Ancient Hymnody

I have little doubt you are all fascinated by the history of lyrics of Christian hymnody. Sure you are, I can hear it in your silvery voices. Nothing would make you happier than Part One: Ancient Hymnody.

The early church did not make the sharp division between songs, prayers, and readings that we, especially in the Protestant churches, do today. Those used to a liturgical service know the distinction. There are set musical pieces that occur throughout the worship, to which the lyrics are not optional or very limited in choice. Most of these lyrics come straight from the scriptures without alteration.

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might. Heaven and earth are full of your glory...

Christ became obedient unto death, even death on a cross...

Any inserted special music would be recitation of psalms. Whatever creative energy a person might have went into the music. In modern liturgical services there will often be hymns with composed lyrics, but this doesn't seem to be the case in the early church. It is ironic that the churches which advertise themselves as "biblical" often have hymns only drawn from the scriptures at some distance; the liturgical churches they disapprove of have great raw hunks of scripture, too big to swallow at one sitting.

In examining a lyric, I use a few obvious question: who are the words addressing? Is the presumed hearer the congregation, God, or the world at large? What is the theological focus? Is it a work of exaltation, of evangelism, of storytelling?

In the early church, this division is less sharp than we are used to now. When we say Christ, O lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world... it is pretty clear that we are speaking directly to Jesus. But what about This is the feast of victory for our God... or Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. It is hard to tell exactly, and quite unimportant, whether these declarations are evangelistic, teaching, or praise.

These are the lyrics handed down since earliest days. Declarative, communal, straight from scripture. But there is a hint in the Epistles of something else happening. "Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs." Ephesians 5:19. Spiritual songs...what are those, exactly? There is some sense in this. Even in a far more formal and liturgical culture than ours, do we imagine that folks encouraged each other by launching into a Kyrie? Hardly. There may not have been a Syriac "Arky, Arky," but they must have sung something other than the liturgy to send babies to sleep.

From the 7th Century:
Christus Factus Est Pro Nobis
Christus Factus Est Pro Nobis Christ became for us
Obediens usque ad mortem Obedient unto death
Mortem autem crucis Even to the death of the cross
Propter quod et Deus exaltavit illum For which cause God hath also exalted him
Et dedit illi nomen And hath given him a name
Quod est super omne nomen. Which is above all names

Catchy.

Update: In response to Jerub-baal's comment, I share the poor results of my research. There is an online radio station which plays Gregorian chant, and there are sites devoted to the Syriac, Melkite, and Coptic traditions. There are also two which cover the Orthodox tradition fairly thoroughly. There is also Ambrosian Chant, which I know nothing about, but ran across references to.

Controlling The Flow Of Information

Reprinted from last February:

A friend spoke movingly about prison ministry at church yesterday. He spoke about a man he was working with who was doing 10-21 for Felonious Sexual Assault. He read at length from the man's recent writings about incarceration and how it affects his family. The presentation highlighted what he was learning from this man spiritually.

It also highlighted why I won't do prison ministry, at least not with sexual offenders. Prison ministry is a wonderful thing, and Christians should do more of it. The Wymans send money to Prison Fellowship, we participate in Angel Tree, and I wish repentance and forgiveness for all of prisoners.

But slips of information came out, information that could only have come from the perpetrator, that pass most people by but I zeroed in on. "He had an affair (huh?) with a girl who was 15, almost 16..." I immediately thought bet not. The age of consent is 16 in NH. Why would a repentant person make sure that his spiritual advisor think his crime was borderline? That also didn't square well with the length of sentence.

My friend read directly from the prisoner's writing. It was mostly gentle, humorous, and warm. But. "I have noticed that women get shorter sentences for the same crimes than men." Whether true or not true, that is not the statement of a repentant person. What happens to other people is irrelevent to the state of your soul. Whether life is fair or not is immaterial.

My antennae were up and I googled the name and read up on the case. He had molested the girl from when she had just turned 14 to just before she turned 16. See how a liar can use the truth? She had come from a Brazilian orphanage, and he had met her through church, as she was the age of his daughters. Where do wolves hide? Hint: Why would a wolf hide in wolves' clothing? So she was doubly helpless, doubly dependent on adults for affection.

