Making ourselves the measure of all things

We keep our house at 68 degrees in the winter. Our son keeps his at 67, so I always feel a little chilly when I am there. Our daughter keeps her house at 69, so of course her house feels uncomfortably warm to me. Sixty-eight degrees is the perfect compromise between comfort and energy efficiency. Why can’t everyone see this as clearly as I do?

For many years I have poured 1% milk on my cereal in the morning, so now skim milk tastes like white water while 2% milk feels like something that needs to be chewed. Why doesn’t everyone buy 1% milk? I always drive at precisely the right speed, grumbling at all the fools around me who are driving either too fast or too slow. People who spend more money than I do are self-indulgent spendthrifts, and those who spend less than I do are stingy tightwads. On it goes. We develop our own particular patterns and habits and come to regard them as normal and right, not just for ourselves but for the world in general. We make ourselves the measure of all things.

Mostly this is a harmless conceit that makes for stimulating debate with friends who also believe their particular patterns and habits are normal and right (they are wrong about this, of course). To my knowledge a war has never been caused by disagreement over the ideal fat content of milk.

But this harmless conceit becomes pathological and dangerous when extended to the arenas of religion, race, sexual orientation, and politics. When we label someone else’s religion as “false,” their race as “inferior” or their sexual orientation as “sinful” we have denigrated their personhood and created fertile ground for hatred, violence and oppression. It is dangerously easy to fall into these patterns, sometimes in ways so subtle that we are barely aware that we are doing so.

Politics used to be an arena where we could disagree with one another with mutual respect and affection, but the growing polarization of our society has hardened the edges in disturbing ways. Views have become more extreme, and we are far more prone to demonize those with whom we disagree. For examples we need look no further than the extreme right’s view of Barack Obama or (let’s be honest) my own view of Sarah Palin. Yes, I am guilty of the attitudes I condemn. Civility, which includes the ability to “agree to disagree,” is essential to a healthy society, and we have allowed civility to erode so badly that it will be very difficult to recover.

It is human tendency to make ourselves the measure of all things and to have too high a regard for our own opinions, whether we are discussing milk or politics. We need the wisdom to know when our convictions represent a harmless conceit and when they represent a destructive prejudice.

The New Holiday Card Etiquette

We are receiving a growing number of Thanksgiving cards instead of Christmas cards from businesses and community organizations. I am guessing this trend is centered in a desire to avoid offending people of various faiths (or no faith at all) who do not celebrate Christmas, and perhaps also to avoid offending certain devout Christians who object to the manner in which a religious holiday has morphed into a generic season of good cheer and power shopping.

Since it is presumably good for business to send clients an occasional greeting of some sort, Thanksgiving is ideally situated to provide this opportunity. After all, the message most organizations want to convey to clients is “thank you” for your business or your support. I suspect we will see more of this in the coming years, and that individuals may ultimately embrace the practice along with businesses. In the years where we send actual Christmas cards instead of letters, we always purchase one box of “generic” cards for our non-Christian friends and still sometimes agonize over the etiquette of sending one at all.

In recent years some Christian groups have raised quite a bit of fuss over the way Christmas has been broadened into a holiday that includes everyone, Christian or not. They get their pants in a knot when someone says “happy holidays!” rather than “merry Christmas,” and go to the mat to keep the manger display on the town hall lawn. Their rallying cry is “put Christ back into Christmas!” I am not entirely unsympathetic to their cause; at least insofar as the efforts speak of resisting the crass commercialization of a sacred celebration. Yet I do not believe that specifically Christian symbols belong in public settings, particularly governmental ones. It is an ongoing tension—the month of December is a sloppy mess in which the sacred and secular are all tangled up and the very best and very worst within us are both more evident than at any other time of year. Baby Jesus claims Christmas Eve and Santa owns Christmas morning (along with most of the four weeks preceding it). I choose to view the entire sloppy mess as more positive than negative, but my inner Grinch still surfaces from time to time (I am not entirely certain the Grinch is mentioned in Luke or Matthew; I need to check).

