Obamacare, Abortion, and the Politics of Science

Maybe everybody knows this story.

In a college sex-education class, the professor showed a film about the fertilization of an egg. The film showed a magnified view of a sperm swimming, its tail whipping behind it. The film also showed an egg. Then the sperm again. Then the egg again. The sperm. The egg. Suddenly, a woman cried out from the back: "Run, egg, run!"

But it turns out that the egg could have stayed safe by walking.

1. Fertilization and birth-control pills after sex.

It turns out that pregnancy, if it happens, typically doesn’t happen right away after sex. The tiny sperm has a long trek through a fallopian tube to find its bliss in an egg.

I didn't know this fact until recently. And it might not be widely known to the public. (I’m just guessing; in my sixth-grade class, the boys played outside while the girls watched a movie.) This maybe-widespread ignorance makes it easy to believe that two after-intercourse birth-control pills actually induce abortions.

The best known of these pills is called Plan B. Plan B and its generic versions are also known as "the morning-after pill". That’s a misnomer. They actually works up to 72 hours after sex.

There is also Ella. Ella works up to five days after sex. It’s known by some as "the week-after pill". Because it’s effective only up to five days after sex, maybe it should be called "the work-week-after pill".

2. Plan B, Ella, and abortion.

The federal Food and Drug Administration states that both Plan B and Ella work by keeping an egg from being released from the ovaries. So like other contraceptives, these pills stop the fertilization of an egg.

But the the FDA also states that Ella (but not Plan B) can stop a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus wall. If that were to happen, the egg would simply exit the woman’s body. Abortion foes typically claim that a fertilized egg is a human being and should be protected. So destruction of a fertilized egg would make Ella, to abortion foes, a means of inducing abortion.

3. Plan B, Ella, and the journalists’ integrity.

But it’s not clear what that conclusion about Ella and implantation is based on. According to the New York Times, officials responsible for the decision to claim that Ella stops implantation, or who are knowledgeable about that decision, refuse to be interviewed.

And according to the New York Times’s June, 2012 article:

It turns out that the politically charged debate over morning-after pills and abortion, a divisive issue in this election year, is probably rooted in outdated or incorrect scientific guesses about how the pills work. Because they block creation of fertilized eggs, they would not meet abortion opponents’ definition of abortion-inducing drugs.

According to the New York Times, the National Institutes of Health has revised its web description of how Ella works to reflect the best scientific knowledge. It no longer claims that Ella stops an egg’s implantation in the uterus.

Presently, the Mayo Clinic’s website says:

[R]ecent evidence strongly suggests that Plan B One-Step and Next Choice [the generic version] do not inhibit implantation. It's not clear if the same is true for Ella.

But The New York Times interviewed the Mayo Clinic’s physician in charge of its website. He says that the hospital is "chomping at the bit" to revise its website to conform with the best scientific studies; it only waits for confirmation from government authorities like the FDA.

The conservative Weekly Standard goes the other way. It touts the supposedly un-deniable truth that Ella causes abortions. It does so in a web piece titled "Obamacare Mandates (Free) Coverage of Abortion Drug".

The Weekly Standard sourcing is weak. Sources for their conclusion include partisans like The Family Research Council; or a Dr. Justo Aznar, an ethics professor at a Catholic university in Spain. It also cites the generic web source WebMD that parrots the FDA.

The Weekly Standard insinuates much from reliable sources like CBS, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. These sources, according to The Weekly Standard, say that Ella is chemically similar to RU-486, which does induce abortions. RU-486 and Ella have the same chemical agent, but RU-486 is twenty times more potent. That’s the difference between sprinkling salt on your steak and pouring salt into your mouth. Dose is everything. The Weekly Standard puts too much weight on too little information.

4. Abortion and Obamacare.

The Hobby Lobby is a major retailer. They say that they will defy the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to supply their employees free with contraceptives like Plan B and Ella. They explain that they believe that these pills produce abortions, and that abortion is an offense to God.

They stand on solid ground as to how Ella operates as long as the FDA continues to agree with them, in apparent defiance of the best scientific research.Their ground for objecting to Plan B is more shrouded. But if they choose they could take cover under The Weekly Standard.

5. Love and consequences.

A lot rides on Hobby Lobby’s decision to defy the law. Defiance comes with a penalty to them of $1.3 million a day.

Hobby Lobby lost its lawsuit in federal district court to liberate themselves from having to pay for Plan B and Ella for their employees. They have appealed. In the meantime, they face the fines. The fines start on New Years Day, 2013.

They went to the court of appeal to suspend the fines pending appeal. The court of appeal turned them down. They carried their plea for relief pending appeal to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court also turned them down. Nothing now stands between them and the penalty for defiance of the law.

Maybe this is an acceptable price for their clean consciences.

I don’t understand these people.

That’s not a dismissive remark. I mean it sincerely. Maybe their love for the unborn is so deep that the money doesn’t matter.

But even if their assumption about how Ella and Plan B work is right, their love is a love of life in the form of maybe six-hundred un-differentiated cells. This life that they protect at great cost to their wealth has no fingers, no toes, no eyes, nor even discrete organs. To me, life in a form that so little resembles a human or any other visible creature, and which has no feelings or thoughts, is not lovable.

Alternatively, maybe they are not moved by love toward any undifferentiated group of cells, but by a tenderness toward God and a Godly desire for God’s will on earth. Maybe this love moves them to part with nearly half-a-billion dollars a year.

If they have such love, I need to learn at their feet. And if they cannot trace by words their spiritual minds upon mine, maybe they would pray for me to know the tenderness and fullness that they know. God would answer that prayer of such righteous men and women, and I would be lifted up by their prayers.  I wish that were so because I crave prayers and would like to be lifted up.

I do not judge them because I do not know them. But I would be naive if I were to automatically reject the possibility that they did not act with love but with a religious legalism, a probity by which they judge others. And I would be naive if I were to automatically reject the possibility that their Christianity is infused with a hard-right sensibility that conflates the love of God with hatred of anything Democratic. I have seen such Christianity.

Or maybe they're like me. Maybe they make moral decisions with some mixture of love or fear of God, love of others, legalism, and ideology.

6.  Science and relief from $1.3 million a day.

Hobby Lobby's difficulty is not only a religious difficulty. It is also a scientific difficulty.

Hobby Lobby says that it has no moral difficulty paying for ordinary contraceptives. It quarrels with Plan B and Ella because they believe that these harm fertilized eggs.

But as we have seen, the weight of science is against that position. Hobby Lobby could accept the clear consensus of science and the findings of the FDA as to Plan B. They could accept the emerging consensus of the latest findings of the scientific community as to Ella. If they did those things, Hobby Lobby could come to agreement with their accuser. They would not have to choose between their consciences and painful fines.

7. Climate change, crime statistics, and the casual disregard of science.

But good science is routinely rejected in America.

For example, there is a broad scientific consensus that human activity causes global warming. How broad this consensus is is stated by the National Science Foundation. They’re the body of scientists that turned forensic DNA testing from a crap-shoot that could convict the innocent into something highly reliable. They did that by examining the science of DNA testing and perfecting it.

Here’s what the National Science Foundation says about man-made global warming:

(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [finding that humans contribute to global warming], and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. ["Expert Credibility in Climate Change" (abstract) (2010).]

Yet the two-to-three percent of deniers, who have substantially less expertise, command broad attention among the American public and right-wing politicians and the fossil-fuel industry.

And, of course, the techno-thriller writer Michael Crichton wrote a novel that purported to demolish the idea of man-made global warming (State of Fear). His undergraduate concentration was anthropology, although he later got a medical degree (1969). If, as an M.D., he had written a book about home-surgery, it probably would have done less harm than his novel about climate change.

