“I’ll be glad when things get back to normal.” A common sentiment.
2015 has barely begun and our minivan was in the shop for three weeks, we had a houseguest for four weeks, and I had been sick almost continuously since early December. The last day of this month, my wife and I are going to run a 25K trail run up Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island.
When we have the van back, our houseguest has moved out, I regain my normal health and we’re no longer training for a particularly difficult run, things will be back to normal. We’ve been encouraging each other all month with that sentiment– it’ll be so nice when things get back to normal!
Except that we’re expecting our second child in June or July, our 2-year-old is blossoming more spectacularly every day, and we just had three straight days of record heat.
The letter to the Hebrews advises that the world is passing away. They expected the imminent return of Jesus; they really thought they lived in the end times. Maybe they did; maybe we do.
If Jesus returns tomorrow, the 2,000 years that have passed won’t seem such a long time, though for some of us, it has been such a long time, and the world has changed so much, that the idea that Jesus will return in our age of Google and Youtube seems farfetched, and a dauntingly difficult maneuver. Of course, were Jesus to pull it off in His inimitable fashion, we would be embarrassed at how we had underestimated Him.
As individuals, we do pass away. Our worlds pass away.
A 2-year-old lives half his life as a 2-year-old, but that’s maybe 1% of his parents’ lives, a year that includes the unique marvel of watching your child grow up so fast, through the most endearing phases, on his way to becoming a solitary stranger on a bus someday who no one will regard or look at twice.
The child will someday look back on his life and remember his mom and dad and wonder, was I really special to them? Was I a happy little 2-year-old? Was I the center of their lives? Did my parents take the deepest delight in me and wish me every happiness? What remains of that now that I’m an adult who never lived up to peoples’ expectations who now struggles simply to find some small meaning and consolation in life and would love so much to be with them again as we were so long ago for just a little while?
The new normal might someday be a house that once included pet chinchillas, Spirit, Qyx and Butterfly, a dog named Clover, children George and his younger sister Piper and/or his younger brother Oliver, a house in which the parents once went to their day jobs, and drove a 1996 Dodge Grand Caravan.
Some, or all of us, or none of us, might move to different locations. Some of us might drive by this house and stop by the side of the road as time itself stops and we tearfully remember triumphs and tragedies that still haven’t yet happened while other people in this house peek outside and wonder who is that person outside looking at this house.
That person will then return to his or her normal life, remembering a world that has passed away.

Happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day!
National holidays are mostly abstract. Even the 4th Of July, as tactile as it is. The national anthem is a difficult, bizarre piece of music, and underscores how vast a gulf there is between our times and the world back then. Hardly seems like the same place at all.
MLK Day is a difficult holiday for some. Within my lifetime, some states have resisted the very idea of the holiday. The opposition to the holiday seems so odious that one avoids the subject altogether, fearful that some of the mud will splash onto us.
The events of 2014 are reminders that gulfs exist between the races. Racial profiling by law enforcement seems an obvious fact of life. One wonders how could it not exist? Individuals belong to groups, and groups have demographic characteristics that are materially manifest in the most conspicuous ways, such as fashion.
Much debate goes on about who is racist and how they are racist. I’ve wondered a lot about what entails racism, and how and why it occurs.
One has a negative perception of a community inasmuch as one primarily identifies a group by a negative characteristic.
I grew up in a city well-known as wealthier than surrounding cities, as a city infamous for conspicuous consumption. There was some truth behind the perception. The city has extravagant shopping malls, and every citizen was guilty by association of the conspicuous consumption practiced by those mall shoppers. We were reluctant to say where we lived, because we knew we would be considered to be a type of people we were not.
One hears about a group of people notorious as thieves. Cher had a big hit with a particular song: “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” Well-meaning as it might have been, what most impressed itself on an impressionable young mind is that people think Gypsies are thieves, and if all these people think that– why would they, if there was not some truth to it?
Italians suffer the perception that they have something to do with the Mafia. People think the Irish are inordinately fond of liquor, and if we think Vietnamese people, with all the pho soup restaurants hereabouts, really love pho soup, with all the Irish bars, it’s hard not to think the Irish don’t really like spending a lot of time drinking in pubs. (Some people think that’s a bad thing.)
Blacks in the United States suffer the curse of slavery. When I think on their situation in the US today, I think one has to go back to slavery, because that’s how they got here. That’s why they were, against their wills, brought here. It’s impossible to not think about that and wonder how it was ever morally permissible. One thinks about how and why that happened, and what were the enduring consequences. As a white person, I have to think that a history such as that needs a few centuries to fade into the background and not be a major, unhealthy factor in the community psyche. In the history of humanity, 100 years, 200 years is about as recent as yesterday. And still we have debates over civil rights, discrimination, voting rights, cities with black majorities and white police forces.
I have Irish and Jewish blood. I see the Jews as a people who will always be held suspect. When a group of people has been reviled by so many for so long, it’s all too easy to think, “There must be a reason why people have thought that,” and then latch onto a few self-serving anecdotes as proof that they are guilty of whatever they happen to have been charged with, or are being charged with.
It’s easier to think of people as belonging to groups who can be dealt with in terms of stereotypes. People even think of themselves as stereotypes, when convenient. “I’m a man, so I leave the toilet seat down.” “I’m white, so I don’t have to worry about mistreatment by the police.”
Few things offend people more than being labeled as a type, whether it’s according to something relatively superficial, such as the city where where one grew up, or something more substantial, such as skin color and gender.
We belong to bigger communities: we are brothers and sisters; each others’ keepers; children of God; citizens of Earth. As human beings, to follow the heroic, unimaginable courage and bravery and most excellent example of Dr. King, and promote those overarching realities, is our responsibility and high calling.

