I’m thinking about sin. Why it’s such a bad thing. Not so much how it can manifest in my life, but why I’d want to choose not to sin in any of it’s forms.

I’m engaged in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for the past few weeks. As part of that process, I read Luke 10.18 and 1Cor 15.21. And a striking theme emerged for me.

My sin and my righteousness both have dramatic consequences.

By my actions and my choices, according to these passages, I either establish or dethrone Satan, and I either provide a conduit for death or resurrection from the dead to come through me.

Through me. My choices in this life participate in deception and death or they proclaim (and make possible) truth, light and new life. Which puts a bit of perspective on the matter of morality and self-will – good behavior and the like.

The consequences, good and bad, of every choice that I make, have a profound effect on my world and the people I encounter and many, many more persons I may never know or encounter.

Vicki and I rode the city bus into Wilmington yesterday (Friday). We went with Nicole to DelTech to see if the bus might be a viable alternative to driving her back and forth to classes in downtown Wilmington. We had gotten copies of the schedule for the route that runs between Pike Creek and Rodney Square, but we managed to get the information wrong and found ourselves waiting at the wrong stop 2 minutes before the bus would stop 250 yards away. We ran like crazy and just made it, and that was the last snag we experienced in a great day.

I enjoy public spaces and events, and I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because they make me aware of how connected we are – or that we can be connected in the human community, beyond the walls we live behind so often. The bus is a great public space, where just about anyone can come along for the ride. For $2.40, we got a ticket to go anywhere in Wilmington we wanted to make the time for until midnight.

People on the bus were happy to give us all kinds of helpful tips and advice when we asked for it. At the stop in Rodney Square, a student introduced herself to us, having overheard us talking to another “stranger” about waiting for the #10. She told us where the nearest stop to our destination (the DE Art Museum). She had just started the UD’s Parallel program at DelTech as well. The guy we had been talking with had on an Applebee’s tag. The older woman who had offered help to Nicole worked at the Grand. The first guy who helped us was from New Jersey originally and knew about the 24/7 bus system there. When he got off the bus at Price’s Corner, he took his bike off the front and rode away.

We met Nicole after her class and bought a lunch that we ate on the ride home. The day was beautiful. I took a bunch of pictures. And wondered why this was my first ride on a DART bus in our 11 years here.

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Originally uploaded by PBoGS

It’s funny (not, “ha ha” funny, as Ellen would say) being the family photoman. It took a bit of dragooning the gang to settle into their places on the steps while I raced the couple of miles back and forth to camp to retrieve the tripod for this shot. But wasn’t it worth it?

Or I should say, weren’t they worth it, because this picture is brought to you by the magic of Photoshop CS3! (Joy’s head got imported from the other shot). I probably shouldn’t have confessed, but I can’t stand your not knowing (and now that you do, I feel a lot better).

So here we are, sans Jack and Chelsea. Perhaps we’ll do it again, and I’ll be ruthless in my drive to get everyone to sit for a moment and say “cheese!”.

Just finished “Under Enemy Colors” by S. Thomas Russell. And yesterday saw the end of “Murder at the Vicarage” by Agatha Christie (my second Agatha Christie mystery – it won’t be the last). I have been wading through the beginning of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”, a 6-volume tome of over 4000 pages, and I needed a break. Christie and Russell provided it.

I call it reading for plot, which means I don’t much care for niceties of form or structure – let the pace bear me irresistably onward! Nearly any contemporary author provides it, because we won’t stand for anything less than a screenplay in 2008. No point in naming them. These novels provided the break I needed, but like cookies and brownies, they were not nearly as filling or as satisfying as Proust… or Tolstoy, or Dickens, or Elliot… et cetera.

Not nearly as daunting, either.

Russell took me aboard a ship of the line in the British navy, and I sailed the Atlantic in search of French merchants and frigates. Christie acquainted me with any number of suspects in the murder of a cantankerous church deacon in a little inconsequential hamlet of England. And though it was not memorable, it was fun. And reading for fun is nothing to be ashamed of.

Tomorrow, back to Proust, I’m afraid… and lines like “the faith to create”. Read that, and plot seems to fade into oblivion while a vast vista opens and takes your breath away.

My brother wanted to talk with me today. We don’t often get the chance to talk. He doesn’t do email and when he wants to call, I’m usually working. So this vacation time means communication between us is at a premium.

For some reason, we began with the “How am I doing?” option. I didn’t take long to answer. I start with the church. And picked out several quotes. Of one detractor. And even as I’m saying it to my brother, I’m wondering what in the world it means when one negative voice trumps a couple dozen positive voices. Several dozen voices. Any voice that confirms God’s leading.

How am I doing? Really. Seems a shame to give one deluded person the right to define the answer to that question. I need a better story. A more representative story. A more truthful story.