But for many, a techno-thriller writer matters more than the National Science Foundation.

Selective hostility toward science taints public judgment of  other scientific conclusions. Economists Donohue and Levitt wrote a paper that studied the effect of legalizing abortion on crime. They concluded that legalized abortion leads to less crime, including violent crime, as the generations subject to legal abortions come of age.

This conclusion was attacked. I cannot say that it was attacked by fringe science; but Donohue and Levitt’s principal opponent on this issue seems to have abandoned statistics and embraced moral arguments. Steven Levitt’s article that summarizes his argument and answers his critics is linked below.

There is a lengthy reply to Levitt’s piece that purports to be by Levitt’s committed opponent, Steve Sailer. He waives at statistics and presses into the tall grass of child "wantedness" and other un-measurable concepts. He’s bold to argue based upon what is "pretty likely" and what is his "guess". He speaks knowingly about what "the educated assume". He describes facts as "pretty murky" and then makes assumptions about those facts.

Of course, as a reason for or against legalized abortion, statistics do not end the discussion. A moral argument can justly outweigh an argument based on utility. Sailer calls abortion a "pre-emptive death penalty". Someone might or might not agree with him, but the argument is fairly made.

Fair point or not, we shouldn’t despise science because we hate its findings.

8. The politics of science.

A definition of politics is "The often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society." (American Heritage Dictionary of English Language (fourth edition).) There is a politics of science. We war with each other in the media, in courtrooms, in classrooms, and in legislatures over science and its usefulness in particular cases. We choose direction for ourselves and our society based on the outcome of these wars.

9. Bearing the burden of the politics of science.

Sometimes, disregard of science has no personal consequence.

A person might or might not believe in evolution. But not believing in it usually has no consequences. I remember, from my youth, an argument with a high school science teacher about evolution. He didn’t believe in it. Still he taught science.

Sometimes disregard of science has grave personal consequences.

In my youth, I sat in on the trial of a couple, the Parkers, who did not get treatment for their son Wesley’s diabetes. They did not believe in medicine. Wesley died, and the jury convicted the Parkers of manslaughter.

Sometimes disregard of science has grave collective consequences.

Man-made global warming is affecting America. Any given storm or drought cannot be reliably blamed on global warming. But the mechanisms of global warming and droughts and storms are well understood by climate scientists. And if the public largely rejects the science behind man-made global warming, still we live with the consequences of the steady rise in temperature since the industrial revolution. These consequences exist, for example, in the form of crop-destroying droughts and deadly storms.

Sometimes disregard of science starts out as a burden on others and becomes a burden on ones self.

10. Hobby Lobby and the politics of science.

The last case is the case with Hobby Lobby. While they initially clung to an outdated understanding about the workings of Plan B and Ella, the consequence fell, potentially, only on their employees. An employee might have used poor judgement during sex, or used good judgement and suffered an accidental failure of a condom, or exercised no judgment because she was raped. Hobby Lobby has made it more difficult for them to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.

But the burden of knowing the science of these contraceptives has now shifted onto Hobby Lobby. That, of course, is where it belongs. Facing huge fines, Hobby Lobby probably should use its vast resources to get the best possible advice about how these contraceptives work. It would pay them to believe that advice.

11. Science and faith.

If I had to choose between living in a society where God was known and science was not, or a society where science was known and God was not, I know which I would choose. Others would make a different choice.

But it’s a false dilemma. I believe that ignorance of God is a hazard to anyone in any place at any time. To anyone in our nation in our time, I believe that ignorance of science can have consequences. But science and faith don't exclude each other. Most Americans believe in God, and they accept much science. They readily use techology, which is based on science.

12. Conscience and Country.

A time comes when conscience must oppose law. And a time comes when conscience must yield to the national will expressed in law. I once prosecuted a man for driving without a license. He considered it an affront to accept a driver's license. He thought driving was a natural right, beyond government dispensation.

I would have a problem if the law compelled an employer to pay for abortion. There is no wide agreement in society as to that. But relatively few people cling to the belief that contraception is evil.

I hope Hobby Lobby keeps their piety and learns science.

_______________________________________

The New York Times on morning-after and week-after pills:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/health/research/morning-after-pills-dont-block-implantation-science-suggests.html?pagewanted=all

The Weekly Standard on morning-after and week-after pills:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-mandates-coverage-abortion-drug_581969.html

Steven D. Levitt on legalized abortion and crime rates:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

National Science Foundation on man-made global warming (summary of findings):
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract?sid=c4aba312-61f9-4189-a37d-6062a033a93b

 

Believers and Unbelievers

What?! Apparently, not everybody in America is a Christian. And some of these so-called "non-Christians" have strong opinions. This takes my breath away, but did you know that sometimes they express these opinions? In the media and in courtrooms! And they get away with that!

Thankfully, Fox News is on the story. They published a piece about it on Christmas Eve. It’s called Beyond the War on Christmas.

1. I wish all of my friends were believers.

But seriously, to my non-Christian friends: I wish that you were believers. I do. Since I believe in God and I believe in heaven and in hell, I believe that it would be better if you knew God and he knew you.

2. When unbelief is better than belief.

But, here’s a little walk-back. I would rather that you didn’t believe than that you believed and harmed children. I would rather that you didn’t believe than that you believed and were hateful to your parents. I would rather that you didn’t believe than that you believed and loudly rejoiced about dead American soldiers and murdered children in Connecticut.

Because I believe that then to God your belief would make little or no difference. And your behavior would disgrace the Lord.

3. The perfect logic of unbelief.

And let’s be clear: if you don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that’s not fainting-spell illogical.

Jesus’s own family tried to restrain him because the crowds were saying that he was crazy. (Mark 3:21.) And those who knew him as he grew up and as a young man were generally unimpressed. ("‘Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?’ And they took offense at him." (Matthew 13:55-57 (NRSV).)

As the gospels point out, those who knew Jesus as he grew up and as a young man saw nothing that to them said God-is-with-us. (Although young Jesus was well thought of. (Luke 2:52).)

Yet you, my non-Christian friends, didn’t know Jesus before his ministry, so you don’t have that excuse to be unimpressed. But you might have a better excuse: you know us, your Christian friends.

4. We Christians are unimpressive to your detriment.

The hand in the glove of my wishing that my non-Christian friends believed is that I wish that my Christian friends were more Godly. (Not that any of them do the vile things that I talked about earlier.) I wish also that I were more Godly. Like, I wish I weren’t so selfish.

It’s true: Christians make rude, single-fingered gestures at other Christians on the freeway. We take advantage of others. We look out for ourselves, and we resent having to look out for others, especially if it’s not family, and sometimes even if it is. Our compassion fails. If I meet someone and he calls me "brother", my guard goes up.

Not to say that I have no tenderness toward my fellow believers. In my church, we have a custom in each service of greeting each other and blessing each other with the peace of God. I enjoy this ritual and feel blessed by it.

But of course, these people that I shake hands with, bless, and am blessed by are, for the most part, people who value their religion enough to attend worship every week. I’m grateful to worship in their company. They certainly aren’t Chreasters (folks who show up in church only on Christmas and Easter).

Still, weekly church attendance and gripes when someone says "happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" don’t necessarily show that someone has more than a twisty, winded walk with God.

So I concede this: you unbelievers might have some logic and some facts on your side when you’re unimpressed with Jesus because you’re unimpressed with we Christians. And that’s because often we Christian ain’t all that impressive.

5. A pious defense, and its rebuttal.

Now, here I could say something pious like, "We’re not perfect, we’re just forgiven." But I suppose you’d have at least two retorts to that.

First retort: "Not perfect? Try [rude plural noun]!" And that’s right. The news is full of failed and predatory and too-falsely-pious Christians.

