Nativity

"Adoration of the Magi" by Rembrandt

G. K. Chesterton is almost exclusively known by his prose, not his poetry. Yet he wrote a lot of it, and much of it as sublime as his novels and religious works. I would love for him to be known to you as the author of this poem, Nativity.

The thatch on the roof was as golden,

Though dusty the straw was and old,

The wind had a peal as of trumpets,

Though blowing and barren and cold,

The mother's hair was a glory

Though loosened and torn,

For under the eaves in the gloaming

A child was born.

Have a myriad children been quickened.

Have a myriad children grown old,

Grown gross and unloved and embittered,

Grown cunning and savage and cold?

God abides In a terrible patience,

Unangered, unworn,

And again for the child that was squandered

A child is born.

What know we of aeons behind us,

Dim dynasties lost long ago,

Huge empires, like dreams unremembered,

Huge cities for ages laid low?

This at least--that with blight and with blessing

With flower and with thorn,

Love was there, and his cry was among them,

"A child is born."

Though the darkness be noisy with systems,

Dark fancies that fret and disprove,

Still the plumes stir around us, above us

The wings of the shadow of love:

Oh! princes and priests, have ye seen it

Grow pale through your scorn.

Huge dawns sleep before us, deep changes,

A child is born.

And the rafters of toil still are gilded

With the dawn of the star of the heart,

And the wise men draw near in the twilight,

Who are weary of learning and art,

And the face of the tyrant is darkened.

His spirit is torn,

For a new King is enthroned; yea, the sternest,

A child is born.

And the mother still joys for the whispered

First stir of unspeakable things,

Still feels that high moment unfurling

Red glory of Gabriel's wings.

Still the babe of an hour is a master

Whom angels adorn,

Emmanuel, prophet, anointed,

A child is born.

And thou, that art still in thy cradle,

The sun being crown for thy brow.

Make answer, our flesh, make an answer,

Say, whence art thou come--who art thou?

Art thou come back on earth for our teaching

To train or to warn--?

Hush--how may we know?--knowing only

A child is born.

I love how the tense changes after the first stanza, from past to present. And the author addresses the Child directly in the last, as if some awestruck rabbi nattering in the corner of the stable, trying desperately to figure it all out. But he is interrupted by the Mother, who reminds him simply:

Hush--how may we know?--knowing only

A child is born.

-Wayne S. 

Hiking fashion

Late this summer, my wife, Cheryl, and I spent a week near Asheville, North Carolina. The reasons were the usual—to get away for some alone time, to eat well and browse artsy shops and places, and to see some mountains. I think we both would agree that perhaps the most enjoyable part of the trip was driving twisty roads up into those mountains, marvelling at the dramatic vistas that swung into view around each corner.
As we were visiting a waterfall, we saw another sight we weren't expecting.
Upon returning to the parking lot, a late model Jeep Cherokee pulled into the lot. A 40-something couple emerged from the front seat. The back door opened, and first appeared a well-turned female leg, with a five-inch black stilleto shoe. It was attached to a maybe late teen girl who was wearing a tight black dress that was as short as it could possibly be and not be called a shirt. I am not sure where such a dress would be acceptable, but it seemed laughably inappropriate for a gravel walking path. In fact, that's what we did: laugh.
But then I was reminded of something in my life. Cheryl and I had visited Mt. Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, a few days earlier. Seeing the sign proclaiming that fact, I was taken back to a visit I and my family had made there in the 60's. It was the height of popularity for The Beatles, and I was crazy about them. So, naturally, I did my best to emulate them, as much as an adolescent could. So how did I dress for my trip to Mt. Mitchell? In a Nehru jacket, of course. Never mind that it was Summer. Never mind that my pants could have crossed a river and never gotten wet. I was cool.
When we returned, I found that original picture, from the summer of 1968. It is posted to remind me that youth is indeed a squirrelly time.

(click to enlarge)

And here, Cheryl and me, in 2012.