He had been "inappropriate" with four other underage females as well. Funny how that got left out of the story he puts out.

Here's the "flow of information" part. Sex offenders have a strong need to control exactly how you hear things. Criminals in general do this, but trebly so with DSO's. He had appealed his conviction because he had not testified, on the advice of his attorneys. His attorneys noted that testifying was likely to land him in even more trouble, but that he was more fully involved in the design of his defense than any of their other clients. He now thought that it would go better if he could control the flow of information. (It didn't, BTW)

While it is my experience working with sexual offenders which first put me on to this uber-suspiciousness, I have understood it not from observation of others, but from observation of self. The exquisite skill in admitting guilt while redirecting focus, of minimizing criminality, of using the truth to lie -- I don't hate these things because they are foreign to me, but because I understand them all too well. It is lying to yourself which comes closer to the unforgiveable sin. To lie, not merely for a moment of fear, but as an ongoing proposition -- that is a sin which will never be confessed. And hence, unforgiven.

Stickers

Why do I still see so many Kerry or Kerry-Edwards stickers? Not that I never see a Bush-Cheney sticker, but they're rare. Is it just where I happen to be driving, or is there something different in the persistence of announcement between Republicans and Democrats? That election's long over, people.

Now a Dukakis sticker - that would impress me.

God Plays Twenty Questions

The Scriptures are the record of how God plays Twenty Questions with us. The rules are a little different than the parlor game we're used to, but it's recognisable. When we play with each other, we start from scratch: Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?

God starts by speaking to us but not revealing very much of Himself. We are unwilling to ask directly "tell us who You are," but we just have to keep testing and finding out. We want a simple, done-and-out answer.

Are you a local god? God answers Try that idea out and see where it brings you.

Are you an earthly king? Try that. I'll even help you, so it will be a fair trial.

Moses asks "Are you a God of magic?" Push that idea as far as you can. I'll show you how much of a God of magic I am. Moses tries, and eventually even pushes it over the line by bringing water from the rock. God reins him in. I am this, but I am not.

Do you live in a building? I will direct you in building a building that is as much like Me as possible. Then you will answer.

Are you a place, this whole land of Israel?
Are you a debate about philosophy?
Are you a set of ideas?

Try each, one by one. Give it a good try. Go down those roads as far as you can. Then you will ask a new question.

God plays in the style that answers more than Yes or No. Sometimes He gives the direct answer - most often if it's "No" - but He might also answer Partly. Or That question can't be answered. Or Sometimes.

The answer is only given through experience. But answering each question does teach us a great deal about God. We may decide that God is not merely a debate, or a building, but we learn a great deal about Him through the test. When we ask God who He is, He dares us to test Him. People have tried a thousand questions, and we each become attached to the path we are on. We become so attached, in fact, that we forget the original question and just show off what we've learned along the way. We stop testing, and are simply satisfied with the bit He has shown us.

"I think nature is God."
"Love is God."
"God is the force that holds everything together"
"God is in each of us."

We can approach through philosophy, or through culture, or good works, or memorising Scripture, or contemplation. Each will teach us a great deal. But it's all for nothing if we forget the original question.

Nuclear Waste

The supposed difficulty of nuclear power is what to do with all the radioactive waste. Nuts to that. The difficulty is any danger from radioactivity now. It is apparently a requirement in some circles that we must develop ways of safely disposing of nuclear waste for 10,000 years or the whole deal should be off. They think it would be irresponsible to bequeath such danger to later generations.

Does it hurt to point out that the "later generations" that will be around in 10,000 years are not our grandchildren and great grandchildren? This is posterity at a very far remove. Turn the telescope in the other direction: how much do you think your ancestors of 10,000 years ago were responsible to you, personally?

Heck, cut it by a factor of ten. The people who lived in the year 1007. How connected to them are you?