Second retort: "Not perfect? Why the hell not?" Fair enough. If Jesus is all that he’s supposed to be, why aren’t we all paragons?

6. Marines: a metaphor.

This issue reminds me of being young and with a young friend. We saw a group of three young, uniformed Marines. They were skinny. My friend said something like, "Those are Marines? I’m not impressed!"

Yet we didn’t know those Marines. We didn’t know their past. We didn’t know how the Marine Corps had shaped them for the better. We didn’t know their present. Just by looking at them, we didn’t know what they knew, what they were capable of. We didn’t know their future. We didn’t know what they would become, which most certainly was more than they were at the moment that my friend and I squinted at their physiques.

And we judged the whole Marine Corps by the three specimens in front of us. Certainly if we had studied Marine Corps heroes, or the history of the Marine Corps, or even if we had seen an example of a Marine who had excelled and thrived in his profession – that would have impressed us.

7. Marine Corps: standards.

Yet among Christians, there usually is less rigor than in the Marine Corps.

Because in the Marine Corps all recruits famously go through boot camp. They get a new vocabulary. They exercise. They learn skills like close combat, how to shoot. They learn all about their weapons. I haven’t gone through boot camp, but by wide reputation I know that it’s hard.

8. Christianity: flab.

But anybody can call himself a Christian who feels like it. By far most churches take whoever walks through the door and finds a seat.

And Christian discipleship isn’t very much. The Bible is our book, but few Christians have read it from cover to cover – never mind more than once. I suspect that our prayer-life is often weak, and so are other exercises through which God might shape us.

Our deliberate building of a relationship with God might be so lackadaisical that it’s a wonder that God has built what he has built in us. If our discipleship is lackadaisical, we might or might not hold onto these gains when trouble comes. Scripture is pessimistic about this.

And modern American Christianity teaches that entry into heaven is easy for all who confess Christ. This tends to sooth believers into a flabby Christianity. If we gain heaven with no effort, why make effort?

This teaching is a historically-recent blight on American Christianity. In a pastoral class I took, the professor told us about a wealthy businessman who was kicked out of the Presbyterian Church at the beginning of the 20^th Century. He was kicked out because he claimed assurance of his salvation. The then-prevailing theology was that we may hope in our salvation, but heaven is not assured. I think that that’s the right way to think about salvation

Knowing the love of God is good and needful. But having no fire under us, so to speak, we Christians often let only our upbringing and the happenstance of life shape us – like almost everyone else.

9. Paragons show what’s possible with God.

The results of leisurely Christianity are what they are. But don’t judge God by leisurely Christians. Judge God by the more-than-mediocre Christians.

Judge God by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a German pastor and theologian. He was a pacifist. But he did not cling to his pacifism in the face of his anguish over the crimes of the Third Reich. He joined the plot to kill Hitler. The plot failed. He was arrested, imprisoned, and hanged.

Judge God by St. Francis of Assisi. He rejected his advantaged life as a wealthy heir. He lived in poverty to the glory of God, and he taught others to do the same. He founded the Franciscan order.

Judge God by Corrie ten Boom. Her father and her sister and she were Dutch under the Third Reich occupation of their country. They hid Jews in their home. There was a little Jewish baby who cried. No other rescuer would take the baby because he cried so much that there was great danger of discovery. Corrie ten Boom’s father considered it an honor to risk his life and the life of his daughters for the welfare of a Jewish baby who cried too much. Sadly, before the war ended, they were discovered. Of her small family, only Corrie lived to leave the concentration camp. She spent the rest of her time on the earth spreading the gospel.

Judge God by Sister Margaret McBride. She was excommunicated because, as a member of a hospital ethics committee, she and others approved the abortion that saved the life of a mother of four.

Judge God by Sister Rachele Fassera. In 1996 the raping, torturing, murdering Kony’s army kidnaped 139 Ugandan schoolgirls. Sister Rachele pursued them through the jungle on foot, caught up with them, and convinced the 200 cutthroats to release the great majority of the girls.

Few Christians are Dietrich Bonhoeffer or St. Francis or Corrie ten Boom or Sister Margaret McBride or Sister Rachele Fassera. But some that you’d meet in ordinary churches in ordinary places are impressive in their faith and in their walk with God. Or they’re on the way to being impressive in their faith and in their walk with God. I can’t say how many these are, or what percentage these are among believers. But they are there.

10. Realistic possibilities: a swimming metaphor.

Few people who think about swimming to get fit really expect to end up dolphining across the pool with the speed and grace of an Olympic champion. But that doesn’t keep people from swimming for fitness.

And you wouldn’t judge swimming, either, by the guy who jumps in the pool, swims a couple of lazy laps, strikes up a long conversation with another wall-hanger, swims another couple of lazy laps, and calls that a workout. You would judge it by the person who, even if they started out that way, kept at it until they could swim serious workouts on a regular basis with visible results.

Knowing God takes effort and grace. So look for a Christian who makes serious effort and gets visible results. Judge Christianity and its potential by those who strive and who have about them a penumbra of grace.

And when you become such a person yourself, pray for the rest of us.

Top reasons why Santa Clause comes only when everybody’s asleep.

For Christmas Eve, here are the top reasons why Santa Clause comes only when everybody’s asleep.

1. He’s got warrants.
2. He’s doing the Lady Godiva thing.
3. He’s ashamed of his neck tattoos.
4. He’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. People would freak.
5. He has a strict no-autograph policy.
6. He wants to be able to avoid paparazzi when he vacations.
7. He doesn’t want to run into his ex-wife. Or her lawyer.
8. He owes money. To organized crime.
9. He has a male part where his nose should be.
10. He can’t go out in sunlight because he’s a vampire.

Newtown, Ct.

I worry before I post some pieces. Sometimes I worry because what I write might make people judge me. Sometimes I worry about stirring anger without any compensating benefit.

But I hesitate to post this prayer because I am writing about a tragedy as an outsider. I don’t want to add any empty piety to the internet traffic about Newtown, Ct. I don’t want a copy of this to end up in the in-box of a parent of one of the Newtown victims, for them to call me a fool or worse.

I publish this prayer with this disclaimer, and I commit it to the judgment of my friends.

Newtown, Ct.
 
To wake from horror
Would be rebirth
To the parents of the dead,
To the desolate in spirit.

What you think and feel, my God,
I do not grasp, cannot know.
Do you wait in stillness
Until the reckoning?

Your son, who died, died in pain.
But at Golgotha you saw Easter.
What convulsion came from three days
Of a body that knew no rot?

So I weigh Golgotha against Newtown.
Where wounds gape at heaven.
Where earth covers the young.
Where earth crushes the old.

But I have not touched sweat like blood.
I have not died under darkness.
I know no hell nor its hurt.
My hand has not probed your wound.

Heaven is nearer to earth
Than earth is to heaven.
Your thoughts are nearer to ours
Than ours are to yours.

Your angels are quick,
But their light is unseen.
Cosmic wheels turn, eternal winds blow,
But they are unheard, they are unfelt.

A reckoning will come
Between you and us.
Another reckoning will come
Between those who grieve and you.

God and the Election

If God didn’t mean for Barack Obama to win the 2012 presidential contest, how do you explain Clint Eastwood?

1. Unsought benefit: Clint Eastwood and the empty chair.

That question is meant only half in jest. Nominating conventions typically boost a presidential candidate. But Eastwood’s performance sucked the energy from Mitt Romney’s would-be momentum.

Not that things were going placidly at the Republican nominating convention up till then. Hurricane Isaac caused the Republicans to bail on the first day of their Tampa-based convention. Some wonder that the Republicans chose as their venue Florida in the hurricane season.

