love

Leap
by Brian Doyle

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Tiffany Keeling saw fireballs falling that she later realized were people. Jennifer Griffin saw people falling and wept as she told the story. Niko Winstral saw people free-falling backwards with their hands out, like they were parachuting. Joe Duncan on his roof on Duane Street looked up and saw people jumping. Henry Weintraub saw people “leaping as they flew out.” John Carson saw six people fall, “falling over themselves, falling, they were somersaulting.” Steve Miller saw people jumping from a thousand feet in the air. Kirk Kjeldsen saw people flailing on the way down, people lining up and jumping, “too many people falling.” Jane Tedder saw people leaping and the sight haunts her at night. Steve Tamas counted fourteen people jumping and then he stopped counting. Stuart DeHann saw one woman’s dress billowing as she fell, and he saw a shirtless man falling end over end, and he too saw the couple leaping hand in hand.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.

Via Aaryn

instruction manual for life

Why does everyone have to have the same cupboard? This seemingly simple question sparks the journey of one kid who grew up under the influence of intolerant and fearful parents.
Via Matador Travel

it matters how you finish

A week ago, I said goodbye to Steven.

Try as I might, I couldn't find joy or celebrate his death while at his homegoing. (As a man of faith, his funeral was no somber affair. Instead, it was a time of singing and celebration.) It was my first funeral, and unlike anything I expected or have ever experienced.

I heard remembrances from friends and family, and laughed and cried at the vignettes shared. One, about Steven's love of music and the first time he took his son Craig to an Earth, Wind and Fire show, had me smiling. Another, about a remark Steven made to his pastor when he was near the end and had a lucid, pain-free moment where he uttered one word -- "tremendous" -- repeatedly, left me hopeful. A final one -- about how Steven always ended his conversations this year with the words "I love you and I appreciate you" -- reminded me to always ensure that my loved ones know how I feel about them.

But one remembrance epitomized why I have such respect for Steven: it spoke of his grace and his strength in the attitude he chose to very end. Our friend Sandra read her beautiful eulogy and said the words that all of us needed to hear, but didn't have language to express.

For Stevie C. who asked me to speak at his homegoing celebration:

This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

My brother Steven would want me to share that thought with you this morning. He would want me to remind you that despite our tears and sorrow, we have good reason to celebrate today.

We can celebrate because Steven is home. His long night of suffering is over. And our long night of watching him suffer is over. The body that failed him has died. But Steven himself is more alive than we. And we will see him again. This is the great hope that sustained our brother Steven. This is the great assurance we share as people of faith.

Some will dismiss our belief in things we cannot humanly perceive as quaint, naive, even delusional. But how then will they explain the courage, the perseverance, the unfailing sweetness of spirit that Steven displayed throughout a long and grueling illness he knew would ultimately take his life? What we have witnessed over this past year, in both Steven’s and Craig’s responses to inconceivable hardship, has been nothing short of supernatural. I asked Steven once how he did it, and he said, “In the middle of the storm, in the middle of the typhoon, you just close your eyes and say, thank you.”

We have a saying in our family: It matters how you finish. And what we mean by that is, it really doesn’t matter what you accomplish or accumulate in this life, how high you rise in society or business or government, none of that matters if you throw it all away in the end. And conversely, it doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make along the way if you learn and grow beyond them. Because in the end what matters isn’t what we’ve done, but who we’ve been. What matters is the content of our character.

When I think of Steven, I will think of a man no more perfect than any of us, but a man of character and commitment, an extraordinary father and a wonderful friend. I will think of a man of faith, who died as he lived, counting every day a blessing and every blessing a reason for thanksgiving. When I think of my brother Steven, I will think of a man who finished well.

As his casket left the church, I sobbed again when I glimpsed the "get well" banner that Geraghty and Lori made for him last year when he was in the hospital receiving chemo. After leaving the sanctuary, I reached for colleagues and friends who were also grieving, and trying to get to the emotional place where they could celebrate his death as more than just the end of his suffering. But when I left the church, I just wasn't in that space yet.

Over the next week, I had two unexpected moments that got me there. The first came when I turned on the TV in our hotel room in Solvang to do a homework assignment for a Comm class. Although I'd finished the assignment, I lingered on that channel for a few minutes longer before getting dressed to go to dinner. I had to sit down when Earth, Wind and Fire opened the Nobel laureate concert. Two hours later, I was already sitting down when the second moment came with Leo's one-word summary of an exquisite meal we enjoyed at the Ballard Inn: "tremendous."