We are entering an era of rapidly improving technology. Every generation now does things thought impossible not long before. People are seriously studying how to extend our lifespans 20, 40, 100 years. The singularity is expected in a few decades. Even 100 years from now, the behavior of societies will be radically different. 200 years out - we wouldn't recognise the lives those people have. And here's the kicker - we might not like them. They may have taken a cultural turning that renders them not only incomprehensible, but repugnant to us.

Okay, give them the benefit of the doubt. They might be fine people, and despite tremendous technological advances, might still be just short of figuring out what to do with radioactive waste. But really, the call for even a thousand-year guarantee of safe disposal is just ridiculous. The variables for ten centuries are too great to make any plan remotely sensible.

Put the effort into safety now. Ignore the rest.

Hitchens and Daniels on Orwell

I am training myself not to begin reviews of excellent books by telling you what’s wrong with them. First, the summary, so you can pretend you’ve read the book.

Hitchens’ view is that Orwell is the necessary corrective for just about every current stream of political thought. Everyone loves to quote Orwell when he’s clubbing the opposition, but slinks out of the room when he turns to confront one’s own group. Why Orwell Matters touches each in turn, holding first the left then the right by the shirt-front to repeat the lessons George Orwell wrote five decades ago and more. Not content with this standard slapping of all parties and wishing a plague on both their houses, Hitchens calls out other groups by name to see what judgment Orwell passes upon them: Englishmen, Americans, Feminists, Academics. He considers their counter-arguments and accusations against Orwell and passes judgment of his own. His dissection of recent academic treatment of Orwell is especially delicious.

Orwell was a man of the Old Left, and Hitchens retains considerable approval of the evolution of his thought. He was anti-imperialist because he had witnessed and even committed brutality in Burma, anti-plutocrat because he had lived “down and out in London and Paris.” He believed passionately in socialism for the common man, and the rightness of their cause in taking control over industries and countries to protect their interests against the powerful. Even after disillusionment, Orwell clung to the idea that everyday people could and should, somehow, kick out the powerful in their midst and rule themselves.

Hitchens highlights the counterpoint, that Orwell also describes the collusion of the oppressed with the oppressor, and insisted on its reality even when it was politically and personally costly to him. No one likes to hear that, and we even have a new phrase about “blaming the victim” to prevent us from thinking such things. Yet the caution against blaming applies most fully with random victims, or those who have gotten entangled with pathological people through no identifiable action of their own. But the peculiar dance and collusion of victims is observable in counseling and mental health even in individuals. It can be stronger in groups. Consider the picture of Parsons in the cellars of the Ministry of Love speaking to Winston Smith in 1984.

“Of course I’m gulty!” cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. “You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?…between you and me, old man, I’m glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I’m going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? ‘Thank you,’ I’m going to say. ‘thank you for saving me before it was too late.’”

Commentary: Orwell is remembered for the brilliance of his late fiction, Animal Farm and 1984, and to a lesser extent his war essays on propaganda, simple virtue, and meaning. Perhaps his earlier work deserves more attention; Hitchens would certainly say so, though he didn’t convince me. What remained of Orwell’s socialism to the end is interesting, but not compelling and instructive any longer.

By happy chance Anthony Daniels has revisited Homage to Catalonia at The New Criterion this month. Daniels reminds us of some morally reprehensible sections of that work. Perhaps Eric Blair had not fully become George Orwell by 1938, and the incompleteness of his disillusionment should not be held against him as forcefully as Daniels does. Yet it remains that Orwell clumped Homage into the category of his later work, and did not change a word for its reprinting in the late 40’s.

This final clarity of thought before his death to tuberculosis, which we see in AF and 1984, obscures the earlier excitement and admiration he describes on meeting soldiers who would murder the bourgeoisie without compunction, or his regret that the “workers” who took over a town did not destroy all the churches and deface all the graveyards. Orwell’s perception of child soldiery as poignant and inefficient, rather than immoral and contemptible, is surely a blow against his reputation for fearless moral honesty. That he faults Stalin for softening his stance on the democratic socialists for expediency’s sake does not square with the figure of the noble old Trotskyite holding the high ground against the brutal Stalinists.