Hurricane Isaac at the beginning of the general-election season was seconded by Hurricane Sandy at the end of the general-election season. I don’t make claims about the intention of God in these two hurricanes at the beginning and at the end of the short general-election season. I look at that and I wonder, but I draw no conclusions. Too many people claim to know the intention of God in natural disasters; and it always happens to match their own personal religious agenda. That kind of theology, without pretty clear and plain communication from the Almighty, is in the domain of douches.

Instead, I’ll talk more about Clint Eastwood and his last-minute choice to do the unexpected. His empty-chair speech energized Democrats. It gave them the perfect metaphor for all of the attacks that they had heard and would hear against their candidate. Eastwood’s speech illustrated the disconnect between the Obama of reality and the Obama of Republican scorn. "See?" we could say after Tampa. "Another attack on empty-chair Obama."

So it’s possible to see a divine hand pushing Clint Eastwood to the front of the convention stage with the subliminal prompt, "Son, let’r rip!"

2. Unlikely outcome: A boon from the Supreme Court.

But God had other means, if he had a say in this election. The Supreme Court that handed victory to Bush in 2000 had a hand Obama’s victory twelve years later.

Months before the general election, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare. After that, public opinion shifted in Obamacare’s favor.

Victory in the Supreme Court made Obama look like a winner. Victory kept Obama’s most high-profile legislative victory from becoming smoke. It kept Obama and all of his effort to pass that law from looking like a dog chasing its tail.

And in hindsight, the victory looks unlikely. This is true for a couple of reasons. First, Obama had voted against John Robert’s nomination to the Supreme Court. (Though he later voted to confirm Robert’s rise to Chief Justice.) In the Obamacare decision, Roberts provided the crucial fifth vote for a majority of the justices.

And experts look at Robert’s published Obamacare opinion and say that it looks like it started out as an opinion against Obamacare. Its center of gravity is its argument that the constitutional commerce clause cannot bear the weight of Obamacare. The section upholding Obamacare under the taxing power of the federal government might have been an afterthought. Experts surmise that the taxing-power section flipped the opinion from a vote against Obamacare to a vote for it.

And Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's concurring opinion has sharp language common in a dissent rather than the typical language of a concurrence. This leads some experts to suppose that it might have begun as a dissent, meaning that the justices initially voted to reject Obamacare.

Maybe God directed Robert’s conscience and shifted his position, changing him from the leader of the justices against Obamacare to the writer of the lead opinion that upheld it.

3. Unexpected ally: Governor Chris Christie.

Let me say a second time: I’m not making pronouncements about God’s will, this election, and hurricanes. That said, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie helped Obama by changing from a high-profile sneering critic of Obama’s leadership to a high-profile enthusiastic extoller of Obama’s leadership.

That transformation, that praise was not a foregone conclusion. After Hurricane Isaac, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal did what many Republicans wanted Governor Christie to do. Jindal took disaster aid from the federal government but publically carped about it.

4. Obstacle: the first debate.

Then there was Obama’s catastrophic first-debate performance. That might seem to cover up God’s footprints in this election. But it’s possible to see otherwise.

In the Old Testament Book of Judges, the tribes of Israel turned on one of their own. The tribe of Benjamin committed a notorious crime. Then the other tribes battled against Benjamin. They almost extinguished it.

God sent Israel into battle against Benjamin twice before giving Israel victory over Benjamin. Both of those times, Benjamin inflicted slaughter on Israel.

So sometimes God hands out failure before victory. Like Obama’s first debate performance. Maybe such failures supply needed humility before a blessing.

Conservative Christians might take this idea of God-in-failure as an explanation for the 2012 outcome contrary to mine. They are welcome to. I claim no special oracular powers.

4. What this exercise is and is not.

My friends who are un-believers will argue that I am foolish to find proof of God in the 2012 election. They are exactly right. This is no proof. This essay is instead a way of looking at the world. It is an interpretation of events. It is no more than that.

5. Aftermath: the hand of God.

I interpret events after the election with the hand of God in mind.

Nobody was more eager to defeat Obama than the Christian right. Some conservative Christians literally fasted and prayed for the triumph of Mitt Romney.

Maybe God transformed their curses into blessings. Something like that happened when Balak king of Moab summoned the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites. The story is told in the Book of Numbers.

But here’s the point. Franklin Graham is a prominent conservative evangelist. He’s the son of Billy Graham. He is no Obama enthusiast. In the 2012 election cycle, he fanned speculation that Barack Obama is a Muslim. He did this even though Obama professes Christianity and was a long-time member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

But Graham has now called for Evangelical Christians to support the president with their daily prayers.

Surely God is in this.

Team Effort: Southern Pacific Masters Regional Championships

The Southern Pacific Masters had their regional swimming championship on November 30 through December 2, 2012 in Long Beach. I swim with the San Diego Swim Masters. We took first place.

1. Strivers and coasters.

Some swimmers on the team are very dedicated, very skillful, and very fast. Some of these swimmers carried stress at times during the meet. These stress-carriers tend to be the high performers, but not necessarily all of the high performers. (It’s a big team; I don’t yet know everyone.)

I’m toward the low-intensity end of the spectrum. We range, though I would say we tend toward the striving end.

2. Roles.

Different people on the team have different roles; some have several. These showed in the meet.

We have a relay czar. He devised a brilliant program that uses a database of team-member times to craft relay lineups. This program maximizes our chances of winning relays. Relay victories were a profound part of our overall success at the meet.

We have our exhorters who encourage others. We have smart people who share tips on stroke-technique and racing-technique.

We have our champions, the ones who always do spectacularly; the ones who qualify for the yearly national masters meet; the ones who hold records.

We have our folks who are good to hang with.

And everybody contributes points to the final outcome. Everyone fills out the team.

3. Aging up.

Those of us who do not routinely place high at championships get satisfaction by competing against our previous times. If we improve over a prior time, we’re glad.

This improvement can’t be taken for granted. When you compete when you’re a child, moving up to a new age group is a fraught event, because suddenly you are competing against older children who have had more time to develop strength and skill. That puts you at a relative disadvantage, which you overcome in time, until you age up again.

It’s different with we older swimmers. Aging up is a good thing, because aging up means competing against folk who are, well, getting older. People always seem glad when they’re about to age up.

But this gladness exploits our universal habit of slow decline. So in the midst of the vigor that our workouts and our competition represent, in the midst of our celebration of strength and skill – and these are joys – there is this whispered reminder of mortality.

I don’t know why someone hasn’t done a video documentary on masters swimming. The season goes year-round. They could start in the spring, and focus on the younger swimmers. They could follow the meets into the fall, and focus on the older swimmers. It would be a film of effort and joy in the passing of seasons.

Some swimmers compete into their nineties. They even compete in distance events, like the 1500 meters freestyle (a race of almost a mile). They compete even when someone else needs to stand next to them at the starting block for them to hold onto to steady themselves.

You see in these meets a strand, a sense of turning the clock back. In the fact of competition itself, in the physical effort, we older swimmers invade the prerogative of youth. This turning-back also shows in a sometime-sense of playfulness. Some of the seasoned women on the Las Vegas team wore to keep warm knitted caps patterned after animals. I told one woman that I liked her pink pig with its purple nose.

4. Olympic hero.

Olympic heros show up. This year it was Matt Biondi, an Olympic champion from the Olympics of 1984, 1988, and 1992. Word spread that this swimming standout-great would be at the meet.

He swam in the 50 meters butterfly and 50 meters freestyle. People left their seats to stand and watch from the deck as he stood behind his starting block, ready to race. Some people were surprised at how lanky he was.

In both of his races, he raced in the last heat, which is the fastest heat. In those heats, he raced against much younger men. He didn’t win his heats, but he lost only by one-or-two tenths of a second. In the butterfly, he was 6/100th of a second off the world record for his age group. Wikipedia calls him a "former competition swimmer", but someone should change that.

