their potential to become good and to do good.

But where does this evil come from? Is it the work of a spiritual being in rebellion against God, a literal devil, evil personified, who orchestrates a cacophonous medley of disease, mischief, and death in a jealous rage as John Milton would have us to believe? If so, how then are we to explain the apparent evil present in the world before the appearance of man since we know from the fossil record that all kinds of natural disasters and the death of many species characterized life on earth during the eons of its evolution? Or are we to think of evil only as the deliberate selfish act of a human being who should know and do better?

I believe that if we are to reconcile our Christian thought with what we now believe to be true about the evolution of the cosmos in general and human beings in particular, we must be willing to consider the possibility that our understanding of evil, like our understanding of ourselves, is continuing to develop. Whereas we have personified evil in the past as a way of differentiating it from the good, or the potential for good, that we recognize in ourselves and in others, it is important to be brutally honest here.

Evil, apart from the suffering caused by accidents, disease, and natural disasters, is the work of evildoers, human agents, who act with a deliberate disregard for the good of others. Evil in this sense rises up in the heart of man when he does not intentionally choose good. As in physics where we observe that nature abhors a vacuum, so also in the human heart the absence of good will creates space for malevolent thought and action. Choosing to do good and to become good is the requisite action for not being an evildoer and becoming evil. There really is no middle ground.

The choice before us is not abstract but real. What am I going to do today? What kind of person will I choose, with God’s help, to be today? What will I do when faced with a difficult situation? Do I want to be part of the good, as well as I am able to understand this, or to become evil?

What do you think?

The Value of Money

2008-03-10T22:07:00.002-04:00

On March 10, 1862, the first paper money was issued in the U.S. Denominations were $5, $10 and $20.

Quote of the day: "The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money." — unknown

A successful businessman found out he was going to die and informed his wife that he intended to take all of his money with him in his coffin.

She said to him, "No way! I am not going to let you do that. Don’t you know that you can’t take it with you?"

But he insisted that he was going to regardless of what she said since it was his wealth and he did not want to share it with anyone.

The man died and was buried. Family and friends gathered around the widow after the service and asked if, in fact, she had carried out his wishes.

"Yes I did." She answered in tears. "That was the biggest check I’ve ever written."

Me - the Pearl of Great Price?

2008-03-10T05:39:00.009-04:00

Several years ago, I had a startling realization that changed the way I thought about myself and, consequently, others. It began, I think, when my long-time friend and brother-in-Christ Father Phil Thibodeau suggested that I begin to pray this prayer on a regular basis. It goes:

"God, help me to see, to know, and to love myself and others as you see, know, and, love us."

Around the same time I began to make the Serenity Prayer a regular part of my personal litany throughout the day. It goes:

"God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference."

The realization that came to me was really a very personal answer to the first prayer but, at the same time, I discovered, through the second prayer, a new ability to live out, or to incorporate it into my daily life.

What I realized or began to see differently is best summarized by a kind of re-telling of Christ's parable of the Pearl of Great Price in this way: I am the Pearl of great value that God, personified as a merchant, was seeking in the world. God-in-Christ "sold" or gave up everything of his own in order to get me. He became "poor" so that I could become "rich." What he did not only saved me from spiritual death, what I call the "first" resurrection, but from my final natural end, physical death, through an eventual "second" physical resurrection. Reconsidering the parable in this way is very much in line with the other parables of the lost coin, the shepherd and the sheep, the Good Samaritan, etc., because it makes me/us, God's beloved, central to the story as the object of God's love and personal attention.

This has been enormously helpful to me and underscores how it is that our faith is different from other religious systems. We Christians believe that each person - with their unique body, soul, and spirit - is, in the eyes of God, of great value. We are not just part of a chosen people (Judaism), or a temporary host for a transmigratory soul (Hinduism), or something that will be assumed into an impersonal universal consciousness (Buddhism), or just a creature-servant of whom moral obedience is required - or else (Islam). Christians have believed from the beginning that the Christian Revelation of God is unique because it is the ultimate affirmation of the value of the individual who realizes their value and the value of others most fully in reciprocal loving relationships. Indeed, we believe the rather preposterous notion that we, as individuals and as a community, have been offered the opportunity to become sharers in the Divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) a process known as theosis, glorification, or divinization.

