Consistently Pro-life

Sometimes we long feel the need to speak up on a particular subject, yet wait for a defining moment. For me, it was the shock I felt when I realized I agreed with Jimmy Carter.


This is something that does not often occur. In fact, I am not even sure I agree with the former President on Christianity or the Bible. But I do agree with Carter on this, even though my reasoning is different:


It is time to end capital punishment.


Carter says so in an opinion piece published online at the Associated Baptist Press. While I encourage you to read the article, I will summarize his reasoning:

1. The majority of people and police chiefs are against it.
2. The focus is on punishment, not rehabilitation.
3. The death penalty is not a deterrent to murder and other violent crimes.
4. The cost to defend and offer appeals for death row inmates is "astronomical."
5. Scripture leans more towards mercy than punishment.
6. Capital punishment is biased towards the poor and minorities.

Here are my comments to Mr. Carter's points:

1. Polls from people and police chiefs should not determine policy. Laws should. If there is a case to change the law, make that case.
2. Rehabilitation may feel good, but it is rarely effective.
3. This point is mostly true, but not for the reasons cited. Many capital punishment states may have a higher rate of homicides, but there are too many other factors (population, wealth, even weather) to make that a valid statistic.
4. This statement is definitely true.
5. Scripture decidedly leans towards mercy, but it also promotes justice.
6. This statement is true as well (at least statistically). The quality of defense is greater for people of means.

So, I agree with President Carter on some reasons (racial and economic bias, lack of deterrence, the legal cost of appeals), and not on others.


As inferred, I arrived at my conclusion both before reading Carter's article, and from a different direction. My reasons for opposing the death penalty are--

• It buys us nothing. There is no societal benefit to the death penalty. Yes, it may bring closure to a grieving family, but it does not lift the nation or the people. In fact, it may have the opposite effect, creating a subtle "blood lust" in people who want a criminal to get his "just deserts." Finally, it has been proven that it is no more a deterrent than life without parole. 

• It cost us so much. Not only in terms of perhaps doing damage to our national psyche (and our spiritual health as well), but also in raw financial terms. The main losers are the taxpayers. As one law professor explains: "What we are paying for at such great cost is essentially our own ambivalence about capital punishment. We try to maintain the apparatus of state killing and another apparatus that almost guarantees that it won't happen. The public pays for both sides." The complete process of conviction, appeal and habeus corpus in a capital conviction  is often reported as 2 to five times greater than a sentence of life without parole. Even if the cost were equivalent (and they can be in long incarcerations), LWOP is still as effective as capital punishment, a severe, effective and permanent solution. 

• It usurps authority that belongs to God. Carter makes an interesting comment in this regard: " We remember God's forgiveness of Cain, who killed Abel, and the adulterer King David, who had Bathsheba's husband killed. Jesus forgave an adulterous woman sentenced to be stoned to death and explained away the 'eye for an eye' scripture." I would take it a step further. God said "Vengeance is mine." (Romans 12:9). This lust for revenge, either individually or corporately, is a wresting away of a right that belongs to God. I realize there are many scriptures that may be used to justify capital punishment. Yet historically, the practice was most used (and abused) by totalitarian, amoral and God-less societies, from the Romans of Jesus's day to the Nazi, Soviet, Chinese and Middle Eastern governments of our own time.

• It may kill/have killed innocent people. No doubt this was more true in the past, before improvements in forensic science and DNA testing. Yet wrong decisions are probably still being made, and many are being reversed. In the final analysis, a wrongly imprisoned person can be released--a wrongly executed person cannot be resurrected (at least by the state).

• Finally, as a Christian, consider that as long as a person is alive, he or she has the chance to allow God to perform a work of real redemption. Read the stories of Karla Faye Tucker (executed in Texas in 1998), Jeffrey Dahmer and Manson cult killers Susan Atkins and Charles "Tex" Watson, all who seem to have genuinely embraced Christ. Thanks to saints like the late Charles Colson, prisons are full of such stories.

I am a peace with this decision. It has come with a lot of prayer and thought. But I do have a regret. In the past, I have challenged several people who were pro-abortion, yet anti-capital punishment, by saying that I would become anti-death penalty if they would become either pro-life or pro-death penalty, and thus we would both be consistent. I have lost that leverage.