5. Triumphs.

I was on two first-place relay teams. Before winning my relay-team medals, I happened to compliment a teammate when I saw two medals dangling from their neck-bands in his hand. He was dismissive: "They’re only for relays".

This is a guy who’s been generous to me with suggestions for my stroke technique, so I know that he has an interest in others. But he seemed to – seemed to – embrace the common idea that only personal glory really matters. Some people live by, "Don’t touch my things." I prefer the old-time, American national motto: e pluribus unum ("out of many one"). So I will be glad of my relay-team medals.

While a teammate videotaped us, in imitation of Olympic glory, I stood with two of my winning relay-teammates with our medals around our necks, and we sang The Star Spangled Banner. (Our fourth had left.) One of us seemed to mumble the words; well, he's Canadian. One of us started chorus-line kicking to the national anthem, so I joined him in that. Then, with my free hand, I pantomimed the words. The singing showed poor planning – we started singing in a middle register, which was catastrophic on the high notes.

That video is now posted to Facebook. It’s amusing. But since many Americans are deadly serious about our national anthem, it pretty much guarantees that I can never run for public office. At least not in a district where people lack a sense of humor.

6. An embarrassment.

Personally, I was happy with some of my times, but the meet was not an un-alloyed triumph, even by my modest standards. I was disqualified in the 400 meters individual medely.

The error was on my backstroke leg. The modern backstroke flipturn involves rolling onto your stomach before the wall and flipping to plant your feet on the wall, then pushing from the wall, once again on your back. This is new to me – we didn’t do it that way when I was a kid. Apparently, you have to start your flip immediately after you roll onto your stomach. I glided too long before starting the flip.

The next leg was breaststroke, and as I swam it, I happened to see the referee at the foot of my lane, writing on my entry sheet. I finished the race, but I dialed back my effort after I saw that I had come to the referee’s attention.

It wasn’t a happy moment to be disqualified; but it didn’t crush me like it would have many decades ago. That’s one of the benefit of being a low-intensity swimmer. Or just being older. Fortunately, the high-intensity swimmers tend to avoid the mistakes that we low-intensity folks make. They tend to.

7. Gathering with friends.

It’s a joy to compete with a team. It’s camaraderie; it’s mutual encouragement and aid; it’s shared success and shared happiness. It’s spending time with people from different backgrounds and different national origins and with different ideals. I like my teammates, and I wish them well in life.

A Christian Defense of Roe v. Wade

I walk more in ignorance than in knowledge. When I don’t feel this way, I take it on faith.

I try to live my life as if the Bible were the inspired word of God; I believe that it is. I read it faithfully. I read it to learn how to live. I read it to know God better.

But I wrestle with it. If it’s inspired by the Holy Spirit, as I believe it is, I have no simple answer about why this inspired book has two different descriptions of the death of Judas Iscariot, one in Matthew and one in Acts. I have no simple answer about why Paul, John, and Luke can’t agree about who was the first person to see Christ risen from the dead. I have no simple answer about why the man of God Paul thinks that women are innately more sinful than men, as he suggests in his first letter to Timothy; yet with all the men that lived in Judea in the time described by the Book of Acts, God chose to speak to the daughters of Phillip the Evangelist, who were prophets. And with all the men in ancient Israel, he raised up Deborah in her time, who was both a wartime leader and a prophet. (I consider not accidental Paul's attitude toward women and his assertion that Peter was the first to meet the risen Christ. John says it was Mary Magdalene.)

Once when I was young and well-traveled in the Bible, I explained to my brother Peter that I felt that I could answer any theological question. He promptly asked me a question that I could not answer.

It’s a good working hypothesis that I’m prone to error.

So I hope that I approach with due humility an area of much controversy. There is a rough divide between Republicans and Democrats over the issue of right-to-life versus freedom-of-choice. It’s a controversy that some right-leaning Republicans use to paint Democrats as innately un-godly. When a Democrat prevails in the contest for the White House, I imagine conservative Christians crying out, "Why, O God, and how long?"

Bless their piety, and bless their yearning for God’s will on Earth. May I be blessed in the penumbra of their faith.

I make here a Christian case for Roe v. Wade.

1. A fundamental concept: the image of God.

 This is my core concept to assay the rightness or wrongness of abortion: that mankind is created in the image of God.

This concept appears in the first chapter of the Bible:

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. [Genesis 1:27 (NIV).]
More pertinently, Genesis chapter 9:
"Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind." [Genesis 9:6 (NIV).]
The question is: at what point does the unborn acquire the image of God, such that destruction of the unborn is murder?

2. "Created in the image of God": what does this mean?

The meaning "image of God" is not self-evident. Certainly, Genesis speaks of God as walking in the Garden of Eden as a man would, so that in some sense it can be taken literally – we physically resemble God, and he physically resembles us. This is true at least when he chooses a corporeal form.

The concept of created in the image of God might also foreshadow the incarnation of God as a man. Jesus was one with God, and he looked, fundamentally, like we do.

So there is a literal way in which humankind bears the image of God.

But mere physical resemblance doesn’t satisfy. There must be a mystical way in which humankind bears God’s image; but what is that mystical way isn’t clear. It’s not necessarily the capacity for moral judgment, because God created humankind in his image before humankind ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Nor is it moral purity, the state of innocense before the fall. This is true because God proclaimed humankind to be made in his image as he spoke to Noah, and that was after the fall of humankind. (Genesis chapter 9.)

This condition of bearing God’s image has persisted through history. Jesus was asked whether it was right to pay taxes. Jesus asked who's image was on a coin. He was told that Caesar's image was on a coin. So Jesus said to give to Caesar what was Caesar's, and to God what was God's. The kicker to that story is that while Caesar's image was stamped on the coin, we ourselves bear the image of God.

And then we crucified Christ.

Maybe there is a good and precise and satisfying answer to the question of the full meaning of "created the image of God." I don’t have it.

3. "Created in the image of God": what it doesn’t mean.

But I doubt that the meaning of "created in the image of God" reposes in a genetic sequence of DNA. And at the time of fertilization, that is the zygotes’s sole claim to being human. It doesn’t look human; it doesn’t have a mind. It isn’t aware of itself or its surroundings, and in that way it is less human-like than any variety of fully-formed mammal.

Being uncertain of the precise meaning of "created in the image of God", I lack a clear idea of when in the chain of existence between a human zygote and an infant that breathes air – I have no clear idea of when in that chain of existence a fertilized human egg becomes the "image of God". I do trust that there is a time between these states that a fertilized egg – a zygote – ceases to be mere tissue. I do not believe that that moment necessarily comes at the moment that the father’s DNA mixes with the mother’s.

4. Roe v. Wade and emerging human-ness.

Roe v. Wade acknowledges this. Roe v. Wade is clear: government's interest in forbidding the artificial ending of a pregnancy expands as the pregnancy proceeds. I find this analysis to be intuitively and morally defensible.

 Therefore, the mother has greatest freedom of choice to end a pregnancy at the beginning of it. The government has the greatest freedom to protect the unborn at the end of the pregnancy. In between lies judicial and legislative line-drawing.

5. The reason for this piece.

These words appear near the beginning of the majority opinion of Roe v. Wade, written by Justice Harry Blackmun. They acknowledge strong feelings against abortion and suggest the legitimacy of those feelings.
We forthwith acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions about abortion. That was true then; it’s true now.

This piece isn’t designed to stir up anger or hard feelings. But I have a friend who as a young man got his girlfriend pregnant. He helped her get an abortion. For this, he considers himself literally to be a murderer. I hope that this piece is balm to him and to others like him.

Some pregnant women have been poor, ill, crushed by shame, or all three of those. They were financially or emotionally or physically unable of bringing the unborn to term. I hope that this piece is balm to women like them who have made a hard choice and now feel guilty.