Why? Because God wants us to be part of the immortal, eternal Divine Family. That is what I believe.

What do you think?

The Internet as the Mind of Mankind

2008-03-07T10:19:00.009-05:00

Because the Internet and digital technology give us an almost instantaneous awareness of events around the world in both words and images, our collective global human consciousness is greater than it has ever been. We are linked together in this cyberworld through a physical network of digital electronics but the result borders on the metaphysical. This is analogous to the way our individual brains, like a complex array of neurological hardware and software, generate what we call our minds. Our brains are physical but our minds are metaphysical. This is what I think Teilhard was onto in his description of what he called the noosphere. He saw this as a physical/metaphysical "layer" surrounding the globe but generated by human beings. Collectively, the human race has a conscious awareness of itself. The Internet is a step in the direction of realizing more fully the implications of that global, collective self-awareness. It represents, or perhaps even is, in a sense, the collective mind of man.

This is not funky New Age religion but physics at work. The world wide web is not just technology or a tool, it already contains within itself an astonishing amount of human knowledge, memory, reflection, wisdom, good and evil, darkness and light. And it is giving conscious thought - the power of ideas - a new dominance in the sociology of history. Whereas thought has long been recognized as a force that shapes cultures it is rapidly replacing geography - also known as community of place - as the most powerful one. The community of ideas that the Internet represents or is in a sense, the engine of, may soon be the force that overshadows all others including genetics, economics, and geography as the single greatest culture-shaping force. This should not be surprising because this is what frees us from our basic animal tendencies and distinguishes us from our fellow earth-born creatures. Here is what Christopher Dawson says about this in Dynamics of World History:

In addition to these (other factors) there is a fourth element - thought or the psychological factor - which is peculiar to the human species and the existence of which frees man from the blind dependence on material environment which characterizes the lower forms of life...The formation of culture is due to the interaction of all these factors; it is a fourfold community - for it involves in varying degrees a community of work and a community of thought as well as a community of place and a community of blood." (Dynamics of World History p 5)

Though there has been a tendency at times to think that one or the other of the unconscious forces - place, race, work - was capable of mechanistically determining the true profile of a culture or even of an individual, it has always been within man's power to do something about his situation. The great question, it seems to me, is: what should we do with the power that has been given to us and how are we to know what is truly Good especially as the world around us and we as a race continue to change?

What do you think?

Dynamics of World History

2008-03-05T05:46:00.001-05:00

As I continue to reflect on some of the themes that I brought up yesterday that are essential components of Father Teilhard's reasoning, I am reminded of things that Christopher Dawson says in his brilliant assessment Dynamics of World History see this link for info on Dawson http://www.geocities.com/dawsonchd/ . Mind you, I am a carpenter, not a scholar, and one of my shortcomings or natural limitations is that I tend to glean what I feel is most important from whatever I read rather than to plod through every last page. If I did that I would still be reading things I started in the last century. I tend to speed-read things looking for concepts and prevailing ideas and then to see how they fit into an overall direction. I have often wondered if this modus operandi is in fact a shortcoming or an asset because it has helped me countless times to lead groups and organizations toward goals that I could see but which others could not or only dimly perceived. It is another aspect of what I mentioned in yesterday's post of being able to "see" things in a completed or finished state. This is part of what resonates with me about Teilhard, that he sees more clearly than most where we are headed, not in the sense of predicting the future but of perceiving an underlying current or movement in the unfolding of the cosmos. The downside of how I work is that I usually have to go back and fill in what is lacking in details, which I can usually do with the help of source materials that are readily available. One of the reasons I love the Internet is that it makes so many things available at your fingertips that would have taken an amateur researcher like me weeks to find in a traditional library.