Both moments left me slack-jawed and incredulous, because I am not a person who believes in god or fate or messages from beyond. What I'm left with is a profound feeling of peace and a heart that is grateful for having shared a few moments with a man who finished well.

quotable

"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."-Article VI of the U.S. Constitution

the most wonderful time of the year

Having been in a mixed-faith relationship before, lots of these conflicts were all too familiar. Lucky for me, I'm no longer in the relationship and am free to enjoy a smorgasbord approach to chrismahanukwanzaeidfestivusice (enjoying all the tasty and fun parts and avoiding the heavy, distasteful ones).

A Holiday Medley, Off Key - New York Times
By JULIE SCELFO
Published: December 6, 2007

WHEN her sons were toddlers, Amy Manata, a Jewish woman with a Catholic husband, began conducting a silent war. In the months leading up to Hanukkah, she would ask the boys, now 4 and 6, which toys they wanted most, then bestow them at Hanukkah to ensure that it was a better holiday than Christmas.

She and her husband, Frank, who live in Skokie, Ill., are raising their sons with both Catholic and Jewish traditions. Still, with so much Christmas everywhere, “Hanukkah was sort of getting lost, and I felt like I couldn’t compete,” she said.

Ms. Manata willingly put up Christmas decorations, but she sometimes felt weird about the wreath on her front door and the tree in her living room. “Skokie was very Jewish when I was growing up,” she said. “I wasn’t in a house with Christmas lights until I was a sophomore in high school, and I remember feeling so uncomfortable about it, like it was a totally foreign place.” Years later, a tree in her own living room brought back some of those feelings.

It is a familiar problem, widely known as the December dilemma: the annual conflict faced by millions of adults in interfaith marriages over how to decorate homes, how and when to give gifts, and which rituals to celebrate.

As of 2001, more than 28 million Americans lived in mixed-religion households, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, which is widely viewed as providing some of the best data on the subject. Of those households, the largest group of interfaith marriages (distinct from interdenominational Christian ones) was Christian-Jewish, and few types of couples seem to experience the December dilemma as acutely as they do.

One reason for this is that few non-Christian religions other than Judaism have significant holidays in December. (The Muslim holiday Eid-al-Adha, the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca, begins on Dec. 20 this year, but it often falls in other months.) Another reason is that many Jews, both despite and because of their assimilation into American society, are particularly conscious of threats to Jewish culture.

According to the United Jewish Communities’ National Jewish Population Survey, about 47 percent of Jews in the United States who married in 2001 married non-Jews, up from an average of 13 percent before 1970.

“You get this kind of difficult blend of family-of-origin issues as well as religious and cultural issues all at the same time,” said Karen Erlichman, a licensed clinical social worker in San Francisco who specializes in counseling interfaith couples. “They kind of sweep it under the rug for 10 months of the year, and Thanksgiving comes and it’s like, ‘Uh-oh, here we go.’”

When Scott Gamzon, who is Jewish, and his Episcopalian partner, Rick Draughon, adopted their son, Noah, three years ago, they agreed to raise him Jewish but get a tree and spend Christmas with Mr. Draughon’s family in Texas. Despite the agreement, Mr. Gamzon said he cannot help but engage in a few guerrilla tactics.

Two weeks ago he told Mr. Draughon that “it would be really nice if the house had lights all around it this year,” then sat back and did nothing to help beyond instructing him how to arrange the lights and manage the cords.

“I pretty much stood around and gave him opinions,” Mr. Gamzon said. “I had no idea how much work it actually was.”

Mr. Draughon got his revenge days later when picking up Noah from his Jewish preschool. “I put Christmas music on, and later, when Daddy Scott was in the car, Noah was singing, ‘Up on the rooftop, reindeer pause.’ Scott was like, ‘Where did he learn that?’ I was like, ‘Hmm, I don’t know.’”

Then, on Saturday, while entertaining guests for dinner, Mr. Draughon set an iPod to play a mix of holiday songs by Diana Krall. “Scott was like, ‘Would you please turn that off,’” Mr. Draughon said. “I was like, ‘It’s not “Jingle Bells.” It’s Diana Krall.’”

But even sultry jazz versions of Christmas standards can alienate someone who does not celebrate the holiday, a concern frequently overlooked by those who grow up Christian and never experience the isolation of being part of a religious minority.