I write this so that my conservative friends might consider that Roe v. Wade was not defiance of the will of God but a reflection of it. I hope that some who are mystified by the moral blindness of persons who support a woman’s right to choose to end a pregnancy might see that there are godly arguments on the side of choice, so that they don’t judge others harshly.

I acknowledge that there are arguments that persons who oppose Roe v. Wade can make, and that those arguments have moral force. Certainly, abortion would not exist in a perfect world. But rightly or wrongly I believe that abortion has a place in this imperfect world, within some of the limits outlined by Justice Blackmun and his majority four decades ago

Bloody Hand: the Sacrifice that God did not Stop

You could say that Jephthah’s daughter was wronged by the world, by her father, and by God. But her death has meaning across the millennia.

1. The story of Jephthah’s daughter’s death.

Jephthah was a judge – a leader – of ancient Israel. Surprisingly for a man who rose to that position, he was the son of a prostitute. His story is told in the biblical Book of Judges, starting at chapter 11. One part of his story is the death of his daughter, his only child.

Jephthah and Israel warred with the Ammonites. Jephthah vowed to God that if God gave him victory over the Ammonites, whatever emerged from his door on his return from battle he would sacrifice as a burnt offering. God gave him victory. His daughter emerged from his door to greet him. She emerged dancing.

Jephthah wanted to renege on his vow; his daughter would not let him. Instead, she asked that she be permitted to go up into the mountains for two months with her friends, who mourned with her that she would never marry. Then she returned and submitted to her father’s knife. She became smoke from an alter.

This gave rise to a tradition in Israel. At a certain season, daughters of Israel left for four days to commemorate Jephthah’s daughter.

This was right. These daughters had much to commemorate, much to mourn, for Jephthah’s daughter and themselves.

2. Much to mourn: proxies.

They could mourn because of the Ammonites. The Ammonites are a proxy for all wars, wars that devoured the loved ones of women and devoured women themselves. Maybe the Ammonites, a proxy for war, are also a proxy for all violence against women by strangers. They are a proxy for all such rapes, beatings, and robberies. They are a proxy for the recent attempted assassination of Malala Yousufzai by the Taliban, men who were incensed that a girl such as she should speak out to an international audience against their ban on the education of girls like herself. Malala Yousufzai and Jephthah’s daughter might have been the same age.

The Ammonites, like the Taliban, were an outside force. But Jephthah was no outsider; he was his daughter’s father. So the daughters of Israel could also mourn because of Jephthah. Jephthah’s rash vow led to his daughter’s death. In this way, he is a proxy for all violence against women by the hands of a near person. He is a proxy for incest, intimate rape, beating by a husband or brother. He is a proxy for honor killings, practiced today in some parts of the world.

The daughters of Israel could mourn because of God. Jephthah’s daughter is like Isaac, but also unlike. God told Abraham, Isaac's father, to sacrifice Isaac. But at the last moment, God stopped Abraham’s knife-hand from slicing into the flesh of Isaac. But at the last moment, God did not release Jephthah from his rash vow.

3. Much to mourn: the virtue of Jephthah’s daughter.

The daughters of Israel could mourn because of the death of someone as good as Jephthah’s daughter. Jephthah’s daughter is a Job-like figure. She was virtuous. She did not complain: she plainly saw that Jephthah had to fulfill his vow. She accepted death resolutely.

She had the virtue of Job. In fact, she suffered more deeply than Job. Job’s family, wealth, and health were taken from him. But Job was permitted to live; Jephthah's daughter was not. In this way, everything that was taken from Job was taken from Jephthah’s daughter. She lost her family, she lost the comforts of life. She lost everything that she cherished when she gave herself to her father’s knife.

And calamity fell upon Job. Suddenly it was there. But Jephthah’s daughter submitted to it. She went up into the mountains to mourn with her friends. After two months, the agreed time, she came down from the mountains.

4. Much to mourn: the love of Jephthah’s daughter.

And see who Jephthah’s daughter loved and feared. She loved her father. She accepted death for his sake, so that he would not go back on his vow to God.

She loved her nation. She accepted death for its sake, so that the leader of her nation would not incur guilt on its behalf by going back on a vow to God.

She loved her friends. She chose to prepare to die by going with them up into the mountains for two months to mourn. In a way, this foreshadows the Last Supper, where Jesus had fellowship with his disciples on the night that he knew he would be taken captive to be crucified.

She feared God. She realized that a vow to God had to be respected, had to be fulfilled. God was large to her, larger even than her love of life.

5. The meaning of Jephthah’s daughter: eternity.

There’s more to the story of Jephthah’s daughter than sorrow and love.

The Bible does not say the season when this story took place. But it appears that in Old Testament times there were fighting seasons, as there are in Afghanistan today. In the biblical book of 2 Samuel, the story of King David and Bathsheba is introduced with the phrase, "In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war . . ..." (NIV.) This story took place after that fighting season, when Jephthah returned from war.

Summer is suggested by other circumstances aside from fighting seasons. Jephthah’s daughter and her friends retreated to the mountains for two months. It's likely that the mountains teemed with food; certainly Jephthah's daughter and her friends would not have carried two months worth of food into the mountains.

This meant that Jephthah’s daughter was in the wilderness in the season of nature’s aliveness. On the edge of death, in that two months, maybe she contemplated the seasons, the yearly cycle of life and death in nature. Maybe she saw in this eternal cycle a hope of the renewal of her own life, like the renewal of life in the growing seasons. The succinct biblical narrative does not say.

Jephthah’s daughter is not known by name. I don’t know why. It might be that by the time that the story was written down, her name had been consumed in the forgetfulness of years.

But one thing is certain: she is known to God. And he is the God of the living, not the dead.

Arrogance and Humility and America and the President

A friend of mine said that people today don't value humility, at least not in themselves. I wonder if she isn’t right. Yet clearly arrogant is in our ammunition-case of insults, and we are glad to hurl it at people whom we hate. Maybe humility is a quality we value in others, but we don’t value it in ourselves, as if we were saying: "Why should I be humble if I’m perfect?"

In a Facebook discussion-thread, I offered one of my blog posts. A conservative participant in the discussion called it arrogant. That surprised me, because I thought that my post was meek and self-critical. I regret that I did not ask this conservative to point to something arrogant in the post; maybe that would have caused him to read it.

What quality in a person permits him to judge a writing without reading it?

1. Arrogance, Accusation, and Barack Obama.

Arrogant is an insult often flung at President Barack Obama. Here’s a link to a video of Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie accusing the president of arrogance.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/10/22/Chris-Christie-Unloads-On-Arrogant-Obama-If-He-Cant-Change-Washington-What-The-Hell-Is-He-Doing

Christie said:
If you don’t think you can change Washington from inside the White House, then let’s give you the plane ticket back to Chicago you have earned. I mean that is a scary thing for the President of the United States to say, isn’t it? It shows his arrogance. If he really believes that, if he believes that, then what the hell is he doing asking for another four years?"
This is the episode in which Christie said that Obama is like a man in a dark room groping for the light-switch of leadership and not finding it. But now Christie has famously praised Obama for his, um, leadership and for his outstanding service to the people of Christie’s state who were overwhelmed by Hurricane Sandy.

A Google search of the words arrogant and Obama yields 14,400,000 results. That of course is a very loose metric, and naturally I can’t describe the content of the 12,301,404^th result. But even if those numbers are a very loose metric, they might be a good metaphor for some people’s ideas about Obama. Christie’s accusation that Obama is arrogant was well received because it is widely believed.

And here’s the thing: it is widely believed by people who know Barack Obama less well than Governor Christie knew Barack Obama before Hurricane Sandy put them in each other’s admiration. It is widely believed by people who know Barack Obama no better than my conservative accuser knew my blog post before he called it arrogant.