(click to enlarge)

Spiritual, but not religious

Why are alcoholic beverages called “spirits”? Because when you drink them strange “spirits” rise within your mind and body. That’s all that “spirits” are: intangible feelings we don’t fully understand and the emotional experiences that go along with them. Understood in this way, “spirituality” is just another way of saying “emotionality” — or learning to understand and interact with one’s strong emotions.
Thus, the danger of “spiritual but not religious” is that a practitioner engages with spirits (strong emotions and religious rituals) without having any guidance for how to interpret them.
Someone who is “spiritual but not religious” doesn’t know if the spirit they’re invoking is an “angel” (symbol of God, our higher nature) or a “demon” (symbol of death, our animal nature) because they don’t have a religious foundation to guide them upward. They’ve ignored the collective wisdom of humanity and decided to just set their own course. They’ve made themselves their own god. And they reap the consequences: unhappiness.

 —Dave Swindle at PJMedia.

What if government owed its success to business people?

In the five years I have contributed to this blog, I have written about politics less than five times. The reason for that is, as important as citizen action is, personal action trumps it all. As important as a political world-view is, a proper spiritual orientation is primary, and informs all other aspects of your work in the world.

But I want to comment on a recent statement by President Obama, because I believe it to be so wrong-headed it must be addressed. On July 15, he said the following:

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business. you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

While most of the media have sought to downplay the comment, saying he was referring to "roads and bridges" and "infrastructure," it still seems pretty clear the President meant that successful people are successful because of the largess, beneficence and help of government. But if the media are right in their interpretation, it seems they, and the President, are wrong in their facts.

What if it is actually the other way around? What if government owes its success to business? Using the President's own examples, consider the following:

• ROADS: When Henry Ford started his first assembly line in 1913, there were no wide, smooth roads waiting for cars to travel on them. Most roads in America were nothing more than rutted wagon trails, which wreaked havoc on the Model T. The flood of inexpensive cars created the demand for better roads.

• BRIDGES: There were bridges in Roman times, but bridge-building in America was driven by private enterprise, first the railroads, then the automobile. There was no Brooklyn Bridge before the train. There was no Golden Gate Bridge before the automobile. Modern bridges owe their success to the steel industry, which made strong, long spans possible, as well as the locomotives and the cars and trucks themselves.

• POWER: Thomas Edison, an inventor, came up with the process of electrical generation and distribution. That made manufacturing on a large scale practical. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil led the way in fueling America's movement, as well as the boilers that heated our buildings, and now the natural gas that powers it all. 

• INTERNET: Yes, the Internet began as a defense project (never envisioned as a profit-making enterprise, as the President claims—private business did that), but it would have been an abject failure had not Alexander Graham Bell paved the way with his vision for communication by wire, and if IBM and others had not furnished machines to harness it.

• EDUCATION: Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune in steel, built 1,795 public or academic libraries, and helped others with 1,419 grants. Harvard University, the nation's oldest institute of higher learning, and where the President attended Law School, was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard, a clergyman. John D. Rockefeller, the "infamous" oil baron of Standard Oil, founded The University of Chicago, where the President was a Senior Lecturer. Even The Punahou School in Hawaii, where the President attended before college, was founded by Christian missionaries. While the President speaks often of the value of public education, he himself is the legacy of the hard work of successful men and women who did not depend on the government.

So, would it not be more accurate to say that America—the government and the nation—owes its success to business men and women, and not the other way around? A case can be made that all of those listed above, as well as others, like Bill Gates, built the machines and made the tools that made the much-touted "infrastructure" possible.

And let us not forget some other great businessmen. George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson weren't in the colonies to make a government. There were here to farm and to practice law. But when the demands of the King became too onerous, they and others took time from their lucrative trades to win a revolution and give us some real "infrastructure"—the Constitution of the United States. 


—Wayne S.

The importance of a grandson.

In the late 18th century, two teenage brothers, Rubin and Adam Stedham, left Ireland with a very wealthy family (not their own, mind you) and landed in New Bern, North Carolina.

Rubin was my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

The family exploded from there:

We don't know how many children Rubin had, but one of them was my great-great-great grandfather, William Addison Steadham, whose family now resided in eastern Alabama. William, we know, had thirteen children, including seven sons, two of which died in the War Between the States. Jacob Newton Stedham, who was born June 9, 1852, was the first son too young to fight in that conflict. He was my great-great grandfather.