And I have one interesting conundrum. If it weren't for capital punishment, Jesus would never have died on the cross, and I would still be lost, with no hope.
--Wayne S. 

Pat Conroy on Losing.

Pat Conroy, lower left

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous. But there is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss. The great secret of athletics is that you can learn more from losing than winning. No coach can afford to preach such a doctrine, but our losing season served as both model and template of how a life can go wrong and fall apart in even the most inconceivable places.

   Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time. The American military learned more by its defeat in South Vietnam than it did in all the victories ever fought under the Stars and Stripes. Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniff you out of whatever fields you  hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true. My team won eight games and lost seventeen... losers by any measure.

--Pat Conroy, in My Losing Season.

What's inside the package?

    In doing some research on Blu-Ray players prior to a purchase, I was reading some customer reviews on Amazon. They usually prove very helpful, since most customers are eager to describe both disappointments and pleasant surprises. 

    In my reading, I came upon a review unlike any other I have read. In it, the reviewer... well, let me just quote the reviewer, Abe, verbatim:

I purchased this product as a gift to give my youngest, adult daughter for her 31st birthday. Therefore I can't say very much about how the unit performs in relation to video presented on the screen, audio, or Blu-ray loading speed. I can tell you that after I removed it from the shipping box, the manufacturer's packaging was attractive with interesting pieces of information printed on the box. The box itself appeared sturdy enough for the purpose of protecting the unit within and was of a size that made wrapping it very easy. The box surface adheres very well to standard Scotch tape which further facilitates wrapping.

The unwrapping process proved to be quite easy as well. Practially all the wrapping paper came off in one stroke. Opening the box was something even a two year old could accomplish easily. Once opened, the unit came out with a minimum of effort and a minimum of protective material that would have to be thrown away later.

Once all items were out of the box, accounting for each item that was supposed to be included was accomplished quickly.

All-in-all, this unit made for an exceptionally well received gift. I'd give it again and highly recommend it to anyone contemplating this unit as a gift to give to a good friend or relative.

     Of course, what is wonderfully humorous about the review is that Abe says absolutely nothing about the Blu-Ray player itself. Yet he is meticulously true to his experience with the product. I think Abe is either a very sincere man who wants to contribute to our decision-making, or else a very charming joker. Either way, I enjoyed his review.

    Further reflection, though, made me realize something. Regarding my spiritual life, I am almost always careful to describe it in positive terms. I talk about my church, my service to my brother, my Bible study. I talk about what I believe, and even some of what I practice. But I seldom get beyond the "box" and the "wrapping paper." It is rare that I will tell someone what's really in the box: a man with many faults, inconsistent faith, disappointments, debilitating sins and even bouts of depression. A man who believes strongly, strives mightily (not near enough) and who knows he is made to be something other than what he often is at the end of the day. I know some people (like my wife) see that my surface does not always "adhere very well" to the tape of the Gospel of Christ. 

    The real value of the product that is Christ in me must come from honestly appraising my life, first before God, then to myself, and finally to others. We all want to know what I wanted to know about that Blu-Ray player: How well does it work?

--Wayne S.

Days

20,455
days ago
I became the first child of John and Joyce,
the first grandchild of James and Mildred
and Croley and Hazel.

14,874
I found myself a sinner
in need of a Savior.

13,711
well over half my life
I have loved one above all others.

11,976
we started keeping house.

10,917
I became a father
(and again at 10,418, 9650 and 8424).

A mere 86 days ago
I became a grandfather.

And I count each day passed worthwhile
and the days to come
surely less than I wish
yet more than I deserve

as gifts.

So teach us to number our days,
That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.
Psalm 90:12.

C. S. Lewis on WWJD

It depends, of course, on what you mean by ‘practising Christian’. If you mean one who has practised Christianity in every respect at every moment of his life, then there is only One on record—Christ Himself. In that sense there are no practising Christians, but only Christians who, in varying degrees try to practise it and fail in varying degrees and then start again. A perfect practise of Christianity would, of course, consist in a perfect imitation of the life of Christ—I mean, in so far as it was applicable in one’s own particular circumstances. Not in an idiotic sense—it doesn’t mean that every Christian should grow a beard, or be a bachelor, or become a travelling preacher. It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God. It means looking at everything as something that comes from Him, and always looking to Him and asking His will first, and saying, ‘How would He wish me to deal with this?’