In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no “well-dressed” people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform…I believed that things were as they appeared, that this really was a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side….There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. (emphasis mine)

Orwell’s popular memory is the fairer one, despite Hitchens’ advocacy. Orwell was one who saw through communism at last, perceiving that its good intentions led inexorably to totalitarianism nonetheless. That he retained some form of socialism is irrelevant. He saw with the clarity of one betrayed where it all would lead, and indeed had led in many places. Revisionists who attempt to draw from the two last novels a lesson of equal condemnation of the left and right torture the texts to get there. No one in eastern Europe who read illegal copies of Animal Farm during the Cold War thought “Hmm, I wonder if the writer is describing his fears of McCarthyism or Enoch Powell here.” Orwell certainly hated fascism and any totalitarianism of the (purported) Right – enough so that his essay on pacifism as a support for the enemy still have great sting – but it is the Soviet state that is represented. Even when I read 1984 as a radical socialist in 1967, there was no doubt which nations were closer to that dystopia. We kidded ourselves that Amerika was in severe danger of becoming much the same. We enlarged our right-wing enemies to inflate our own reputations for courage. But the plain fact was unavoidable.

Or perhaps not unavoidable. Even today, the fevered commenters of the Left will blithely refer to Oceania being at war with Eastasia in reference to America and the war on terror, as if it is we who are seeking and needing enemies and Others.

Orwell pinned the bug to the page, and the many flaws of 1984 are of no account. Pace, Christopher Hitchens and Anthony Daniels, neither are Orwell’s earlier works are of any account, save as curiosities tracing his development.

Lebron as Global Icon

Lebron James is going to represent Cub Cadet Lawn Tractors. He thought it was "sort of a good fit," and part of his "being a global icon."

We Are All Witnesses.

Early Tribes Writing

I can see the beginnings of my Arts & Humanities Tribe thinking in a post from last February, Parallel Hatreds.

I recall going into Walmart a few years ago and thinking "There's a lot of ethnic folks here. Huh." I thought immediately after, "I wonder if that's what the people who hate Walmart are really objecting to. There are poor people here, immigrants, odd-looking people." I have observed the tone of discourse about Walmart since then, and it has confirmed my initial suspicion. The Walmart opposers like immigrants and poor people in the abstract, but they don't like to see them in groups larger than three outside their assigned neighborhoods

Quick Reference

Among the oddities from last February, there was a post on Irish Hurling,

another on the deterioration of Habitat For Humanity,

and a third on Phonics.

The Meanings of Words

I am back on the edges of this tax-protestor thing again – from a different direction and partly my own fault. Ah well.

One of their arguments is that the tax system is “voluntary.” They interpret this according to the everyday meaning of voluntary, as in a voluntary contribution to a charity, or enlisting in the armed services rather than being drafted. It’s easy to see why this would be the first definition that would occur to anyone seeing it in print. “Hey! Voluntary! I never knew that; this is great! I’m not going to volunteer anymore.” As is usual, things that look too good to be true usually aren’t. Voluntary has a specific legal meaning in this case, in that you are allowed to figure out and submit the data yourself, rather than the government sending you a bill.

People don’t like that. It seems like some sort of trick or playing with words to them. The plain meaning of a word should be what wins the day, in their eyes.

But this happens with words all the time. Everyday words have specific meanings in context. I argued with my high school English teacher that such-and-such a character couldn’t be the “hero” of the book because he was so unheroic. To me, it seemed that the word hero required some sort of heroic behavior. It doesn’t. It’s a technical term. We use the word “depression” in an everyday sense, but medically it has a specific meaning; in the case of an agitated depression, it might even look quite different from the usual picture in our minds of a depressed person. Force has a specific meaning in physics. Culture has a specific meaning in anthropology. There are other meanings to those words, but those are irrelevant to the physics or anthropology discussion.

Words can even have dramatically different meanings in different contexts. To a probate court, both biological and adopted children are your descendants. To a genetecist, only biological ones are. Who you call your children might be a third thing: she’s no daughter of mine – she cut herself off from the rest of us years ago.