Jacob's first wife, Adeline, gave him six children before leaving him for another man. Alice Littlefield, his second wife, evidently felt the need to outdo her predecessor, delivering nine children. But it was one of Adeline's sons, second-born William Henry Steadham, who was my great-grandfather. (As you can see, William Henry added an a to the name, for reasons unknown.)

William Henry had eleven children, six girls and five boys. The fifth born, in 1901, was my grandfather, John Croley Steadham.

At this junction, my branch on the family tree narrows to a thin reed.

My father, John Wayne Steadham, was an only child, born in 1933. Perhaps one reason for that was his diagnosis of childhood diabetes at age five. Both his mother, Hazel, and his father had siblings who either suffered or had died of that same disease, and perhaps felt that their devotion should go exclusively to their son.

The branch strengthened again in the next generation. My father and mother, Joyce, brought into the world three sons: me, in 1954, Charles in 1958, and Jeff, in 1961.

Then the branch thinned again. While I have two sons and two daughters, my brothers have none. Charles married late in life (and even later again after the unexpected death of his first wife), and is blessed with wonderful daughters by marriage, but no one with the Steadham name. My youngest brother, Jeff, suffered a brain injury at age sixteen, and has never married.

While my daughters, Sarah and Hannah, may someday help to fill our house with children's laughter, the task of carrying on the family name falls to my sons. Joe, the eldest, is not married, though we assume  it is probably in his plans. James, our second-born, married in 2004, and in 2010 blessed us with our first grand-child, Adeline Grace, a bright and delightfully precocious girl, who most assuredly is NOT named for her traitorous great-great-great-great grandmother!

But the name will survive. On June 21, 2012 (my wife Cheryl's birthday), James and Bernnie gave the Steadham family some staying power, in the little form of Callum James Steadham. Callum, originally from Latin, is a Gaelic (Irish) name which means "dove." It is a nod to his Irish great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather.

Welcome, Callum James Steadham!

My son James, his wife Bernnie, granddaughter Adeline and grandson Callum. (Click to enlarge)

--Wayne S.

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. 

Bumper Sticker Theology

This saying was sent to me by my old friend, Don Newby. It's an interesting twist on a very familiar line from a song. 
I replied I wish I had it on a bumper sticker. 
Well, I do have Photoshop.

(click to enlarge)

All the little things He does.

"...the writing of many books is endless..." 

Ecclesiates 12:12

Biographies are one of my favorite forms of literature. I always have a bio on my bedside table or Kindle (currently, I am reading The Narnian, about C. S. Lewis). I have several volumes on Teddy Roosevelt, one of my favorite subjects, and probably fifty biographies overall.

The number of biographies on a specific individual are not always commensurate with his or her popularity, influence or notoriety. In many cases this is true (think Churchill, Hitler, or Lincoln). But in others, there is a glaring lack of production.

Perhaps the most obvious example is that of a man who really revolutionized the entire world, yet the entire eyewitness accounts of his exploits are contained in four small novella-sized narratives. They are woefully incomplete in proportion to his importance. These books record many of his most important acts, dialogues and speeches. Yet surely there were so many other amazing things said and done that are not preserved for our scrutiny and enjoyment.

And the author of one of the books makes an audacious statement in his closing:

Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (John 21:25, ESV)

What does that mean?

If they were said and done, why weren't they written down? And doesn't the claim itself seem a bit overblown?

Suppose you follow a very busy person—lets use the U.S. president—for a single term. You record every speech and meeting. You record his Cabinet meetings and private conversations. What books he reads. You transcribe his conversations on the golf course. Words shared between with his wife and children. How long he sleeps. Whether he dreams. How many steps he takes in a day. Even how many times he breathes.

If you included every bit of minutae from his life, would the results realistically be larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica? Yet the Enclycopedia Brittanica is but a drop in the ocean of books (The Library of Congress contains over 22 million books).

The whole idea seems preposterous.

The comment seems a bald-faced lie.

Unless...


Near the end of another of these mini-biographies, the author quotes Jesus as saying this:

And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20).