The other thing I like about Teilhard and that I see in Dawson's thought as well is the very important recognition that we must incorporate what we have learned and continue to learn from both the hard and the soft sciences into our understanding of who we are and where we are headed. A true anthropology cannot be just a biblical one anymore than a true cosmology or geology can be because every age of man perceives or interprets the revealed truth of scripture through the lenses of its current understanding. The Copernican Revolution happened because of advances in scientific thought or, to put it another way, because of the willingness of a man to challenge prior assumptions based on his observations, analysis, theorizing, testing, conclusions - in short - by using the scientific method. This was thought by some, at the time, and still today by those who subscribe to Creation Science or what they call a "biblical worldview," to contradict the revealed truths of Sacred Scipture because they believe all of it to be "inspired" rather than being the work of inspired writers. There is an interesting discussion of differences between eastern and western views of Scripture if you go to some of the Orthodox Christian websites (sorry I don't have the links here). Personally, I think, Scripture tells us as much about its human writers as it does about God.

But this discussion is not, I think, just about our ability to analyze natural or cultural history or even the present state of the world and human society more accurately. It is also fundamentally a discussion about whether the nature of things is static or dynamic. Are we caught up in a constant effort to regain balance or stasis that was lost as a result of some primordial event - this is how I read the traditional idea of Original Sin - or, are we part of an unfolding story of growth, change, and movement toward fulfillment? For an interesting discussion of different Christian ways of understanding this question go to http://www.antiochian.org/ancestral-versus-original-sin

With regard to trying to understand history, Dawson says,

"Christianity does not itself create the historical sense. It only supplies the metaphysical and theological setting for history and an attempt to create a theory of history from the data of revealed truth alone will give us not a history but a theodicy (see the link for an explanation of this term) http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14569a.htm like Augustine's City of God or the Praeparatio Evangelica of Eusebius http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/religion/9780199296132/toc.html.
The modern historical consciousness is the fruit of Christian tradition and Christian culture but not of these alone. It also owes much to humanism...we cannot understand the past by applying the standards and values of our own age and civilization to it, but only by relating historical facts to the social tradition to which they belong and by using the spiritual beliefs and the moral and intellectual values of that tradition as the key to their interpretation. "(Dynamics of World History p 272)

Perhaps the most important question that arises from all of this is : can we collectively and/or as individuals, actually do anything of real substance to shape the future or is it all just pre-destined to end in massive destruction? And, if we can do something, what do we do and how do we do it? Dawson, Teilhard, and many others, myself included, believe that in a very real way the future is up to us and that we, if we learn to work and to pray in accord with the activity of the Holy Spirit, are the means by which a future full of hope will be realized.

So, what do you think?

Revisiting Teilhard

2008-03-04T05:45:00.000-05:00

I was happy last year to discover, while I was away on a lenten retreat, a new book about Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's thought. It was a rexamination of the central thesis of his life's work which, I would sum up as - faith and science are partners, matter and spirit are not opposed but convergent, and that the goal toward which all creation is moving is unity and fulfilment in Christ. I was pleased because for too long, non-Christians had been claiming Teilhard as one of their own as if somehow his ideas about cosmology and evolution could be separated from the centrality of Christ in his worldview. This book, though I don't remember the author's name, was written by a Christian with some serious credentials, and, while giving credit where credit was due, admitted that there were elements in Teilhard that had been misunderstood or misinterpreted by various church authorities when they were published.

Part of the reason for my happiness over this discovery was that Father Teilhard had played an important role in my conversion to Christ and for many years I had been dismayed that he was held in not-so-high-regard by many of my peers who had at least heard of him. In the winter that I turned sixteen as a highschool junior living on Martha's Vineyard, I was invited to a book group that met before school by my drama club coach and the book that was being discussed was, I think, "The Phenomenon of Man," by Teilhard. At the same time, I was also reading something by Albert Camus with my French tutor and found that the two books gave me helpful but very different perspectives on the quandaries I was struggling with about the meaning of life in general and my life in particular.

As a person somewhat naturally inclined to challenge assumptions and, on occasion, authority, I found in Teilhard a kind of a soul-mate though, at the time, I had no idea that his perspectives were so controversial. I was not a Christian at the time - I did not meet the Ressurected One until half a year later - so it was for me one of my first encounters with serious Christian thought. That he was a scientist and a priest - I don't think I even knew what a Jesuit was before then - made me pay attention to what he was saying more than if he had simply been a preacher. And the fact that he was able to integrate the Christian revelation of God into a dynamic cosmology of change and growth appealed much more to me as someone raised with a progressive education than a scenario in which the world and the unviverse are simply doomed for destruction and in which Armageddon is an inevitability. This is, of course, the way I am able to articulate the significance of my first encounter with him now, nearly forty years later. But there is no doubt in my mind that the seeds of what I am now able to harvest in my own maturity were planted then.