Somehow Thanksgiving has managed to stay above the fray. Sure, there are parades in the morning and football games the rest of the day, and people eat more than they think they should (which is what a feast is supposed to be about). But the heart of the day manages to remain focused on the core virtue of gratitude, arguably the greatest virtue of all. Truly thankful people will not be consumed by greed or envy. Grateful people do not solve legitimate differences through war or violence. Thankful people willingly share their bounty with those who have less. It is a wonderful day to gather with friends and family to give thanks. Any maybe the ideal day on which to send our friends a card that says “I am grateful for you!”

Waiting for the Grandchild

We just learned that our daughter is on her way to the hospital, confident that her contractions are the Real Thing and the baby is on his way. If so, our weekend plans are out the window and we will be heading for Minneapolis to meet our first grandchild. We’re not excited or anything…

In the course of more than thirty years of parish ministry I baptized at least 500 babies, likely many more. In my role as pastor and now Goodwill chaplain, I have been shown an uncountable number of pictures of newborn children and grandchildren, always making appreciative remarks about how amazingly beautiful the baby was.
Confession time—in truth, all newborn babies look pretty much alike to me. They are cute, of course; it is a baby’s job to be cute. Some are darker or lighter in complexion; some have full heads of hair while some are nearly completely bald. I can sometimes discern, or at least convince myself that I discern, specific features that relate to one of the parents (“He has his father’s nose!”). But most of the time a newborn baby resembles, well, a newborn baby.

What’s more, newborn babies do not do much that is particularly interesting. They sleep, they cry, they eat, they cry some more, they squirm, they poop. That is pretty much a baby’s entire act. They do not play Parcheesi, disagree with umpires’ calls or discuss literature. They become more interesting about the time they learn to play peek-a-boo, but until then they simply look adorable (except when they are crying) so that we can admire them.

None of these things will be true of my grandson, of course. He will be beautiful, and he will look like no other baby ever born. I am guessing he will look very much like me. He will be very clever and utterly fascinating from the moment of birth. I will swear up and down that he smiled at me and no, it was not just gas. I will carry pictures of him and insist that you look at them and pretend to see how unique and wonderful he is. After a lifetime of looking at pictures of other peoples newborn grandchildren, it is payback time!

Grandparents, in the end, are the ones who have it right. Each person is beautiful, each person is precious, each person is unique, each person is of infinite worth and each person is to be loved not because of what they can do or how they look, but simply because they exist. This is a core conviction of religious faith, one we too easily forgot in a divided and violent world. Babies, in their helplessness, remind us of this essential truth. So when I show you pictures of my grandchild, I will be acting as spiritual teacher. Honest.

The Magical Leaf-Raking Fairy

We spent this past weekend at the cabin, cleaning up the leaves. The discouraging weather forecast proved to be accurate—the temperature Saturday was in the thirties, accompanied by steady, light rain mixed with a bit of snow. But it was the only weekend we could clear for the task, and we have dealt with similar conditions in the past. The new wrinkle this year was my hernia repair less than three weeks ago. I am restricted to lifting no more than ten pounds, and am supposed to limit twisting and turning my torso. Which pretty much precluded raking wet leaves, and absolutely meant I would not be heaping them onto a tarp and dragging them across the road and into the woods. My strategy was to have Susan spread the leaves out as best she could while I mulched them with the lawn tractor. It was slow work—the tractor was straining at its very limit mulching several inches of wet leaves—but after more than ten years together my lawn tractor and I are One. I was glad that I had given it a tune-up and oil change; grateful than Mike and Brad had installed new blades for me. Over the course of nearly four hours and several gallons of gas, I managed to reduce wet leaves to a thin layer of disgusting gook. Mission accomplished.