What quality in a person permits him to judge another person without knowing him?

2. Barack Obama and arrogance.

And yet, without knowing Barack Obama, I worry that the accusation might be right.

This worry is not based on any particular action. But I look upon the presidency, and I wonder how any person can hold that office and not be arrogant. It is an office with great power. And the president appears before huge crowds of cheering people. On a whim, a Marine helicopter and an Air Force jet take him wherever he wants to go. Many people look upon him with awe. World leaders crave a visit from him.

Yet I think of Abraham Lincoln as a man who occupied the presidency and remained humble. But Lincoln was an amazing man. And he had known hardship and sorrow, and these imprint humility upon a soul.

Lincoln knew hardship and sorrow before he came to the White House, and he knew hardship and sorrow in the White House. His young son died there. And he was commander-in-chief of a powerful army that bled and failed in battle time after time. I doubt that Lincoln shared the hubris of many Northern citizens who believed at the start of the Civil War that the South would be subdued quickly and easily. But if he had that delusion, events stripped it from him.

Barack Obama has not known the sorrows of Lincoln, nor his hardships. But he must bear the insults and hatred of many people, including a massive right-wing opinion-generating machine, which he has little influence over. Even the liberal press insults him; I think that I have heard few conservative pundits abuse Obama much more than liberal pundit Keith Olbermann did.

And in his first term Obama found himself opposed in almost all things by unified Congressional Republicans who, if you believe Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, made their first priority Obama’s defeat in the 2012 election. Obama was not helpless against their opposition, but strong opposition itself, that you have to struggle against, can teach humility because it makes you to know the limits of your power.

As a lawyer who has been crushed in court, I know this.

And the authority of American citizens to turn Obama out of office must give some humility to a president. And Mitt Romney’s triumph over the president in the first 2012 general-election debate must have humbled the president who came out of it damaged, with his reelection in doubt.

3. And yet.

The humbling experiences of the reelection campaign aside, it must be a heady thing to win reelection. With triumph hubris can come. In that way lies danger.

King David was a king of the ancient Jewish kingdom of Israel. He had been anointed for kingship by the prophet Samuel, and the kingdom was taken away from King Saul and given to David. For many years, David lived under threat of death from Saul, until Saul died in battle and David took control of Israel. In this time he knew that he survived by God’s power. But David forgot to be humble after he came into his kingship.

In addition to being handsome, powerful, rich, and blessed, David was a great writer of psalms to God. I wonder if he had just finished writing a particularly excellent psalm before he committed the moral blunder that gave him great grief and great turmoil in his kingdom for the rest of his reign. This episode is described in the biblical book of 2 Samuel, starting at chapter 11.

David had a romantic relationship with beautiful Bathsheba while her husband Uriah was off at war. She conceived. Adultery was punished by death in that time and place. So David worked to fix the crisis that his hubris had brought about.

He called Uriah back from war on a pretext, and then he encouraged Uriah to refresh himself with his wife’s company. The idea was to attribute Batshsheba’s child to Uriah. Loyal Uriah refused to enjoy himself while others were at war, so David’s scheme failed. So David arranged to have Uriah killed in battle; then he hastily married Bathsheba.

David’s crime was discovered. Hubris became humility. Psalm 51 is David’s plea to God for forgiveness for his crime. It is a model of contrition and hope for we who fall.

I don’t know Obama. He might be humble, not given to ego. Maybe his wife sees and undermines any uprising of hubris in her husband. I don’t know. I know people with opinions about Obama’s hubris or his lack of it, but I don’t personally know anybody with real knowledge on that subject.

But I don’t want the president to have a David-and-Bathsheba moment, in whatever shape it might come.

4. Against arrogance.

So I am thankful for the opposition that Obama faces. It curtails any sense of omnipotence that he might have.

I am thankful that he has opposition in Congress. When the final electoral count is in, the Republican Party stands to lose seats in the House of Representatives, but they will keep majority-control of it. As a Democrat, I regretted this electoral outcome, but I see in it a moral boon for our president.

I am thankful that we have an independent judiciary. In the next four years, the president will be subject to it. One of the president’s controversial plans will likely come before the Supreme Court. Obamacare calls for all employers, including secular institutions run by religious bodies, to furnish, through insurance, birth control to their employees who are women. Some churches that run hospitals and universities cry against this as an invasion of religious freedom.

I support the president’s policy, but I see the boon to his character in the humility of being subject to the last word from the courts. I would regret it if the law were struck down. But were that to happen, it might be blessing to the president to be curtailed in this way, if un-checked power made him think more highly of himself than he ought to.

I am thankful for international opposition. To be sure, I don’t think America is always right and good, but compared to countries that jail and starve their political opponents, rape with their armies, and ignore or curtail democracy, I consider America to be a bright light. For example, I am proud of the anti-Aids program started under President Bush. It was good, it was generous, it was benevolent, and it will always stand as a credit to him.

As a country, we have done wrong, and we have done right. But the point here is that international opposition, right or wrong, helps to keep us and our president humble.

5. Prayer.

So for the sake of his soul and for the sake of America, I grudgingly welcome hardships for the president.

I also pray for the president. I pray for his family. I pray for his wisdom and his humility, and for other blessings. I would have prayed these things for Mitt Romney if he had won, but Obama won, so I pray these things for him. (I still pray for Romney.)

I hope that my friends and even my conservative friends will join me in that. If we join in prayer for the president to be wise and humble, how can that possibly lead to evil? And much good might come of it.

Journey

1. Remembering a journey.

One summer over two decades ago, I journeyed to the summit of Mount Whitney. It’s 14,505 feet above sea level. As I climbed I exhaled all of my strength into the thin air. The long last effort to the summit was painful. It was hard to keep going. I wanted to quit.

My face was a mask of agony. Except that a mask conceals what is beneath it. But the mask of agony that I wore exactly showed what I felt in every square inch of my body and psyche.

Then I got to the top. It was a joy to be there. I felt grand and happy.

On the journey down from the summit, I met people going up with faces that were, like mine before, masks of agony. That was everybody that I met.

I said what I could to encourage them. I wanted them to succeed. I wanted them to know that the joy of the destination made the agony of the journey completely worthwhile.

2. Journeys of the Bible.

The Bible is a book of journeys.

Adam and Eve journey from Eden to exile with a cherubim with a flaming sword behind them barring the way to the tree of life. The patriarch Abraham journeys from his home to the wilderness to make a pact with God. His grandson Jacob flees from his other grandson, angry Esau. Jacob flees rather than stay to be cut down. After many years, he journeys back to a joyful reunion with Esau. Along the way, he wrestles with God.

He and his children journey to Egypt to escape a famine. His son Joseph journeys there first, sold into slavery by his jealous brothers. The rest of the family follows after.

After four hundred years, Moses murders an Egyptian and flees to Midian. Then God reveals himself to Moses in a bush that burns but is not consumed. Moses journeys back to Egypt to lead his enslaved people out of Egypt.

The children of Israel journey in the Sinai for forty years. When it's time for that wandering to end, God stops the waters of the Jordan River, and they cross over dry river-bottom into their inheritance.

The Israelites stay in one place for hundreds of years. In that time, they fall away from God. Then the Israelites go on a new journey – into exile and captivity. After seven decades, a remnant journeys back to the land of their ancestors.

Jesus was itinerant. His story begins with his mother Mary, with child by the Holy Spirit, journeying to visit her elderly kinswoman Elizabeth, who is pregnant with the child who will become John the Baptist. Jesus is born after his parents journey to Bethlehem. The spirit of God tells Jesus’s earthly father Joseph to take his family and flee to Egypt. After the death of King Herod, they journey from Egypt to Nazareth.