And the truth is, I’ve never been better. I love my wife, and am confident in her love for me. The church I have given a quarter of my life to serve is a community worthy of my life. The whole of my life. I have children who are not only the crown of my life; they are my friends. And my life partner has become so integral to the person I have become that I cannot imagine life without Vicki Lynn.

What more does a man have a right to ask for? I’m wonderful. Never been better. Ready for action. In fighting trim. Not asking for trouble, but not shying away from a fight either. God knows I’m ready.

This is what I wanted to say to my brother. I’m bruised and battered, but good. Still good. I have fallen off the high wire and survived. So now I can dare to dance on the wire. Without fear.

I’m good.

We’re spending a last week of summer at Smith Mountain Lake in VIrginia with my parents and one of my brothers and his family. We’ve rented a pontoon boat for the week and we’re staying in three separate places (cabin, camper, tents) and eating together.

Because we don’t get together often, visiting time is at a premium. But we’re filling our days with boating outings and feedings take several hours from prep to clean-up. So we collapse into bed late at night exhausted. I brought a couple of books but feel guilty about opening them, much less reading them.

We need a vacation agreement or covenant of some sort that would specify how we would sanely go about cramming everything in (and also identifying the activities that could not possibly get crammed in).

That sounds so cynical, I know. But I’ve read somewhere that Americans work at having fun more than any other nation. I believe it. I live it. Tomorrow, we’re getting up at 6:30 so we can hit the ground running on the last day, having spent all this money on the boat and all.

This afternoon, we had a forced march (hike) through the woods. It didn’t start out that way (they never do). But it surely ended that way. At one point I wanted to sit down in the middle of the path and quit. And smell. And let the view take my breath away. And hug my son. And kiss my daughter on the forehead (lightly) and take it in. The breeze and the sunlight glinting on the water.

We did some of that, surely. The group stopped to swim and I took some pictures (which they and I enjoyed). My son and I bonded while we raced through the forest like we were being chased by demons. What is that worth? A bit of frenetic haste? Surely.

Then we took a sunset cruise after dinner. Which didn’t exactly make it all come out right but certainly made for a nice consolation prize (even if I was thinking in the back of my mind that the cruise cost us $100 plus gas.)

And now we’re polishing off a bottle of Merlot and a bag of Doritos while the cousins put a jigsaw puzzle together (Papa will ferry them to the campsite layer). What could be finer?

Maybe we don’t need a plan after all. This vacation thing is a matter of putting the right pieces into play and letting the games begin. No planning. Put one foot in front of the other. Rent the boat. Lay on sufficient stock of munchies and wine. Let it be.

It works. Certainly it works. We’re family. What else could we do?

We’re in town for a week before heading out for a final vacation (next week) with my parents and one of my brothers and his family. This had been a strange summer, filled with work requirements (Vicki’s 3-weeks at Drew for her doctoral studies, my week of CE and our sermon retreat).

Of course, the week before a trip is always packed with preps not only for the trip, but make-up work for the work you’re going to miss while you’re away (presumably resting and having fun).

America is the place where having fun is down to a science.

Truth is, I’ll be glad for the structure and predictability that comes with fall. All of our kids are making big school moves, which will be exciting to watch. Skyline is an exciting church community to be a part of. So many things start back up on the fall, it always feels to me like a renewal, in spite of the growing decay that marks the season.

At least it’s pretty.

So I’m ready for fall, and the passing of another summer. I’m ready to see old friends again after a vacation-saturated hiatus. And I’m ready for a little less freedom.

Yeah, you heard that right. A great deal of freedom begins to oppress me in a way that responsibility and expectations of others ever could. Enough with the holding pattern (the patternless holding) and the tyranny of anything goes. Let’s get with it.

Long, hard day today, starting with an e-mail I was sending to the group I shared a table with at last week’s Stephen Ministry conference in Pittsburgh. Before I sent it, I wanted to attach a couple of pictures I had taken of the group. But when I reached for the picture, I wasn’t there. Neither was the hard drive. Actually an array of four hard drives. 480 GB of data. Somewhat less, of course, since it wasn’t chock full, but it was close. And it was gone.

Since I hate to roll over easy for a computer, I fought the inevitable for awhile, reloading drivers, reconfiguring and rebooting, vacuuming the dust (something that always makes me feel better when t/s-ing). But all to no avail, except to raise my anxiety level.

Early in our marriage, we were robbed a couple of times. Once, they hit our house, when we lived in Rhode Island. It didn’t take too long for us to figure out that they took our VCR (this was when people cared about VCR’s) and all of the jewelry Vicki wasn’t wearing that day. But it would have been helpful if the robber had left a note: “Don’t bother looking for the following items, as I decided to take them from you today.” We didn’t see a note, so we looked.