Susan was not at all certain that wrestling with the lawn tractor was a particularly wise thing to do while recovering from surgery, and she had a point – that effort, along with the other small tasks I could not quite manage to resist, left me fairly sore, as I had expected. I prefer a bit of soreness to facing an acre of soggy leaves next May. But I was pretty uncomfortable driving home on Sunday morning, and found myself thinking about the yard full of leaves I would find in the yard when I reached home. Somewhere around the Wisconsin border we had one of those marital debates that I knew I was not going to win. Susan had school work that she simply had to get done, so (he argued, logically) there was no reason in the world why I could not do it. It was a perfect day for raking—dry with a bit of breeze, so the leaves would be light and easy to rake. I would be very mindful of how I used my body, raking only in a straight line. Susan was having none of it.

When we pulled into the driveway the entire front yard was already neatly raked! Magical Fairies had come and done the job for me! I was profoundly grateful, but also eager to thank whoever had done me this kindness. There was no note in the door, no message on the answering machine, no email or Facebook posting. My mysterious benefactor was choosing to remain anonymous.

I confess that I am not at all comfortable with circumstances where I cannot repay a debt, or even express my thanks. So I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and considered various suspects. I finally settled on a certain neighbor as the most likely candidate. When I bumped into his daughter walking her dog later in the afternoon, I asked her what she might know about Magical Leaf-Raking Fairies. She likely now regards me as the slightly deranged neighbor.

Today I got home from work and found Dan, another neighbor, mulching and mowing my side yard. In this case I was able to express my thanks, and asked him if he had observed a Magical Fairy raking my yard. He had, but did not recognize him. He (the Fairy) was bundled up and using some sort of cart; Dan was pretty sure he was not my prime suspect.

If my mysterious benefactor reads this, I would be grateful if you would come out of the closet and confess that you are a Fairy. But if you choose not to, know that I am grateful!

Of Razors and Vibrators

My razor is made by Gillette and is called a “sensor.” It is the last razor made whose handle is small enough to fit into the cunning little rack that also holds my shaving brush (yes, I am a traditionalist). I love my cunning little rack and would hate to abandon it. All current razors (a/k/a “shaving systems) sold by the major brands have handles fat enough to be employed by a gorilla. Some feature more blades than I can count—four, five, six of them. Advertisers no longer even attempt to provide a rationale as to why anyone needs to shave with five blades. Others have batteries in the handle to make them vibrate as you shave. Again, it is unclear why one would wish to have one’s razor vibrate, anymore than it is clear why one would wish to hold a vibrating toothbrush. Many things today vibrate to no apparent purpose—we have come a long way from the era when the only things that vibrated were vibrators, which clearly are required to vibrate if they are to serve their appointed purpose.

And now a riddle. How is a shaver like a computer printer? Answer: both are sold cheaply because the real products they want to sell are, respectively, blades and ink cartridges. A razor blade is good for about a week, and they are beastly expensive for what they are. So for years I have been purchasing off-brand blades designed to fit my sensor. A bit of research revealed that virtually all of these replacement blades are manufactured by Personna to be sold as “house brands” by various chains. I have purchased most of mine at Fleet Farm, where they are offered as “Good Sense” blades at about half the price charged by Gillette. But they are becoming harder and harder to find as the sensor fades into razor history books. Planned obsolescence is alive and well in the world of shaving—corporate America wants me to shave holding a fat, vibrating handle that will not fit into my cunning little rack.

I offer this rant because this week I was forced to purchase a pack of Gillette blades for the first time in years because I could not find the appropriate Personna blade in two stores that were once reliable sources. The sensor itself disappeared from the shelves many years ago. Clearly the relentless march of shaving progress is not on my side.

I note that there is a modest revival of the classic, straight-edged razor and accompanying strop. Interestingly, it appears to be led by women who are taking a straight razor to their legs. I wish I had learned that skill when I was younger. It is not a skill one should attempt to learn without instruction from a master, and likely not one to take on after the age of sixty. So I will haunt the stores for replacement blades sold as Tri-Flexx, Good Sense or whatever else they may be branded. I may be a dinosaur, but I do not wish to be a gorilla, a gorilla with a vibrating face.

