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Technology has a habit of acting up around me. I think I must send out some sort of spooky vibe or something.
While driving to Virginia for my friend’s wedding, our GPS died, leaving us driving up a mountain in the middle of Nowhere, VA, in the pitch dark with no idea where to go. (Due the banjo ditty from Deliverance.)
I used my laptop successfully and peacefully all weekend for different tasks at my sister’s wedding only to come home yesterday, try to turn it on, and have it weakly try, then power off again. The Geek Squad makes a fortune off of me (okay, not really…but it feels like a fortune). I can’t decide whether to be mad at HP or just shrug, know it’s only money, and just keep truckin’. (At least I get points on my Best Buy Rewards card towards free gift cards. Hurray?)
(In any case, I will be laptop-less for two to three weeks. Guess I will be starting on more of my books that keep piling up. I will try to update during breaks at work, but expect a bit of a “crickets” period on here.)
Speaking of money, I checked my bank account today and winced. With all the festivities of the summer marching by, the only thing racking up faster than the photos is the financial tab. Yikes. I normally don’t worry much about money, having been raised to be frugal and not usually spending beyond my means unless I had the ability to pay it off swiftly, but as my eyes burned at the sight of my account statement, I realized that this is when my “Trust that God will provide” advice comes around in a neat circle to tap me on the shoulder.
My rent’s going up.
I’m going to be paying off this trip to Virginia for a few months.
I’m going to IKEA this weekend to finish getting a few things I need for my apartment. (It’s like sending a diabetic with a sweet tooth into Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Pray for me.)
My sister getting married and family being in town meant sushi here, “let’s meet for lunch” there, as well as a manicure/pedicure that ended up being almost twice as expensive as I was told it would be.
Between my laptop getting fixed and buying an external hard drive to backup everything, that’s setting me back a couple cool hundreds.
Ireland is fast approaching, and I just realizing how soon.
Oh well. At least I decreased my Netflix plan, which helped me breathe a little easier, even if it is only a paltry $5 a month. And hopefully, I will be able to buckle down to some serious frugality this fall and winter once “wedding-palloozza” is over and done. Make many pots of soup as I snuggle up next to my cute little radiator, and watch the leaves change. Free and cheap entertainment is the name of the game. I also anticipate a lot of solo dance parties with my rickety old record player and my well-loved copy of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album.
It’s in moments like these, when I start to get that dizzy-headed, “why am I breathing so fast?” feeling, that I have to remind myself that I have never not had what I needed, and that in the end, despite the cozy, secure feeling it gives me, it really is just money. It comes, it goes.
What are some of the things that you all do to cut corners and help budget?
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~ by Samir Selmanovic
Every morning as I step out of my apartment in Manhattan, I grab two free daily newspapers from the stand at the street corner. I then walk four city blocks to the subway station, reading while navigating my way through the crowd, and by the time I arrive six minutes later, I have read them both! It is a skill I have honed over time that integrates fast reading, selective attention, finger dexterity and navigating the traffic around me with peripheral vision only, never lifting my eyes. But this is becoming dangerous. I might knock down an elderly person, step into a construction site or get hit by a taxi cab.
And if I stop taking time to watch people, sensing their presence, and imagining where they are coming from and where they are going, I might lose my love for the city. When I come home I find my wife’s and two daughter’s heads buried in their laptops, checking their emails, text messages and Facebook accounts. I am beginning to think this diligence about knowing today’s news is not worth it.
We are continually urged to get the most from the present moment. The past is left behind and the future is unreal. And it is not only about our individual lives and families. Our economies have been oblivious to the lessons form the past and severed from the concern for the future, and have crashed as a result. But is the same self-sufficiency plaguing our religions threatening them with their own crash?
While a thoughtful critical tension with our religious traditions is a wise way to hold on to one’s past, the disdainful neglect of the tradition is not. G K Chesterton wrote these words of warning: “Tradition is only democracy extended through time. . . . Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).
In 25 years of religious life, I have picked up plenty of stories and personal experiences about how silly, broken or downright toxic tradition can be. It has hurt individuals, destroyed communities and alienated institutional religion from society. I once heard Christian speaker Tony Campolo quoting reformer Martin Luther quoting St Augustine who said, “The church is a whore, but she is our mother.” This statement seems painfully brash. A whore is something no one wishes to be called—or have their mother called. But the second part of the statement matches the first with its exquisite tenderness. My church is my parent who gave me life and loved me to where I am. It echoes the commandment of God, “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12).
Our fathers and mothers don’t have to be perfect for us to honor them. They are to be respected, cared for, forgiven, healed and loved despite their apparent faults. Without those who came before us, without their love and hard work, none of us would be here. Our frustration with the past must be paired with forgiveness and our bitterness must be tempered with gratitude. We are not better. Our time to make mistakes is here and the more we fashion ourselves in reaction to the mistakes of the past, the more likely we will be reacted against by future generation.
Our disdain for the past has been matched by our disconnection from the future. After watching the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, my 11 year old asked me, “Dad, what have you done?” When I asked what she meant, she said, “When you grown ups were making all these decisions in the past, what were you thinking?” She meant, “I am scared and disappointed. Why weren’t you thinking of us, of me?”
We are leaving to them not only a planet in shambles but other things, including religion. By and large, religion today has grown impotent or destructive instead of potent and constructive. We are leaving religions that do not know how to work together to make the world a better place. Religions replicate a civilized market, peacefully and politely coexisting in competition. But like toddlers playing separately, there is no synergy.
Furthermore, much of religion has had a death-wish approach to the future of the world, counting on a Cosmic Fixer to redo the whole thing after the end of the world. Such religion has spurred—or at least failed to resist—society’s plunge into ecological disaster. More importantly, however, religion has been failing to stir human imagination about the future.
I recently spoke with Jeffrey Sacks, an author and spokesperson on issues of poverty and sustainability. He asked, “Did you notice we don’t have Ethics of the Future?” Thinking back to graduate school, I realized there was no ethical systems that asked, “How will this decision affect people who might live 200 years down the road?” People of the present are always the only consideration. Chesterton’s “democracy extended through time” has started after our past and before our future. Our locus of concern has narrowed to nothing but today—another way of saying we have become self-centered and therefore ultimately self-destructive.
But there is a way forward. First, we can live our religions in a place larger than today and for community larger than ours if we can pay tribute to our ancestors and their faith, stamina, vision and integrity. Any good we do, we do because of those who have gone before us. And if don’t know how to name and forgive the past, we will become the kind of people who will make it harder for the coming generation to forgive us.
As we pay tribute to our ancestors, we are also to bless our successors. We don’t have to understand everything they are doing, let alone control it. A new kind of Christianity by definition requires a new kind of thinking. And such innovation begins with questioning the thinking that went before. Those who are emerging will break the rules we have constructed, and produce their own theology and expressions instead of indiscriminately mimicking ours. They will take the vision to places we could not imagine and in the context we cannot understand. Yet they must be released from our expectations and given the holy burden of blessing and hope we have for them.
If God can believe in us, respect us and work with us, why can’t we do that with each other? Our boasting about the self-sufficiency of the present has taken a blow and we are yearning to have a more responsible and meaningful role in the story of God. This story did not begin only when we came on the stage and will not finish when we leave.
We have to regularly lift our eyes from the news of today and look where we are walking. Without perspective, we tend to hurt ourselves. Where we come from and where we are going is as important as where we happen to be now. In the world where economy, politics and popular culture have enthroned the opportunity of the present moment, religions can provide a conversation about our stories, ways to remember where we have been and imagination for where we want to go.
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