The rabbi Paul, author of many letters to the early church, puts it another way:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.(Galatians 2:20)

Major W. Ian Thomas, in his book The Indwelling Life of Christ, explains this mystery:

Salvation is so much more than a change of destination from hell to heaven! The true spiritual content of our gospel is not just heaven one day, but Christ here and now. In the economy of God, conversion is only an essential preliminary to discipleship, which is a lifetime of allowing Christ to live in you to do His work through you.

So, according to these witnesses, Jesus Christ is still active, performing acts of love, mercy and service through all those who follow Him. And He has throughout the years since His resurrection, and will until He wraps the whole story up someday in the future. And every one of those followers has countless stories of all the little things He does.

How many books do you think they will fill?

Safe for the whole family?

There is a local Christian radio station that my wife listens to exclusively (or would that be religiously?). The only time I listen is when I am in the car with her. It's not that I'm against Christian music. I don't even listen to FM radio at all. But Christian music doesn't move me like it moves my wife. When it does, it is not the big worship anthems, or the vocal gyrations of the "pop" songs, but rather the quiet, reflective songs that put words to my deepest hopes—and doubts.

The tagline for this local station is "Safe for the whole family." I always wonder, what exactly does that mean? I think they mean that their content and on-air personalities can be trusted not to be objectionable or provocative. And they pretty much deliver on that trust (although I find some of the inane chit-chat of the DJs objectionable just from a communicator's point of view).

I fear, though, that for many, "safe for the whole family" can be a very misleading and even dangerous notion. It infers that there is a safe, protected place where, if we are careful, we can insulate ourselves from harmful influences, harmful thoughts, and harmful acts. In other words, from the world at large.

If there is such a place, I haven't found it, and I've been around almost six decades.

It cannot be found by hiding in the church. Christians by the hundreds are being killed for their faith. Even Christians in countries where there is freedom of religion find themselves mocked, reviled and marginalized. To hide in our "Christian ghetto" with others just like us is to avoid the issues. It is also to avoid being salt and light to a sick and dying world.

Safety cannot be found by hiding behind God. Please notice, I did not say hiding in God. The Psalms alone won't let me get away with that. I simply mean that it is wrong to hide from the world under the robes of God, as if we were chosen because we were holier than those outside. Nope. We were chosen to become holier, but we started out in the same place, and truth be told, we are still probably more like those without our club than we are like God.

We cannot even be safe in Christ. Did He not say that if you want to follow Him, you must "take up your cross"? Didn't the apostle Paul (who never had Christian radio) pray that he would "share in His [Christ's] sufferings" because he (Paul) knew that simply knowing is not the same as sharing? Jesus said: "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." (Matthew 10:28) He was talking about himself. Does he sound safe? I am reminded of Mr. Beaver's comment in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as he describes the great lion Aslan, a type of Christ: 

“Safe?" said Mr. Beaver."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.” 

The dangers, as I see it, of the well-meant "safe for the whole family" mindset are manifold. Perhaps most of all, it insulates us from the fallen world. It gives us a false notion of purity, a heightened sense of other's sin, and sometimes a dulled sense of our own. It also suggests that true Christianity is best lived right in the middle of the road, away from the dangerous shoulders. But at the edges is where life is truly lived. That's where ministry takes place. That's where love, mercy and grace are most needed. In John 4:1-30, Jesus met the Samaritan woman at a well, not in the temple. She wouldn't be allowed in the temple. The side of the road is where Paul met Christ (Acts 9:1-9). It is where we will find the man beaten by thieves (Luke 10:25-37). Let us not be like the priest and the Levite, who hurried by (perhaps singing a catchy song?).

A safe place. It's a nice place to visit sometimes, but I wouldn't want to live there.

In fact, I can't. And shouldn't.


—Wayne S.