While Mr. Gamzon said he enjoyed the “forbidden fruit” aspect of decorating a tree, he said he also felt guilty about it, and vividly recalled the scolding his mother gave his younger brother more than 30 years ago when he asked for one. “My mother said, ‘If you really want a Christmas tree you can go live with the neighbors,’” he said. “We were not the Jews who had a tree.”

Jewish-Christian couples may also experience tension more acutely because “having a tree in your house can feel like just a big huge announcement that says I’ve gone over to the other side,” said Micah Sachs, the managing editor of interfaithfamily.com, a Web site that encourages interfaith couples to observe Jewish traditions. “The world is full of all these symbols: it’s full of Santa, it’s full of trees.”

That helps to explain various commercial efforts at making Hanukkah, which is not considered a primary holiday in Judaism, a festive competitor to Christmas. Among the innovations: inflatable lawn menorahs.

Early on, Danielle Kolker and her husband, Donald Viscardi, a self-described Christmas fanatic, negotiated detailed rules about holiday decorating.

“What can be seen from outside has to be completely 50-50,” Ms. Kolker said of their house in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. “If there are Christmas lights up, there have to be Hanukkah lights up too. I don’t want it to look outwardly like we’re more one than the other.”

The compromise, raising their boys Jewish but celebrating Christmas, is working well, they said. At least it was until last summer, when their 7-year-old son, Zachary, asked Ms. Kolker whether she and his father helped Santa buy presents. “He said, ‘Mom, tell me the truth.’ I said, ‘Mommy and Daddy help buy some of them.’ I didn’t say, ‘There’s no Santa Claus.’”

Mr. Viscardi, a private tutor who has twice been a Macy’s Santa, was disturbed that his wife even suggested that the mythology of Christmas could be anything less than true. “I was upset she said that without thinking about the repercussions,” he said. “Going through Macy’s program, being trained as a Santa, I know you never want to destroy that illusion, at least until they get to be a little bit older, anyway.”

For her part, Ms. Kolker cannot help but be annoyed that she has to shop for and wrap a bunch of gifts and then put Santa’s name on them. “He gets credit for everything,” she said.

Susan Needles, a clinical social worker in Manhattan who holds workshops for Christian-Jewish couples sponsored by an organization called Interfaith Community, said the only way to reach a mutually satisfying arrangement is through careful discussion and negotiation.

“Attention has to be paid to how they’re going to incorporate their dual faiths as they go forward in marriage and in their life together,” she said. “That requires work: finding the language to communicate how they feel; discovering what they feel and what they know about their own faith; and discovering what they know and feel about their partner’s faith. It’s harder than buying furniture you both like, and that can be hard.”

Outreach programs across the country have lately tried to help couples achieve this goal. But they can do little to relieve the stress caused by another major source of holiday conflict: extended families.

Frank Manata, Amy’s husband, said that his wife has been supportive of his desire to share Christmas with their sons, but that his in-laws have been less than enthusiastic. Three years ago they clashed over his practice of allowing the boys to play with their Lionel train set around the holidays, then packing it up with the ornaments.

“Her parents think I’m a terrible person for putting it away,” Mr. Manata said. “I’m like: ‘No, it’s a Christmas tradition. It’s up for a month, that’s what makes it special, that’s how we did it.’ So my father-in-law bought a huge Lionel train set and put it up in his basement, so the boys have a train to play with all year long.”

Mr. Manata, who was annoyed by the train episode, never said anything to his in-laws because, he said, they are otherwise wonderful. But now he finds himself facing another indirect assault: he chipped in with them to buy a big gift for the boys, a Nintendo Wii, but his mother-in-law wants to give it at Hanukkah and not on Christmas.

“Well, maybe I don’t want to give it to them on Hanukkah,” said Mr. Manata, whose wife explained her parents’ behavior as a reaction to feeling threatened by Christmas.

Even the anticipated disapproval of a parent can influence family dynamics. Twenty-one years ago, when they married, Ron Klain and his wife, Monica Medina, struck a deal: their daughter and two sons would be raised Jewish (for him), but they would celebrate Christmas (for her).

Despite their satisfaction with the arrangement, the couple, who live in Chevy Chase, Md., have never put up the tree while Mr. Klain’s mother is visiting from Indianapolis. Instead, they wait until after her annual December visit.