--C. S. Lewis in God in the Dock

Editor's note: One thing that bugs me to no end is when writers—or at least smart people—put the period or comma outside the quotation marks. This is never, under any circumstance, to be done... unless you are a British writer, as Mr. Lewis was. If English-speaking Europeans are your market, then you may do so. That is why it is such in the quote above. And why s is substituted for z or c in many words.

Growing old in God

It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terribly difficult to sustain the interests. Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate.  Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In art and culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty it goes on the garbage heap. There's a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

—Eugene H. Peterson, from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

The Lockmaker

“If I found a key on the road, and discovered it fit, and opened, a particular lock in my house, I’d assume that most likely the key was made by the lockmaker.

And if I find a set of teachings set out in pre-modern oriental society that has proven itself with such universal validity, that has fascinated and satisfied millions of people in every century, including the best minds in history and the simplest hearts, that it has made itself at home in virtually every culture, inspired masterpieces of beauty in every field of art, continues to grow rapidly and spread and assert itself in lands a century ago where the name of Jesus Christ was not even heard.

Such teachings that obviously fits the locks of every human soul, in so many times and so many places, are they likely to be the work of a deceiver or a fool? In fact, it is more likely that they were designed, by the heartmaker.”

—G. K. Chesterton

November 19, 1972

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. ---  

Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. — Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel



Thank you, dearest Cheryl, for those three words spoken 37 years ago. I love you, too. --Wayne 

What is the purpose of this misery?

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" says Holmes solemnly. "What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what purpose? That is humanity's great problem to which reason so far has no answer." Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.

What refuge then when a man feels himself powerless in the grip of some unseen and inevitable power, and knows not whether it be chance, or necessity, or a devouring fiend?  There is but one escape, one chink  through which we may see light, one rock on which our feet may find standing-place, even in the abyss.  And that is the belief, intuitive, inspired, due neither to reasoning nor to study, that God is there also; the belief that these seemingly fantastic and incoherent miseries have in His mind a spiritual coherence and purpose, though we see it not.

—Charles Kingsley, in Two Years Ago Volume I

Better than that

Have you ever seen someone behaving badly? A man cheating on his wife. A worker stealing from her boss. A parent publicly embarrassing a child. A doctor who drinks a bit too much. And the thought comes almost to your lips: "I am better than that."

You have just lied to yourself. For in the final analysis, there is always some part of every man and woman just as callous, craven, brutish and weak as the most egregious examples of humanity. We may be better about that, but we are not better than that.

--W.S.

Hide and Seek

Over time, I have learned two things about my religious quest: First of all, that it is God who is seeking me, and who has myriad ways of finding me. Second, that my most substantial changes, in terms of religious conversion come through other people. Even when I become convinced that God is absent from my life, others have a way of suddenly revealing God's presence.

    —Kathleen Norris, in Amazing Grace, a Vocabulary of Faith

My Story

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually."

—Frederick Buechner, in Telling Secrets

All OK

Thumbs up from my granddaughter, Adeline Grace.

Letting us know she's on schedule for a mid-March debut.

Witness

A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something. A witness, in the sense that I am using the word, is a man whose life and faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences.

—Whittaker Chambers, Witness

A new perspective

"Pointing out that stuff sucks is not edgy or dangerous anymore. Everyone knows what sucks. What's better is to find the stuff that's amazing and hold it up."

— Comedian Patton Oswalt, quoted in Paste Magazine, September 2009

Two billion beats

Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two-hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

So much is held in a heart and a lifetime. So much held in the heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think they will come one person who will save us and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by a force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in a distant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you," a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, and the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of her father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children. — Brian Doyle, from the essay Joyas Valadorus, in The Best American Essays 2005 (The Best American Series)

Man as a creature of purpose

The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we've seen so many manifestations in our time - in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistably, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory--farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well--being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. — Malcolm Muggeridge, in an address at Hillsdale College in 1979.

Half in and half out

You know, it's a funny thing, but when you're old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won't go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God's creation, you are a participant in God's purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy. — Malcolm Muggeridge, in an address at Hillsdale College in 1979.

Reaching out from solitude

Writers live paradoxical lives, spending much time alone in an attempt to connect to others. — Philip Yancey

Evidence of Life

Poetry is just the evidence of life. 

If your life is burning well,  

poetry is just the ash.  

- Leonard Cohen