When I did meet Christ while I was away at boarding school in Vermont for my senior year, many of the things I had begun thinking about as a result of that book group began to make sense spiritually and intellectually. As a result, when I started my college studies at Brandeis http://www.brandeis.edu/ I had already resolved to study the history of Christian thought within the broader context of Western Intellectual and Cultural History. My decision was well supported by the coursework there, which exposed me to a fairly broad spectrum of thinking, and my own independent reading of Scripture and various commentaries under the guidance of my spiritual father, Eugene Bondi O.P., a professor of logic who was, at the time, Director of Novices at the nearby Dominican Priory.

Anyway, here is a brief description of the man from this site: http://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~jpaulsen/teilhard/isnoogen.html It is particularly interesting to me to note the similarity between Teilhard's description of what he called the "noosphere" and what we have come to call the world wide web.

"French Jesuit paleontologist (Sarcenat, Puy-de-Dôme, 1881 - New York 1955). The scientific work of Teilhard de Chardin is situated primarily in Asia: discovery of the Peking Man (1929), explorations in India, in Java, participation in the Yellow Crossing (1931, etc.). His theological and philosophical writings, banned from publication during his lifetime, have been disseminated since his death. Enlightened by a synthesizing vision of the universal unfolding of evolution, they give validity to the phenomenon of the cerebral complexification of the human phylum, ending in the abrupt appearance of the consciousness of self (the "threshold" of reflection), then in a worldwide communication network of human thought, the noosphere, at the heart of which is acting "Christ, the capstone of evolution", who is conducting humanity, in a simultaneously immanent and transcendent fashion, towards the "Omega point" (the Kingdom of God). His principal work, the Phenomenon of Man,appeared after his death."
Le Grand Larousse Universel, Tome 14, p.10095 (Translation by Janice B. Paulsen)

What are your thoughts about this?

More About Coffin Building

2008-03-01T06:26:00.000-05:00

This whole coffin making business is becoming quite interesting. I had a good conversation yesterday with a friend, another farmer and fellow parishioner at Holy Trinity Parish in Ypsilanti. I buy alfalfa hay from him for the goats that we raise on our urban micro-farm see http://thomasonfamilyfarm.blogspot.com/ My friend thought it was quite fitting that I am storing some hand tools - rakes, shovels, a maddox, posthole diggers - in the coffin I built for myself last year. I will insert a picture here as soon as I take one of its being used in this way. There is a picture of this same coffin displayed in my dining room in an earlier post on this blog along with some funny pictures I took at a local casket store a few years ago.

Like most things I do, my coffin is not quite finished - I don't think I put all of the hinges on it - because for some reason, and I have not quite figured this out yet, I don't feel compelled to get the last five percent of most things done. I have wrestled with this for years, even to the point of having to get my sons and daughters to finish things for me. I don't know whether this is a character defect or a sign of genius on my part, I suppose only time will tell. But I do know that one of the reasons for it is that I have, for as long as I can remember, been able to "see" things in a completed or finished state long before they are actually done. Of course this has gotten me into no little trouble with my wife - God bless her for her patience and forbearance with me - who, has had to put up with many semi-hinged doors, and other partially-completed projects over the 35 years of our not-always-blissful-but-nevertheless-passionately-loving marriage.

The fact is, I really can see things in their completed state to such an extent that I don't need to finish them to be able to enjoy or appreciate them. And not only that but I can see them in my mind so completely that I can look at them, rotate them 365 degrees and examine their various parts, inside and out. I can do this with houses, cars, chicken coops, coffins, and other things too. Additionally, somehow, I also "see" or feel connections that things have with other things, not completely or perfectly of course because only God sees them in their entirety, and not simply in terms of linear cause and effect relationships, but in what I call a "causal matrix." However, there are many, many things I do not either know or understand much to the surprise of my 14 year-old son, and youngest child, Robert. For example, just this week a litter of our new baby rabbits died from the cold because I stupidly moved the doe from the nest she had built in anticipation of their being born to another birthing box that I thought would be better. Stupid me! She had made a perfect nest that I thought was going to be too small when in fact it would have insulated the kits perfectly against the cold.

