Culture clash

This struck me tonight:
"Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything.
Indeed, she didn't know what to say; she was taken aback, she was
at a loss.  She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a
picture of a man and a horse, not only recognisable as such, but
even aggressively in drawing.  Trompe-l'oeil--there was no other
word to describe the delineation of that foreshortened figure
under the trampling feet of the horse.  What was she to think,
what was she to say?  Her orientations were gone.  One could
admire representationalism in the Old Masters.  Obviously.  But
in a modern...?  At eighteen she might have done so.  But now,
after five years of schooling among the best judges, her
instinctive reaction to a contemporary piece of representation
was contempt--an outburst of laughing disparagement.  What could
Gombauld be up to?  She had felt so safe in admiring his work
before.  But now--she didn't know what to think.  It was very
difficult, very difficult."

-- Aldous Huxley, Crom Yellow

Forgetting to let go

The creek ran under a bridge on Irene Avenue , around the edges of the block, and under another bridge on Greenwood Street. Each bridge was concrete, with a concrete bed, and with a curb about eight inches high with no railing. Where the water poured out of each bridge, it formed a pool. The one on the avenue was the larger.

One day, when I was maybe eight, several of us were throwing large rocks into the pool, trying to see who could make the biggest splash. One boy, who had recently moved into the neighborhood picked up a stone smaller than his fist, stood on the curb, and threw. He threw very hard, trying to control the speed and direction of the rock, but neglected to open his fist and let go. Given the nature of the structure of the human body, his fist traveled with the rock, his arm traveled with the fist, and the rest of his body traveled with the arm, into the pool of water. Fortunately, he suffered nothing more than a thorough wetting.

The rest of that week, all the kids in the neighborhood laughed about the kid who forgot to let go when he threw a rock.

Do we ever forget to let go?

Turmoil

Stasis no more. The answer was S. Only, it turns out there were more than one question.

Call it what you want: turmoil, tipping-point, state-change, it can certainly make the ride wild. Most people don't like too much change, and some people don't want any change, but change is inevitable.

Turmoil isn't all bad. In the kitchen blender, it turns separate ingredients into something good. The persecution after Stephen's martyrdom, and the Jerusalem conference in Acts 15 show this. Change that moves us closer to God is good change, and any change can be used by God to further the kingdom. Indeed, God is all about changing people.

But turmoil scares people, and when people are scared, they react in predictably unpredictable ways. Sometimes people deal with it by lashing out at others, sometimes by withdrawing and turning inward. I believe God calls us to trust him, and reach out to others.

Buckle up, hold on tight, and love each other no matter what.

Coffee

I love coffee. Not the cheap stuff made of sawdust and and whatever came to hand at the factory, but real, good coffee. I buy whole beans, and grind them as I need them.

I've done a lot of reading about coffee over the years, and have learned some things.

First, coffee apparently started out in 9th century Ethiopia.

Second, there are two species that are grown commercially: coffea robusta and c. arabica. The first is bitter, but ultimately very inexpensive. Nobody sells pure robusta beans that I'm aware of, as the beverage would be too nasty to drink. Rather, they are used to blend with the more expensive arabica beans to cut the price/increase the profit margin.

Third, and more to the point, the really good coffee is pure arabica, but not all arabicas taste the same. You see, even though they all are the same species, differences of soil, micro-organisms, climate, season, altitude, harvesting, and preparation techniques give different flavors. They're all coffee, all arabica, yet culture makes them somewhat different.

Jesus compared God's message about the kingdom to seed in Matthew 13. If I may employ my coffee metaphor, the coffee bean grows coffee, but the culture causes the flavor of the coffee to vary. The cultural variation doesn't make it not coffee.

Further, if I try to grow coffee in Mexico, and make it exactly the same as coffee in Kona, Hawaii–or 9th century Ethiopia–I'll probably not have good results. At best, I'll have some twisted plant that, with a great deal of effort, only approximates the goal; at worst, I'll have a dead coffee plant with no fruit. If, instead, I plant the bean in Mexico, and cultivate it in the local environment, I'll have a coffee plant that is impacted by that culture, and whose beans have a unique, local flavor. But, it will still be coffee.

Unicycle places.

When I was small, three or four years old, living in a tropical country south of the equator, there was an empty concrete pad along a path not far from our house. I don't know what it was for. Sometimes I'd pass it on a walk with Mom. I don't know why, but, for some reason, I called it "the unicycle place." Of course, it wasn't that, but I imagined that it was.

Why does this occur to me now, decades later? I don't know. Maybe it's that we sometimes see something we don't understand, and try to supply our own explanation of what it must be. That's a normal thing, until we start becoming adamant that our explanation is the only possible one.

There is a true explanation. That concrete pad did have some reason for existence; I just didn't know it. And then, there are the one's we come up with: "the unicycle place." A discussion of a situation we can only really guess at in Paul's writing. We make it a unicycle place, and argue over whose unicycle place is better, more accurate.