Post-Surgery Thoughts

It is less than three full days since my surgery and I am feeling much better than I had expected to. Yes, there is still a fair amount of pain, and I have bruising and swelling in places that cannot be discussed on a family-friendly blog, but these are small things. My doc’s advice proved to be sound – forgo the Vicodin if possible, and manage pain with ibuprofen, ice-packs and whiskey with a milk of magnesia chaser. Worked like a charm; just wish I had thought to buy better scotch before the procedure.
I received the kind of health care reserved for the privileged in our society. I did not have to jump through hoops to receive permission for the procedure (somewhat oddly, even when a hernia repair is clearly needed it remains classified as “elective” surgery). The Groth Center for Outpatient Surgery at the Appleton Medical Center makes undergoing surgery no less pleasant than it needs to be. Everything happened on schedule; everyone was kind, friendly and courteous. Even the post-op muffin was of superior quality!
One interesting moment: before the procedure I had been tended to by several nice RNs, all of whom appeared to be named “Laura” or “Laurie.” There was “shaving your private parts Laurie” with her remarkable friend, “Mr. Sticky Hand.” There was “hook up the I.V. Laura.” So when another young woman stopped by I assumed she was yet one more RN, but it turned out to be my anesthesiologist. She explained that she would be giving me a “cocktail” that fell short of a full general anesthesia, and named its components. When one compound was named she grimaced and said “I assure you than when used by a skilled anesthesiologist it is both safe and effective.” A small light went on for me and I asked “will it instill in me an intense desire to own a chimpanzee and a giraffe?” She said it would not. Who knew that Michael Jackson’s death had made life more difficult for anesthesiologists?
As noted earlier, I know myself to be very privileged. That makes me both grateful and angry. Quality medical care should not be reserved solely for the fortunate. If I were already on Medicare I suspect that I would have needed to wade through some paperwork to demonstrate that this surgery was necessary. Fair enough. If our entire society were on a single-payer system, it is possible that my surgery would have been delayed for several months, and that it would not have been performed by the region’s most experienced surgeon who happens to be an old friend. And that excellent muffin might have been a stale graham cracker. I could live with all that if it would mean that quality, affordable health care was available to all. I mean, why should I be the only one privileged to have a blue, swollen groin?

"There's Always Someone who has it Worse than You"

Next Tuesday I am having minor surgery. I have always liked the definition of “minor” surgery as “a surgical procedure performed on someone who is not you.” I have every reason to expect a positive outcome—my surgeon is an old friend who assures me that he is reviewing his 1973 anatomy textbook and that he plans to practice on a rat or two before cutting on me. Still I can expect to be sore and grouchy for a few days, and will not be permitted to lift anything heavier than an onion for the next several weeks.

Anticipating this bit of unpleasantness has brought to mind the sentimental platitudes we too often employ when a friend is dealing with difficult circumstances, including the one I particularly detest: “There is always someone who has it worse than you.” That may be true, but I have never found it comforting or helpful. If I am hurting, grieving or anxious, what I need from a friend is sympathy and support. When a friend says “someone else has it worse than you” it feels like I am being called a whiner. Don’t compare me to other people! Just be my friend!

Then there is the version that goes “I was sad because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” Fair enough, I suppose. Given a choice between having no shoes and having no feet, I am pretty much going to go for the “no shoes.” But doesn’t basic human compassion require us to provide footwear to the person with no shoes rather than telling him about the guy with no feet?

Furthermore (he said, warming to his topic), if there is a guy who has it worse than me, then logic insists that there is a guy who has it worse than the guy who has it worse than me. And when I find that guy, there will be a guy who has it worse than him. Sooner or later you get to the end of the road and find the one guy in the entire world who nobody has it worse than. What do you say to him when you find him?

What you say to him is precisely what you should say to any friend who is hurting. “I’m sorry. I care. I’m here for you.” Don’t try to put your friend’s burden into perspective. Simply offer to share that burden. That’s what friends do. That is what we are here for.