Anyway, back to the coffins, the whole issue came up originally a year ago when Dave Askins aka Homeless Dave of the Teeter-Totter network in Ann Arbor, interviewed me about our plan to publicly bring urban henneries back to the City of Ypsilanti - see the whole thing here
http://www.homelessdave.com/tt20070130peterthomason.htm. We were discussing the interconnectedness of things, in particular how chickens contribute so beautifully to home economics as producers of eggs and manure and what good citizens they are, when I brought up the coffin business. It just so happened that Dave had just watched an episode of Jay Leno's show in which he was making fun of someone who was making coffins that were being used as cabinets or blanklet boxes. I had not watched the show and didn't know anyone else was doing this but it was a great segue into discussing this whole question of getting our mortal remains back into the earth in a more eco-friendly or organic way.

My experience, and the research I have done, tells me that many coffins these days, in America at least, are made of metal and sealed so well against air and water infiltration that the natural process of decomposition is inhibited. A wood coffin, on the other hand, even inside a concrete health department mandated vault, will begin to decay - along with the remains - fairly quickly.

What do you think about this? Post your thoughts.

Is Your Work Killing You?

2008-02-26T22:13:00.000-05:00

Praying in Tongues

2008-02-25T10:58:00.000-05:00

When I became a Christian as a sixteen-year old boarding school senior in Vermont, one of the first things that happened was that I started praying in tongues. This experience, long associated with being "baptized in the Holy Spirit," as it is called in contemporary Pentecostal Christian and New Testament Christian groups, has been an amazing benefit to me over the last four decades of my Christian life. http://www.antiochian.org/penetcost/movie/two

Perhaps most importantly, I find that this particular "gift of the Spirit," helps me both in my personal spiritual growth but also when I pray for others. While praying in tongues or "in the Spirit" as some say, there is, I think, an inherent surrender to the omniscience of God. There are so many things that I have no way of knowing or understanding how to pray for, that this appeal to God's Wisdom and understanding of all things gives me both great serenity and the assurance that I have done something to be of help to myself and someone else.

Granted, this requires faith in God's Providence and trust that the outcome of all things will be well - somehow - even if it does not appear that way at the moment. But the practice of praying in this way, of abandoning the limitations of my human mind and imagination to the intercession of the Holy Spirit, to Divine Wisdom, has a way of actually building up my faith the more I engage in it.

Though I did not ask for this gift in particular, at least I don't remember asking, I know that I was ready for it and open to its possibility. My conversion came at a time in my life when I had been seeking God, even though I had not been raised in a Christian or a religious home. Being "baptized in the Holy Spirit" or, as I prefer to say, "plunged into the River of Life," changed everything for me and gave me a whole new direction, one that has born fruit and taken shape in a way that I could never have imagined at the time. As for praying in tongues - the prayer language the Holy Spirit gives believers - as far as I know, all you have to do is ask God for it and use it when it comes.

The other benefit for me has been that this gift has helped me to come to know the Holy Spirit as a person, not just a power or a divine energy. In recent years, I have experienced some surprising things about WHO the Holy Spirit is, qualitites that I can only describe as maternal or bridal. Though this may seem controversial to some, the Church has a long history of recognizing "feminine" qualities in the Holy Spirit and of identifying the Holy Spirit with Divine Wisdom as described by Solomon and other Hebrew prophets and sages. Prayers in some Orthodox Christian churches of the east still, to this day, refer to the Holy Spirit as, "Mother of the seven houses." To read more about this, see chapter ten of Dr. Scott Hahn's book, "First Comes Love: Finding Your Family in the Church and the Holy Trinity." It is also revealing that, in the Orthodox churches, the pre-eminent icon of the Holy Spirit is not a dove but a woman, a human being, the Theotokos, Mary the Mother of God herself.

What does this say to you?