One more example and I’m done. In my long twilight political arguments with my liberal uncle, he objects to my using the word “liberals” to describe people who subscribe to certain political ideas: belief in using government as a force for good, a fondness for transnationalism, a preference for more redistribution of wealth. He wishes to use the term “liberal” to mean open-mindedness, considering many options. It could mean that in some contexts, I suppose. But in current political discussion it simply doesn’t. We might argue about what the precise meaning of the word is, but it is a word about beliefs, and not attitudes in that context. None of us gets to veto the meaning in context. Refusing to be convinced doesn’t change the reality.

Quite Different Polling Numbers

I have been assuming that you all know that Instapundit should be your first source for news every day. On the chance that some here don't visit Glenn Reynold's blockbuster site, however, I include the following chart:



There are links to excellent commentary on this data over at Reynold's site as well.

How To Make New England Libertarian

The flap over Dice-K's Japanese beer commercial. One commenter brilliantly writes:

I'm not pithy enough to find a different phrase, but "inane overregulation" does not do justice to something that is a clear violation of the principles of free speech.

The Internationalist Elite As Secular Religion

Kenneth Anderson of Washington College of Law at American University and the Hoover Institute at Stanford has an article which will be dear to the heart of those who have participated in the discussion of American tribes: Secular Eschatologies and Class Interests of the Internationalized New Class. Behind this imposing title is the idea that internationalism is an essentially religious belief which does not expose itself to competing ideas. I found the first and last thirds of this 10-page pdf more compelling than the middle, but it is otherwise excellent. An excerpt from the abstract:

...international human rights and liberal internationalism can be thought of partly as religious movements, with an eschatological world view of a politically unified world under an overarching moral doctrine of international human rights. Yet this same liberal internationalism-human rights eschatology can also be seen as the ideological project of a global new class, an emerging global bourgeoisie that sees itself at once in technocratic, yet redemptionist terms, driven by the material facts of economic globalization but motivated by a universalist religious vision.

The Academic-speak looks worse than it is. Those of you who have been following the A&H Tribe arguments here won't find it too difficult.

Seeker-Friendly Churches

It occurred to me today in adult Sunday School that all churches are seeker-friendly in some sense. Any church that has members had folks who sought them out, even if only for reasons of habit or family, and felt welcome enough to stay.

The difference is whether you are appealing to a broad range of seekers or a narrow one. What we call seeker-friendly churches are those which appeal to as large a number of who they think is out there as possible. The complaint against them would be that they appeal to a lowest-common-denominator. The complaint against the other churches would be that they have narrowed their appeal so enormously as to become useless. If you only appeal to cradle Baptists over 60, that's too narrow. On the other hand, appealing to the most generic group of seekers will leave out folks who aren't very generic.

Our church is populated by well-educated 40-60 year-old evangelicals and their children up until they get driver's licenses, at which point they go elsewhere, or nowhere. Just about every family has at least one person working in education. That's too narrow. People who fit that demographic feel really comfortable from the first week they come - all well and good - but we should be able to expand that somewhat, wouldn't you think?

Men's & Women's Intelligence

I never much cared when I was younger whether men or women were smarter, being much more self-centered than that. So long as I was smarter, I didn't much care who was second. When my sons started going to school, I became a bit more attentive to issues of how boys and girls were perceived and treated at school, but it was not as pressing for Jonathan and Ben as it was for other boys. Both had the poor handwriting and chattiness that is their Wyman heritage, but they also got some self-control and diligence from their mother that gave them a leg up. Both read exceptionally well, and Ben had the added advantage of being in a small Christian school which I still maintain was in its day, the best school in the state.

My eventual oversimplification from those experiences was that schools favor girls, the nonschool environments favor boys.

I was also briefly president of the Prometheus Society (Hey, my name's still in the officers archives. Cool.), and raised quite a bit of controversy when I noted that the membership was 96% male. It was one of those things that everyone knew but no one was supposed to say, apparently. I just thought it was geekness, but research did show that men outnumbered women in greater numbers as one went up the IQ scale.

Less often mentioned was that men dominate at the other end of the scale as well. There just seems to be slightly more variation in men, which becomes increasingly visible at the extremes.