Why I Chose God

For me, the essence of "faith" is choice, and the key quality is "nevertheless." Faith is the very tension between yes and no, between reliance and rejection, and is the occasion for making an utterly personal decision all by yourself, all for yourself.
It works like this: 
On the one hand, I really, honestly, do see, hear, and experience everything that atheists adduce as evidence that God is an illusion. What is more, as a former executive in a brain-monitoring company I understand perhaps better than most of them the scientific basis for their argument that there is no "there" there beyond some intracranial synapses creating an illusion some call "God".
On the other hand, I also see, hear, and experience in my everyday life what I just as really, honestly, understand as God.
This brings me to a free choice: I can choose to live my life according to either one depiction or the other: without God or with God. The act of "faith" is choosing one over the other "nevertheless." The nevertheless means I don't deny, dispute, or dishonor the evidence and the argument to the contrary; it simply means that I choose not to adopt it as the definitive guide for my own thinking and feeling and actions during what poet Mary Oliver calls my "one wild and precious life." Perhaps the same process holds true for those atheists who acknowledge that there really are two sides to this issue: they, too, see some evidence on both sides, weigh it, and choose the alternative instead (although I can imagine that calling this decision an act of "faith" might not be very palatable to some).

Eliot Daley, quoted in the Huffington Post.

"The winter is also His."

 "It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His--the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness--even 'the winter of our discontent.'"
I stole a glance at Adela. Her large eyes were fixed on the preacher.
"Winter," he went on, "does not belong to death, although the outside of it looks like death. Beneath the snow, the grass is growing. Below the frost, the roots are warm and alive. Winter is only a spring too weak and feeble for us to see that it is living. The cold does for all things what the gardener has sometimes to do for valuable trees: he must half kill them before they will bear any fruit. Winter is in truth the small beginnings of the spring."

—George Macdonald, from The Complete Works of George MacDonald. 

Where have all the movies gone?

   "We are at a point in our culture when we actually have to pull for grown-up movies, when we must try to encourage them and laud them when they come by. David Lean wouldn't be allowed to make movies today, John Ford would be forced to turn John Wayne into a 30-something failure-to-launch hipster whose big moment is missing the toilet in the vomit scene in Hangover Ten. Our movie culture has descended into immaturity, deep and inhuman violence, a pervasive and flattened sexuality. It is an embarrassment.
   "In Iraq this year I asked an Iraqi military officer doing joint training at an American base what was the big thing he'd come to believe about Americans in the years they'd been there. He thought. 'You are a better people than your movies say.' He had judged us by our exports. He had seen the low slag heap of our culture and assumed it was a true expression of who we are.
"And so he'd assumed we were disgusting."

—Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal.

The Annual Question

Every year at this time, I find myself asking the same vexing question:

Why would the King of all leave the perfection and comfort of Heaven to come to a place that is foul, smelly, loud, chaotic and, frankly, somewhat hostile?
Oh, no. I'm not talking about the stable in Bethlehem.

I'm talking about my heart.

—Wayne S.

A Christmas Thought

Here's a billboard idea I had once. I think it fits well with the season.

(Click to enlarge.)

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens, my favorite atheist, has died of the esophageal cancer he announced in June of last year. As promised, he appears to have avoided any last minute grasps at faith.
I have written frequently about Mr. Hitchens since his illness became public. I thank God (irony, for sure) for the ways he provoked me, and encouraged me to rethink my faith. I thank God for all militant atheists, who show us the best of what a man thinks he is without God. If you listen to them, you cannot turn and face your faith with any half-heartedness.
I leave you with the words of my favorite atheist blogger, Allahpundit:

"Hitchens being Hitchens, I wonder which he anticipated more eagerly — the end of the pain or finally knowing if he was right about you know what. I suspect he was right. I hope we’re both wrong."

Here is an excellent memorial post at Vanity Fair, where Hitchens was a frequent contributor.

--Wayne S.
Photograph by Brooks Kraft/Corbis.

"I'd like to call you all by name."

“I’d like to call you all by name,

but the list has been removed 

and there is nowhere else to look.”