Population worries existed for years

2008-02-23T23:18:00.000-05:00

This is a copy of the letter that was printed in the Ann Arbor News yesterday. To read all of the excellent letters that were printed in response to the letter by "Violet Shadow," advocating abortion as birth control to solve the world population problem go to http://www.mlive.com/news/annarbornews/index.ssf?/base/news-1/1203694861153600.xml&coll=2

I could only laugh at Violet Shadow's letter proposing using abortion as birth control to throttle world population growth. Either she is unaware that this is already being done around the world, or the letter was written provocatively under an interesting nom de plume to elicit horror at the thought of promoting such a ghoulish public policy.

Most people who engage in debate over population issues are familiar with Malthusian theory as modernized and articulated by Dr. Paul Ehrlich, author of, "The Population Bomb,'' first published 40 years ago. Malthus' theory, promulgated in 1798, described a future world where the human population, growing exponentially, would outstrip the natural resources, especially food, growing arithmetically, that are needed to support it. Ehrlich predicted this would happen before the end of the 20th century and that mass starvation would be the cause of untold human deaths.

Ehrlich was not only wrong but still seems to be unable to understand the genius of humanity and our ability to adapt and to change. He also seems to be oblivious to statistics provided by groups like the United Nations, showing that world food production has provided a surplus in recent decades. Or that people might actually resort to growing and raising their own food in their backyards.

According to Malthus and Ehrlich, humanity is like a fox in a hen house, eating and destroying whatever it comes across in its hunger. I, for one, think differently about this. I say, if you give a man some chickens, he'll find a way to get more chickens and even share them with his neighbors.
Peter A. Thomason, Ypsilanti

Theophany, Lent, and the Desert

2008-02-10T07:01:00.000-05:00

I have come to realize more clearly than ever this year, that the time Christ spent in the desert, and his "testing" or "temptations" there, are also representative of the ways in which we are tempted to misuse or to miss, the purpose of our chrismation. I am also struck by the sequence of events in Christ's life that we celebrate at this time of the year and how they bring to mind so many important events in Hebrew history but shed new light on their meaning. In fact, it is only in the light of the Gospel that I have come to understand most of the Old Testament

The first thing in the sequence that catches my attention is the similarity between the scenes where, Jesus approaches the place where John the Forerunner is baptizing at the Jordan River east of Jerusalem, and the time, 1200 years earlier, when Joshua crossed the Jordan into Palestine with the people who had come through the desert from Egypt. I think that there is a very deliberate parallel being made here, emphasized not only by the various characters in the scene but also by references to the historic location of Israel's crossing. For example, the Baptist's reference to "these stones," which, he says, God can raise up into children of Abraham, is not just a casual reference to some random rocks but, I believe, a direct reference to the memorial stones of Joshua. These stones were set up both in the middle of the river at the point of the crossing by the people and at nearby Gilgal where they camped and were circumcised before beginning their occupation of the territory. Apparently there were two sets since one is referred to as being left in the river and the other carried to the camp. See Joshua chapter 4.

The setting, I think, is meant to draw our attention to the way in which the new Joshua fulfills, in a spiritual way, the temporal work that the people of Israel were commissioned to do. Their coming into the Promised Land and the violent way in which it was carried out was not untypical for people of their time. Yet, it marked the beginning of something new at that point in the history of civilization, the establishment of a entire culture subject to the rule of law not the whim of a tyrant, tribal chief, king, or warlord.

As Joshua and the people, with the priests and the Ark of the Covenant at their head, passed through the Jordan, the river that symbolized their new life in God, the Promised Land opened up before them. At Gilgal, not far from the point of crossing, they camped. There, all the men who had been born in the desert were circumcised, the definitive sign of their pledge to detach, quite literally, from identifying solely with their natural lineage - as sons of Abraham according to the flesh - and to bind themselves to Yahweh and to his law.

In a strikingly similar way, if we look at what Jesus was doing at the Jordan in the light of Hebrew history, Christ, gathered there with his own people, like Joshua plunges into the riverbed following John, who is the son of a priest and a priest himself, and who heralds the presence of the new Ark of the Covenant. Christ's presence in the water there also calls to mind the ancient imagery of the Ark of Noah which, provided safe passage for his family through the flood to new life in a new land. God the Holy Spirit appears like a dove not so that we will think of God as a bird but to remind us that Noah's dove symbolically established a new bond between heaven and earth. The bird is a particularly good symbol of this since it lives in the air (heaven) and on the earth simultaneously. The image of bird wings also calls to mind the Glory of the Lord who, having accompanied the Hebrews through the desert with the Ark of the Covenant, also fills Solomon's Temple with her presence, the presence Solomon identified with divine Wisdom herself.