Manchester University's Dr. Paul Irwin has made a more dramatic claim than I had previously seen, that at IQ 120 men already outnumber women 2/1, increasing to 30/1 at IQ 170. That certainly seems extreme, though I haven't looked at the data. Most people leap to the "there must be something wrong with the tests" conclusion, but that has been hard to show evidence for. Males and females both average just about 100, but the Bell curve for women is a touch narrower and taller.

One possible explanation offered has been multi-tasking - that women's brains sacrifice the searing focus of men's in order to do several things simultaneously. People's general observations of society accord with this, perhaps, but it is tough to measure. As we are talking about a very few people when we start throwing around phrases like "IQ 170," it's hard to get good data. A self-selected sample may be misleading. But finding enough people in a random population to run an experiment is difficult.

The Greatest Enemy of Liberty

Harvard Law professor Charles Fried is being kicked by both the left and right at present. That's no guarantee of correctness, but it's usually a good marker for interesting thinking. The link should whet your appetite

From a recent article about his new book in the Harvard Gazette:

"The greatest enemy of liberty has always been some vision of the good."

"Of all the ideals that compete with liberty," writes Fried, "none is as powerful or as attractive as equality"

Fried's book, Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government takes John Stuart Mill as a starting point, and discusses how liberty and equality are not natural allies, and are often in conflict.

Celebrity Look-Alike

My son submitted several photos of himself to one of those sites which tells you which celebrities you look like. I was unimpressed with the results.

With me, it's easy:

Henry VIII




Obi-Wan Kenobi




And Burl Ives







I also look something like my brother, and a bit like my two older sons. Poor bastards.

And Now Sweden

I have mentioned before that emigration of native Belgians, Brits, Germans, and Dutch is increasing yearly. Now it's the Swedes. Immigrants from Muslim countries continue to have children at far above replacement value, native Europeans far below, immigration continues, and now this. Demography may be destiny. The nations of Europe seem to be completely unable to integrate and absorb immigrant peoples. This is because their nations are founded on tribes. America and Australia, less so Canada, are founded on ideas rather than tribes. That's been working a lot better, frankly.

Europeans remain highly suspicious of nationalism because it so easily deteriorates into racialism. It does in Europe, anyway. The nations of Europe are still highly associated with tribes that are centuries old. The Hungarians call themselves Magyars after the tribe that moved in from Asia a thousand years ago. Most of the national movements of the 18th- 20th Centuries had very clear ideas of True Romanians, True Finns, etc. They disliked and often feared those lived among them who were tribally different. Montenegrins just split off from Serbia. The Flemish and the Walloons are still distinct in tiny Belgium. Hatred of Jews and Gypsies and wars over tribal dominance were not 20th C aberrations caused by Germans in Europe. They are Europe.

We have, er, very little animosity between the Flemish and Walloons in America. None to speak of between the Serbs and Croats, even. To get conflict going in America, you have to have really obvious differences: language, dress, color. Even with those, we seem to adjust far better than say Paris or Lille, Rotterdam or Oslo. America does better integrating races from different continents than Greeks or Letts do different dialects. In Europe, nations have a great difficulty defining themselves as anything but historical tribes. Great Britain does best among them, but even the UK has had notable conflicts with Ireland, and still has separatist movements.

Can anyone imagine a popular separatist movement in America? Even to divide races into their own states- certainly a sharper visual divider than Spaniards and Catalans and Basques - attracts only fringe support. (God be praised). You don't have to be descended from anyone in particular to be an American. Any ancestors will do, really.

This quiet emigration is how many western Europeans are solving their Muslim immigration problem. They're moving to New Zealand or Canada, or even (gasp) America. Having no way of defining their nations other than by soil and race, there isn't much hold. Language and foods you can take with you (and kid yourself that you'll pass them on to your children).

One more thing. It's not the elderly who emigrate. Even the middle-aged are underrepresented in mobile populations. The people who are leaving are predominantly those who would have had nice little Dutch or Austrian children to dress up. Europe is vanishing. The English colonies really are very different in the world. Even India is learning how to absorb differences.