—Anna Akhmatova, Requiem

I have spent the bulk of my reading in the last few months immersed in the history and literature of the Second World War, and its corollaries, Hitler's Final Solution and Stalin's Great Terror. Recently I posted an sobering summary of the total human cost of the war. But it only tells part (not even half) of the story. Here are several  lengthy excerpts from a powerful book entitled Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which tells us that ideology can be more deadly than a gun:

The bloodlands were where most of Europe’s Jews lived, where Hitler and Stalin’s imperial plans overlapped, where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought, and where the Soviet NKVD and the German SS concentrated their forces. Most killing sites were in the bloodlands: in the political geography of the 1930s and early 1940s, this meant Poland, the Baltic States, Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and the western fringe of Soviet Russia. Stalin’s crimes are often associated with Russia, and Hitler’s with Germany. But the deadliest part of the Soviet Union was its non-Russian periphery, and Nazis generally killed beyond Germany. The horror of the twentieth century is thought to be located in the camps. But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died. These misunderstandings regarding the sites and methods of mass killing prevent us from perceiving the horror of the twentieth century.

...

To join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity. To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible. With all of its complexity, history is what we all have, and can all share. So even when we have the numbers right, we have to take care. The right number is not enough.

photo by Wayne Steadham

Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual. The one very large number that withstands scrutiny is that of the Holocaust, with its 5.7 million Jewish dead, 5.4 million of whom were killed by the Germans. But this number, like all of the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life: Dobcia Kagan, the girl in the synagogue at Kovel, and everyone with her there, and all the individual human beings who were killed as Jews in Kovel, in Ukraine, in the East, in Europe.

Cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero. So within the Holocaust, it is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed, and Ruth Dorfmann, who was able to cry with the man who cut her hair before she entered the gas chamber. Or it might be easier to imagine the one person at the end of the 33,761 Jews shot at Babi Yar: Dina Pronicheva’s mother, let us say, although in fact every single Jew killed there could be that one, must be that one, is that one.

Within the history of mass killing in the bloodlands, recollection must include the one million (times one) Leningraders starved during the siege, 3.1 million (times one) distinct Soviet prisoners of war killed by the Germans in 1941-1944, or the 3.3 million (times one) distinct Ukrainian peasants starved by the Soviet regime in 1932-1933. These numbers will never be known with precision, but they hold individuals, too: peasant families making fearful choices, prisoners keeping each other warm in dugouts, children such as Tania Savicheva watching their families perish in Leningrad.

Each of the 681,692 people shot in Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937-1938 had a different life story: the two at the end might be Maria Juriewicz and Stanisław Wyganowski, the wife and husband reunited “under the ground.” Each of the 21,892 Polish prisoners of war shot by the NKVD in 1940 was in the midst of life. The two at the end might be Dobiesław Jakubowicz, the father who dreamed about his daughter, and Adam Solski, the husband who wrote of his wedding ring on the day that the bullet entered his brain.

The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity. 

I [...] generally exclude from the count the people who died of exertion or disease or malnutrition in concentration camps or during deportations, evacuations, or flight from armies. I also exclude the people who died as forced laborers. I am not counting people who died of hunger as a result of wartime shortfalls, or civilians who died in bombings or as a result of other acts of war. I am not counting soldiers who died on the fields of battle of the Second World War. In the course of the book I do discuss camps and deportations and battles, and provide figures of those killed. These are not, however, included in the final figure of fourteen million. I also exclude acts of violence carried out by third parties that were clearly a result of German or Soviet occupation, but not German or Soviet policy. Sometimes these brought very significant numbers of deaths, as with the Romanian murder of Jews (some three hundred thousand) or the Ukrainian nationalist ethnic cleansing of Poles (at least fifty thousand)

Fourteen million, after all, is a very large number. It exceeds by more than ten million the number of people who died in all of the Soviet and German concentration camps (as opposed to the death facilities) taken together over the entire history of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. If current standard estimates of military losses are correct, it exceeds by more than two million the number of German and Soviet soldiers, taken together, killed on the battlefield in the Second World War (counting starved and executed prisoners of war as victims of a policy of mass murder rather than as military casualties). It exceeds by more than thirteen million the number of American and British casualties, taken together, of the Second World War. It also exceeds by more than thirteen million all of the American battlefield losses in all of the foreign wars that the United States has ever fought.