All Wood Handcrafted Coffins

2008-01-27T22:49:00.001-05:00

As I mentioned the other day, I am now building coffins to order. The one you see here is a prototype of a simple pine box traditionally displayed on two dining room chairs as it might have been is days past. It was not uncommon for the deceased to be "waked" in the family home while friends came to pay their respects. The coffins I make can be constructed of the wood of your choice though I prefer to use something grown in Michigan. I would be happy to discuss design with you including the kind that can double as a blanket box or a standing cabinet until it is needed. If you have a favorite tree that you would like it made from I can arrange to have it harvested and the logs sawn into lumber. Call me at: 734-482-2438 or email me at: peterthomason@comcast.net

Here are a couple of pictures I took a few years ago that I thought you might get a laugh out of. Note the "Dead End" sign by the casket billboard and the "Enter Only," and "Open" signs at the front of the store.

Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?

2008-01-21T07:08:00.000-05:00

Alot of my writing flows out of asking those questions and then taking time, sometimes many years of sitting with them, to prayerfully consider how they have been answered by others and how my own experience lines up with those propositions. "Who is the Holy Spirit?" will explore one of these questions at greater length in the article below.

Why Do We Die?

2008-01-17T09:39:00.000-05:00

The piece that the name of this post refers to is too big to be a post. Blogspot limits the size of posted messages to 200 words, so it is shown as an article instead. It is about something I have been pondering for a number of years - death, not because I am morbid but because remembering death or, "momento mori," is an old Christian tradition that really helps us to know ourselves better. Read the in-progress article below.

I also build coffins, or am starting to. Just this week I had two inquiries that came out of people reading the interview I did with "Homeless" Dave Askins at Teeter-Talk a year ago. You can read it at http://www.homelessdave.com/tt20070130peterthomason.htm He also "interviewed" some of the chickens when I built them a teeter-totter. Follow the next link to September 11, 2007 and scroll down until you see the chickens.

http://homelessdave.com/totterarchive7.htm#11September2007

Poultry in Motion - Why are There Chickens in the city?