Losing a hard drive is something like that. There’s no note, of course, outlining the files and data that have evaporated. So you have to scrounge around your mind to figure out what’s missing – permanently. Perhaps the biggest item on my memory list was the pictures I’ve taken with the Canon camera I bought last March. 15,000 pictures. And happily, I backed them up last week before leaving for the conference in PA. Some luck, that.

The music (80GB) was another story. Almost all of it was on the iPod, but getting files from an iPod to a hard drive is like trying to put tooth paste back into the tube. It can be accomplished, but it’s going to be messy. Yup – got the tee-shirt all afternoon.

The RAID array was primarily there for DV editing, and the final projects are all copied and archived elsewhere. But with all that space, a boatload of odds and ends weren’t backed up anywhere. Now they’re lost. Which gets me to wondering about our future – the future of data in a digital age.

Hard drives fail. Inevitably. Usually after a few years. The idea that we could retrieve the data from a hard drive 25 years down the road is laughable. 100 years? Unimaginable. So what will survive this relentless push toward obsolescence and decay? What music and pictures, what stories and documents? Because if we’re putting it on a hard drive, kiss it all good bye. Makes a clay tablet and stylus look cutting edge by comparison.

And don’t even think about preserving anything on a disc (CD or DVD). They’re lucky to last 5 or 10 years – or far shorter if they venture too far from the jewel case.

So that leaves us with a pretty short memory span, for all of the data we generate. Much of it (like this blog) deserves the oblivion to which it is surely headed after giving it’s author a much-needed rant.

Went to see West Side Story last night in Pittsburgh (while attending a conference). I went alone to the theater, and was grateful for the ushers, without whom I would have been utterly alone. And they were paid.

As I watched the story of rival gangs dance in hate and reconcile around a corpse, I sat isolated in a cavernous hall with no one to share – not a soul to care enough even to hate me.

And of course I participated in our little dance off stage (or perhaps on a much wider stage), especially as we filed out after politely applauding the efforts of the cast and orchestra together. It all seemed so perfunctory. So far from what should constitute life that I felt as if we has been the ones to take the bullet – that we were playing the part of a living community half-heartedly and without a script.

I listened for comments about the show as we slowly moved our way back to the places where we would end our collective day in sleep. But it seemed to me that we were already sleeping. Few people spoke, and it seemed everyone there but me had a companion. We refused to share this common experience with one another.

And considering what we had just witnessd together, that refusal struck me as obscene as it was utterly ironic. Were we afraid of each other, or were we unwilling of unable to work toward each other? We had witnessed the high cost of fear between people, surely. But no musical could have shown us how to reach across the gulf of apathy.

So we attended the play alone and isolated from one another. We watched the dance on stage as if it took place in another world.

A place for us.

We watched “The Dark Night” last week (at the Weirs Beach Drive-in on Lake Winnipesaukee, NH). The last drive-in experiece I had was when I was Eli’s age (11), and we watched “Son of Flubber” with Ed McMurray.

This was somewhat different.

There was the typical (for postmodern movie-goers) blurring of the lines between good and evil. The Joker was a likeable character (especially when blowing up Gotham General Hospital). And the Batman was scary. Sure, he always managed to throttle back his anger. But barely.

The Joker wasn’t after money. His character is akin to the Satan (Zatan) in the book of Job. He has a jaundiced view of humanity and he detests hypocrisy. Or it might be better to say he delights in exposing it (it’s his ace in the hole, because he always figures on the failure of humanity to live for something other than our own skin).

Meanwhile, the Batman struggles with the overwhelming burden of cleaning up the streets alone. Not that folk don’t want to help him (in the DA’s office or in homemade Batman suits); he simply prefers working alone.

So his failure is inevitable.

He fights on two fronts. The first is the exhausting task of taking on the world’s evil and his need to give that work to others (not share it, but pass it on). But the second presents him with a Gordoan knot: to fight evil, he believes that he must become evil. So he faces the final adversaries of irrelevance or annihilation (isn’t that what becoming that which he fights boils down to?).

Either way, evil triumphs.

The Joker is both right and wrong about humanity. We are driven by selfishness in even our goodness (he delights in presenting people with “the lesser of two evils” dilemmas, like demanding one person be sacrificed so that many others may live). Yet some human choices (self-sacrifice and the refusal to kill enemies) stymie him.

He repeatedly tells the Batman that the two of them need each other. You wonder if the Joker’s need of the Batman involves his enjoyment of a good challenge. While he never believes the Batman will prevail, he’s in no particular hurry to be done with the fight. Like Batman, the Joker would lose his identity without a worthy adversary.

In the end, Hollywood pays clumsy homage to the “common man” in the style of Spiderman. The Batman cannot enjoy his victory over the Joker, because the fight was someone else’s to lose.

So the Batman chooses the only available option: sacrifice for the good of all. And the role the people will play?Crucify him.

Bo