The count of fourteen million mortal victims of deliberate killing policies in the bloodlands is the sum of the following approximate figures, defended in the text and notes: 3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved by their own government in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933; three hundred thousand Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot by their own government in the western USSR among the roughly seven hundred thousand victims of the Great Terror of 1937-1938; two hundred thousand Polish citizens (mostly Poles) shot by German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland in 1939-1941; 4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941-1944; 5.4 million Jews (most of them Polish or Soviet citizens) gassed or shot by the Germans in 1941-1944; and seven hundred thousand civilians (mostly Belarusians and Poles) shot by the Germans in “reprisals” chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941-1944.

In general, these numbers are sums of counts made by the Germans or the Soviets themselves, complemented by other sources, rather than statistical estimates of losses based upon censuses. Accordingly, my counts are often lower (even if stupefyingly high) than others in the literature. The major case where I do rely upon estimates is the famine in Soviet Ukraine, where data are simply insufficient for a count, and where I present a total figure on the basis of a number of demographic calculations and contemporary estimates. Again, my reckoning is on the conservative side.

The cry regarding the Holocaust is, "Never Again!" May the same plea be made for all mass killings. 

God and Suffering

A Christian understanding of God’s relationship to suffering is not that God is simply a compassionate spectator looking down on the strange and bitter world that God holds in being. As a Christian, I believe that God is participating in the suffering of the world, that God is truly a fellow sufferer. The Christian God is the crucified God. 
--Sir John Polkinghorne, quoted in Socrates in the City: Conversations on "Life, God and Other Small Topics." Edited by Eric Metaxas.

The Second World War

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In his excellent book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, author Andrew Roberts offers this poignant summary:


The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than fifteen people killed every minute, for six long years. At the Commonwealth Beach Head Cemetery just north of Anzio in Italy lie some of the men who fell in that campaign, in row after row of perfectly tended graves. The bereaved families were permitted to add personal messages to tombstones, below the bald register of name, rank, number, age, unit, and date of death. Thus the grave of Corporal J. J. Griffin of the Sherwood Foresters, who died aged twenty-seven on 21 March 1944, reads: ‘May the sunshine you missed on life’s highway be found in God’s haven of rest’. Gunner A. W. J. Johnson of the Royal Artillery, who died the following day, has: ‘In loving memory of our dear son. Forever in our thoughts, Mother, Joyce and Dennis’. That of twenty-two-year-old Lance-Corporal R. Gore of the Loyal Regiment, who died on 24 February 1944, reads: ‘Gone but not forgotten by Dad and Mam, brother Herbert and sister Annie’. The gravestone of Private J. R. G. Gains of the Buffs, killed on 31 May 1944 aged thirty, says: ‘Beautiful memories, a darling husband and daddy worthy of Everlasting Love, His wife and Baby Rita’. Even two-thirds of a century later, it is still impossible not to feel fury against Hitler and the Nazis for forcing baby Rita Gains to grow up without her father, Annie and Herbert Gore without their brother, and for taking her nineteen-year-old boy away from Mrs Johnson. If one then multiplies each of those tragedies by 50,000,000, one can begin to try to grasp the sheer extent of the personal side of the composite world-historical global cataclysm that was the Second World War.

The Gospel as short short story

   

As a writer, I appreciate economical writing. Not exclusively—two of my favorite writers are Stephen King and Pat Conroy, famous for wordy, expansive tomes. Yet, like great design, the best writing usually occurs when nothing remains that can be excised. 

   One of the most interesting books I have read in the last decade was a collection of "55 fiction"—short stories consisting of exactly fifty-five words. It is a challenge, but offers great reward; you get to the end between sips of coffee!

   Ernest Hemingway, famous for his economy, is rumored to have penned this short short story:

             For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

   You can spend hours reading that, and reading into that.

   There are 930,243 words in the King James Version of the Bible. It spans from the beginning of the earth to the creation of a new heaven. No one could ever call it economical word-wise. Yet we are told that every word is God-breathed and meant to be heard and read. In other words, it IS as lean and concise as God wants it to be.

   So I am not suggesting a replacement for any word in asking the following: How would you condense the story of the Bible (which I feel is ultimately the story of Jesus) into just six words?

  My humble suggestion:

We couldn't. Jesus did. Follow Him.

--Wayne S.

Oops

I rashly deleted a folder in Picasa which evidently stripped all of the photos from my Blog. Please enjoy the text as I try to rebuild three years worth of photos.