A humbler, January, and, humble.
The fog gets bright enough sometimes, my eyes hurt, then the fog is strengthened, or weakened, into more of a drizzle than a mist, but by 3:30, we are in the sunset hour of another sunless day.
The day began three hours before the 7:55 sunrise, early enough for a couple of cups of coffee and an hour around the house before going out for a 10-mile run among tall trees gray in the fog up from Lake Washington.
Back home during the middle of the sunrise hour, forehead wet with sweat and mist, long sleeves rolled back out after they’d been rolled up during the run after I’d warmed up a bit.
Thirty-two laps around the track with no one seen the whole time. A soccer ball was on the artificial turf field so I took ten penalty kicks, attempting to place the kicks as I had decades ago, as I had run with the technique I’ve had the last 15 years, instead of a round of golf, reliving the dramas of boyhood, struggling to compensate with technique for the loss of power I might once have had.
After today, two more Sundays of long-distance training runs before a 25K on the 31st. The strategy is the same as usual: no competition, no attempt at a specific result. The older runner is mature enough to enjoy the experience of running a little slower a little longer, becoming a more perfect runner, running in a style that exemplifies the athlete and person he has become and is now for this moment.
Next January, God willing, might include these same training runs, these same reflections on the last holiday season with a child still not aware of the season’s weighty expectations, the same hope for another Seahawks Super Bowl win.
The debt I now face will have been managed, and might be smaller than what I’ll have accumulated then.
The health I have now might be compromised by illness, injury.
The time I have for a few things, I might not have for anything.
Silent, head down, back to work.
What will the year bring?
Fog.

Holidays try too hard, so we’re often glad when they’re over. After the new year, the buses, banks, post offices and trash collectors get back on their regular schedules and we can finally get back to the semblance of normalcy craved by us, working people, who don’t get weeks off, who have to squeeze the holiday festivities into the rest of our lives which go on regardless in the quotidian cycles of work, debt, paycheck, crisis, crushed dreams, debt, work, paycheck, toothache, dentist, debt, car problems, short paycheck, hope, debt, miscellaneous crisis, a happy moment when we inexplicably transcend all the tiresome, useless, everyday crap and have a vision of the miracle it is to be alive on “this fortress built by Nature for herself, this precious stone set in the silver sea, this blessed plot, this Earth, this realm (Shakespeare!),” this Emerald Isle of a planet.
There’s a word for that– one of the great Christian words in our vocabulary– Epiphany.
When you have not just a good idea, not just a great idea, but a life-clarifying insight, one hauls out that particular, unique, special word for a special experience– epiphany.
In my life, I’ve had white epiphanies, and black epiphanies. Plus the Feast Of The Epiphany every year, “We Three Kings,” one of the great Christmas songs. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh– the good ol’ days. Tenzing Momo in the Pike Place Market has a nice frankincense and myrrh incense stick, by the way.
But it tries too hard. It’s too deconstructionist and reengineered. The songbooks have songs about it in which the three maji, the three kings, the three wise men, went out in search of the Jesus we know and love in all His theological complexity.
The Gospel says these three saw the star that heralded the king of the Jews. So much is read into that phrase– “the king of the Jews.” Historically, it’s a tremendously sad phrase. It’s the sign above Jesus’ head on the cross. “What I have written, I have written,” Pilate said.
Is this a King for a people who suffered the Shoah in practically our own lifetime? I don’t know who else could be.
What do we have at the Epiphany? Three men who had the astrological kung fu to somehow figure out that a star had emerged in the night sky that proclaimed the birth of the King of the Jews. Kings are arbitrary figures, aren’t they? A family makes alliances, hires mercenaries, prevails over enemies, proclaim themselves royalty, and so they remain until they’re replaced by a more powerful family.
But when an impartial star appears in the heavens and anoints an infant born to powerless people of a powerless tribe in the hinterlands of an occupied people, something irresistibly powerful is afoot, and don’t we want to think that the universe is a good place, ruled by an omnipotent Deity Who desires not our destruction, but our salvation? Wouldn’t we then welcome this child-king, declared by the most profound mechanisms of the Universe, this crucial step forward in the reconciliation of God and His children?
The maji rejoiced at the birth of this King. They rushed to welcome Him, because they must have believed that this was a most excellent thing that was happening. Whether the Christ child never cried after He was born, never evinced any infantile distress, whether the maji were centuries ahead of their time in their theological instincts– no matter.
Their Epiphany was, perhaps, that they were witnesses to something special, something unique, not to be taken for granted.
Something to be admired by us who tend to take Christmas and the King of the Jews for granted!