Team Colors

Two decades ago, my brother was describing to me what a great gig it was doing lights for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. A friend of his had the season contract, and he just went in and supervised the set-up when his friend needed a night off. Big money, little work. I thought it was great. I commented how irritating it was that the Ducks had chosen what were the current fashionable colors: black, teal, and a purply magenta. "Yeah, that's great now," I said, "but what are they going to do when those colors go out of style? Seems like bad marketing to me." There was a pause, as my southern-California brother pondered how to break this to the country mouse back home. "When the fashion changes, they'll change the team colors." (See link)

That would never occur to anyone in New England. The Bruins colors are black-and-gold-and white. I didn't think it was legal to change them. I thought it was sort of like a Methodist deal, where you have to sing Charles Wesley hymns forever, or what kinds of pie you have at Thanksgiving. There is something deeply wrong with a culture that thinks its teams can just change their colors with the fashions.

What Am I Looking For?

I mentioned in my post on genealogy and DNA my brief attempt to try and discover Chris and John-Adrian’s ancestry beyond the parents’ names on their birth certificate. The parents are recorded as being born in Sârbi and Spinuş,in Bihor County of Transylvania. This accords with the boys’ memories of life in Derna, a nearby town. They have some impression that the family has been centered on Derna for at least a few generations.

When I read anything about the area in another context I always look for those village names. They only show up in writings about mining development and Holocaust studies. In reading about the Jews from Transylvania sent to Auschwitz in the Final Solution in 1944, the name pops up: Derna (Hungarian Felsőderna), Jews sent to the ghetto in Oradea.

Am I wondering if their grandparents participated somehow? It’s unlikely, as they were probably born between 1925-1940. Am I concerned about the great-grandparents, then? Am I worried that some Pîrcalab is going to suddenly show in the record as some particularly despised betrayer? What would it matter? The reality of their immediate ancestry is bad enough – what would be added by discovering violent, selfish evil plus nototiety?

Their forebears are almost illusory to me. Gheorghe and Irina are still alive last we heard, but very ill: 49 going on 94. A grandmother, Viturca, is still alive. The boys have only the haziest memories of them, and I of course have no picture in my mind at all.

I have evil enough in my own blood ancestry; starting with my own father. And y'know, I'm not so great myself? Would it affect anything about me if my two miserably irresponsible great-grandfathers turned out to have even worse sins in the record? Not a whit. Why, then, would I see any significance in Romanian great-grandfathers? Perhaps it is merely the mystery, the fact that two boys appear in an orphanage, with little context even in their own country, and I want some narrative. What narrative could there be? Peasants in Crişana; life is hard.

This illusory nature of our inheritence flows in the other direction, toward our posterity as well. If I am fortunate enough to have grandchildren and to know them, I will likely care about them deeply. They exist only in theory, yet I like them already. But their children? I am a great believer in handing on one’s culture, and in particular one’s faith. We put up a time capsule to be opened in 2100. Medical improvements being what they are, it is just possible that one of my children will be there to open and explain. More likely it will be a grandchild, who may or may not remember us. Certainly, they won’t summarize with much accuracy. A few scraps of stories will be woven into some narrative of who Tracy and I were. Even great-grandchildren will be older than I am now by then.

Who can tell which of our values they will have? If we knew them we might not much approve of them. If they are not Christians, in what sense are they really our descendants? Jesus pointed out in his typically radical way: who are my mother and brothers? Those who do my will. I don’t have the spiritual clarity to see things that way. My sons are my sons. Their children will seem something of an extension of this family. But one step further, peering into the middle-aged lives of my grandchildren and beyond? These are not my “mother and brothers.” Those who follow Christ, whether or not they have my name or blood, are our true posterity. If I take a smaller bite at the concept like that, I can see what Jesus meant.

We picture ourselves moving through the world in some definite context of family, or country, of profession or culture, but these fade quickly. Even for someone like me, morbidly considering the birth and death of generations and tracing some threads, the earthly context isn’t much. In the light of eternity, this life will be just one hand of cards played in a long evening.