“I grew up in Indiana, with a decent-size Jewish community, but we were a distinct minority,” Mr. Klain said. “Not having a Christmas tree was very much part of our Jewish identity in a place where everyone else did.”

Ms. Manata said that after her struggles, she no longer feels there is any holiday battle to fight. Several years ago a friend who is Catholic told her, “Nothing is going to be as big as Christmas; you’re not going to be able to make it as big as Christmas,” Ms. Manata said. “As soon as she said that, it kind of clicked with me. It’s not a race. We’re not keeping score. If I compete, my kids are not learning much from me.”

Many interfaith families who have managed to create their own traditions enjoy at least a bit of domestic peace. The first year of Brad and Linda Simon’s marriage in 1978, Mr. Simon, who is Jewish, sought the perfect everything bagel: seasonings evenly distributed, a symmetrically round shape and a hole that was just right for a red holiday light to poke through. Then he shellacked it, and it has adorned the top of their tree — Ms. Simon is Catholic — every year since. (“In the late ’80s it finally fell apart, and I had to shellac another one,” he said.)

Dana Reynolds, a mother of two toddlers in Albuquerque who was raised Jewish, has struggled to accept having a tree in the house ever since she married a Catholic man nine years ago. Although she put up with it every year that her husband, Jeff, decided to have one, she never really participated. “I kind of tolerated him doing it,” she said.

But lately she has been rethinking her attitude. After Mr. Reynolds left last week on a trip to Africa, she arranged to have a nine-foot tree delivered to the house. Then she and the boys, whom the couple are raising Jewish, spent Monday decorating it, to surprise Mr. Reynolds on his return next week.

“He’s not just my husband anymore — he’s the father of my kids,” Ms. Reynolds said. “I want my kids to celebrate diversity and coexist with everyone.”

It was a gesture worthy of a Christmas — or Hanukkah — TV special. “I’m hoping that he’ll see I’m not just saying I’m comfortable and open to him, but that he really believes it,” she said.

bully for pete stark

I'm a secular humanist and agree with this op/ed piece.

God's dupes
Moderate believers give cover to religious fanatics -- and are every bit as delusional.
By Sam Harris, SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation."
March 15, 2007

PETE STARK, a California Democrat, appears to be the first congressman in U.S. history to acknowledge that he doesn't believe in God. In a country in which 83% of the population thinks that the Bible is the literal or "inspired" word of the creator of the universe, this took political courage.

Of course, one can imagine that Cicero's handlers in the 1st century BC lost some sleep when he likened the traditional accounts of the Greco-Roman gods to the "dreams of madmen" and to the "insane mythology of Egypt."

Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham — the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo.

The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things. As a result, Iron Age ideas about everything high and low — sex, cosmology, gender equality, immortal souls, the end of the world, the validity of prophecy, etc. — continue to divide our world and subvert our national discourse. Many of these ideas, by their very nature, hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources.

Of course, no religion is monolithic. Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn themselves into bombs; or the Dominionist Christians, who openly call for homosexuals and blasphemers to be put to death.

Outside this sphere of maniacs, one finds millions more who share their views but lack their zeal. Beyond them, one encounters pious multitudes who respect the beliefs of their more deranged brethren but who disagree with them on small points of doctrine — of course the world is going to end in glory and Jesus will appear in the sky like a superhero, but we can't be sure it will happen in our lifetime.

Out further still, one meets religious moderates and liberals of diverse hues — people who remain supportive of the basic scheme that has balkanized our world into Christians, Muslims and Jews, but who are less willing to profess certainty about any article of faith. Is Jesus really the son of God? Will we all meet our grannies again in heaven? Moderates and liberals are none too sure.

Those on this spectrum view the people further toward the center as too rigid, dogmatic and hostile to doubt, and they generally view those outside as corrupted by sin, weak-willed or unchurched.

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

People of all faiths — and none — regularly change their lives for the better, for good and bad reasons. And yet such transformations are regularly put forward as evidence in support of a specific religious creed. President Bush has cited his own sobriety as suggestive of the divinity of Jesus. No doubt Christians do get sober from time to time — but Hindus (polytheists) and atheists do as well. How, therefore, can any thinking person imagine that his experience of sobriety lends credence to the idea that a supreme being is watching over our world and that Jesus is his son?

There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know.

Let us hope that Stark's candor inspires others in our government to admit their doubts about God. Indeed, it is time we broke this spell en masse. Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain — from cosmology to psychology to economics — has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.

Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
Via Leo