2008-01-16T09:58:00.000-05:00

August 2007 - When people ask me, and they frequently do, why we have chickens living in our Ypsilanti City yard, I usually answer, "for the eggs." But the truth is, the main reason we have them is that it pleases my wife. And, if my wife is happy, most of the time, I am too. What I’m referring to is the inestimable value of pleasure that philosopher-farmer Wendell Berry speaks of in, "Economics and Pleasure," an essay that should be required reading for anyone who refuses to accept the idea that a monetary bottom line is the only "real" bottom line. There are many things about having chickens in the city that please us: gathering dew-laden forage for them early in the morning; neighbor children stopping by to feed them broccoli leaves or bugs from our garden; the cooing sounds they make when you stop for a few moments to watch them; the way they like to fly up and to sit on your shoulders when you go into the coop; the smile on our grandson Sam’s face when he sees the "chichens;" our grand-daughter Judah riding on the hood of a tractor in the Heritage Festival Parade pulling a mobile coop-float with all twelve hens inside; and of course, there are the eggs.For several years we tried to sell our house, move to the country and start a farm but, the times and the market were against us and we finally accepted that, at least for the time being, we were going to have to stay where we were. Not that we had a problem with being here, we just felt a need to reconnect with our agrarian roots. The thought that we were not going to be able to do that was depressing but we did our best to let go of it and to focus on growing as much of our food as we could on our one-tenth of an acre city lot. Then one day it just got to her and she said, "I don’t ask for much. I don’t want jewelry or fancy cars, I just want to have some chickens." My wife’s distress about this weighed on me for weeks until it finally occurred to me one day to check the city’s animal control ordinance. Though it did not specifically prohibit chickens - it allows keeping "common cage birds" and other pets – a call to the city attorney for clarification confirmed that, according to the city’s corporate and legal interpretation, they were not allowed. This just made me more determined than ever so I decided to try to amend the ordinance by first getting the support of two city council members and then making a presentation to the public meeting of the whole council.The members I approached had grown up in the city and remembered the days when chickens and goats were allowed to live in backyards. They supported my request for an amendment to the council but, when the mayor was dismissive of any real discussion on the subject, one of them backed down and helped "her honor" derail the prescribed process into a bureaucratic dead end. I had not even been given the opportunity to present the details of the proposed amendment. It made me angry that a perfectly legitimate request by a tax-paying citizen could be summarily rejected on the basis of an elected official’s personal bias – she had made it known from the time I made my first presentation that she had no interest in allowing it to happen. When I came home from the meeting the night of the vote, my wife asked how things had gone. I answered, "we have chickens in the city!" To which she, elated, replied, "You mean we can have chickens?" "No," I answered tersely. "What I mean is that we already have them. They are roosting down in the city council chambers." Later, I apologized to her for insulting the birds.The Michigan Right to Farm Act of 1981 is little known among city dwellers because it doesn’t impact us much. That is, unless you happen to live on the outskirts of a town that has been developed through the acquisition of nearby farms. Where farms are still operational and close enough to subdivisions to be smelled or heard, those agricultural activities are protected, and rightly so because we need them, as long as they follow GAAMPS – an acronym for Generally Accepted Agricultural Management Practices. We need local farms, especially small family owned farms, for a whole variety of reasons which cannot just be described in economic terms.Using the law to support having chickens in our backyard did not occur to me until I was being interviewed by Michigan Radio several months later and the interviewer suggested I look into the case of a suburban Michigan woman who had successfully used it in defense of her flock of goats. It is a surprisingly strong law, and, to my knowledge, all attempts to modify it have fallen flat. Two recent Michigan Court of Appeals rulings - one involved a riding stable and the other a nursery - have upheld it to the extent that it trumps even local zoning requirements and ordinances. The catch for backyard chicken keepers – or urban micro farmers like us - is that the law appears to be designed to protect those engaged in agricultural activities for commercial purposes. We don’t have a problem with that because, as produce growers – we sell to a local food cooperative – we fit the IRS and the USDA description of farmers. We file a Schedule F with our Federal 1040 and we also follow GAAMPS. I can imagine that the protections would be extended to subsistence farmers as well.So, there it is. Why are there chickens in the city? It’s really all about the pursuit of happiness.

Peter Thomason is a part-time urban farmer and a carpenter. He has lived in the Ypsilanti area for 32 years with his wife Rebecca and nine of their ten children.

The Absolute Necessity of Prayer

2008-01-13T22:32:00.000-05:00

"If we would all learn how to pray, the world would be a different place in three months." - Catherine Doherty, Foundress of Madonna House, Combermere, Ontario

I have often wondered if this challenge, attributed to Catherine, should be taken literally or figuratively. I know from experience that prayer changes things but, perhaps most importantly, what I have come to realize lately is that prayer changes me. I know that when I pray, and more specifically when I ask God to help me to pray, besides other benefits, I know myself better. When I know myself better I am more readily able to find ways to be my highest and best self. When I am my best self I am more loving, more patient, more courageous, kinder, gentler, and understanding. That, I believe, is what makes the world a better, less violent, healthier, happier place. Is that literal or figurative? Literal, I think, because the change can happen that fast if we want it to. Figurative because it remains only a hope and a potentiality if we do not embrace its urgency and the importance of taking it personally.

Prayer, in the sense of seeking God with one's whole heart, is in many respects the greatest possible antidote to evil. On a very basic level, the greatest evil perpetrated in and on the world, is the damage we do to one another - and ourselves - out of lust, envy, greed, gluttony, anger, pride, or sloth. But surprisingly enough, it is not so much virtue that we need to counter the momentum that these forces bring to bear on our ability to choose but a conscious relationship with God. There is no such a thing as knowing God without knowing ourselves and it is, in many respects, self-knowledge that we need more than almost anything else. Seeing, knowing, and loving ourselves as God sees us, knows us, and loves us - with our shortcomings and our potentials - is what real conversion and spiritual growth is about.

I do believe that prayer can change the world - but that it has to begin with me. The sooner the better.