Jesus in his time of ministry does not stay in one place. He journeys from city to city, from town to town, and into the wilderness. He journeys to Jerusalem to die.

Mary Magdalene journeys to Jesus’s tombs with spices to make fragrant his corpse. There Jesus, risen from the dead, greets her. He tells her to go and tell the others. A number of disciples journey to see the empty tomb.

The Book of Acts is a book of journeys. It largely chronicles the journeys of Paul to spread the good news of Christianity. It ends with Paul’s journey to Rome, where by tradition his journey ends in martyrdom.

3. The journey to the golden city.

Some Christians believe that heaven comes to them. But Christianity is a journey, a journey like the journeys described in the Bible. It’s a journey to God.

It’s a journey that begins with the decision to make the journey.

On the journey, most pilgrims meet up with other people also making the journey. Such a caravan of pilgrims is called a church.

On the journey, the pilgrim gains skills for the journey. The pilgrim learns about the journeys of others by reading the Bible and in other ways. The pilgrim learns things useful for his or her own journey.

On the journey, the pilgrim learns to pray. Prayer enlists the help of God in the journey; it can help others, too. It may lead to the pilgrim being consciously guided on the journey by God.

Some pilgrims end their journeys too soon. Some stop believing in the heavenly city that lies at the end of the journey. Some think that the journey is a waste of time – they think that God will be along for them with no effort of their own. And that might or might not be true, but that doesn’t mean that God wants his pilgrims to stop advancing on heaven. (But there are seasons of rest.)

Some of us journey in the wrong direction. Some of us journey in circles. Some of us give up or get distracted or grow complacent. I have known giving up.

When we finally give up the ghost, if God finds us along the way where he wants us to be, that is an act of his grace – grace in guidance, grace in strength, grace in faith, and just plain grace.

For each of us, our life, if it is lived well, is lived in movement. That journey might at times be uphill and hard. Mine has been. Life has been like that for many of my friends. But there’s joy at the summit.

God and Rape.

More people talk about God than know about God. When it comes to God, we are all, as Marilynne Robinson says, biased toward error.

1. Suffering and the Book of Job.

That’s one of the points of the Book of Job. Job was a righteous man. God loved him. God boasted of him. But God permitted Satan to afflict him. And Satan afflicted him. It was a mauling.

As grief flayed a ruined Job, Job’s friends added to Job’s suffering by pouring the salt of their theology over his raw, wounded spirit. They said that God himself had ruined Job, and that God was in the right. They told Job that it followed that Job was in the wrong. Job defended himself to his friends and to his God.

At the end of the Book of Job, God restores Job. At the end, God addresses Job’s friends. He tells them that they are wrong and Job is right. He commands them to go to Job and offer up a sacrifice of seven bulls and seven rams. God tells them that Job will pray for them, and that God will not deal with them according to their folly, because God will hear the prayers of Job.

2. Richard Mourdock, rape, and the will of God.

Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said, "[E]ven when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." Based on this belief, he justifies denying a woman the right to end a pregnancy in a case of rape.

Now, that is not quite blaming the victim; that does not go quite as far as Job’s friends. But it’s not only that Job’s friends judged Job. It’s also that they presumed to tell a person who suffered why he was suffering. In saying what he said, Mourdock sits in the seat of Job’s friends.

But suffering-and-God’s-will is a great mystery. Maybe it’s a mystery that cannot be explained, only known, and only known by experience and reflection. 

Everybody should be humble about the suffering of others. That's Job. Certainly, we should be careful about giving to one who suffers the book on suffering.

I’m glad for my suffering. It has made me, by the grace of God, wiser. And it gives me a little knowledge of suffering. But if a friend of mine suffers, I hope that I would have the wisdom and compassion to weep with them, rather then to piously heap on them my pious ideas.

4. Some questions for Mr. Mourdock.

And it’s not the case that Mr. Mourdock’s ideas about God are self-evident. Some questions arise about Mr. Mourdock’s theology. If rape is the will of God, does somebody who talks a would-be rapist out of raping thwart the will of God? Or is the fact that an intention is carried out proof that God willed that act? If that’s true, why would a rapist’s choice be the will of God, but a woman’s choice after rape would not be?

5. Suffering.

I’m going to do the thing I speak against. I’m going to dip into theology of suffering.

The Book of Job notwithstanding, the idea of blame for suffering persists, and it persisted in the time of Jesus. Jesus’s disciples saw a man born blind, and they asked Jesus, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:2 (NIV).)

Jesus replied, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him." Then he spat on the ground, made mud with the spit, and pasted it on the blind man’s eyes. Then he told the man to wash the mud in a particular pool. The man gained sight.

This account says tells me that suffering doesn’t call for empty speculation; it calls for mercy and action.

6. Mercy.

Job’s friends put themselves at the mercy of Job and God. Mourdock puts himself at the mercy of rape victims and God. He needs to make his propitiation to God, and he needs to hope for the prayers of victims of rape all over the world and across time. Their pain is not fuel for him to burn under them for their choices.

If those who have been raped, and especially those who have been raped and who have had to make hard choices after being raped – if those women have the good and strong heart to forgive Richard Mourdock and to pray for him, God bless them.

The Christian Case for Barack Obama

Three Christian principles call for Americans to give Barack Obama four more years.

1. Principle: spirit over technology.

This election presents a clear choice. It's the choice between technology and spirit.

The technocratic candidate is Mitt Romney. He’s the candidate of managerial competence. He proved his managerial competence by making his fortune at Bain Capital, and he promises to bring that same skill-set to the White House. He sloughs off demands for detail and explanation. His answer is: trust me; I know how to do this.

Romney’s history illustrates the triumph of technocratic solutions over spiritual solutions. Here’s a technocratic solution: when you travel to Canada with the family dog, put the dog in a cage on the roof of your station wagon. If distress gives the dog diarrhea, drive into a service station, hose off the dog, and put him back on the roof, still in the wind but now wet.

Barack Obama is the candidate of compassion. Compassion is spiritual. Compassion is passing a law so that sick people don’t die because they are poor, and so that sickness doesn’t send middle-class people to bankruptcy because they couldn’t get insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Compassion is pushing to extend unemployment insurance for the out-of-work. Compassion is making sure that women get equal pay for equal work. Compassion is spending money to educate Americans for high-skill, high-pay jobs. Compassion is risking money to save the American auto industry, to save the livelihoods of many.

2. Truth over lies.

All campaigns step on the truth. But one of the presidential campaigns builds upon a core of falsehood.

The Republican National Convention dedicated a day of its three-day convention to the exploitation of Obama’s statement "If you have a business – you didn’t build that."

I’ve listened to Obama's speech. I’ve read transcripts of that comment and the words that surround it. And so has the Romney campaign. I know and they know that the "that" in that statement was infrastructure and other benefits that businesses get from government. These benefits permit businesses to thrive. These benefits include roads to make shipping easy and efficient. They include public schools that make an educated workforce.

Anyone who listens to any significant chunk of Obama’s speech instead of the famous sliver of it knows what the president really said. The Romney campaign trusted that most people had heard only the exacto-knifed sliver of that speech. The Romney campaign showed the emptiness at its core when it built a day of the RNC convention upon a lie.

3. Principle: the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.

Everyone should want a president who has known hardship. Everyone should be suspicious of a candidate who has led a gilded life. With a candidate who has known hardship, we know that when we go through hard times, he will understand. We can trust that from that understanding action will come.

So it’s a plus that Barack Obama’s father abandoned his family when Obama was a toddler. It’s a plus that his mother was on food stamps for a time. It’s a plus that he made his own way through college. It makes his climb to heights more impressive, but it also gives us reassurance that he knows not only the view from the top down, but the view from the bottom up.

To Barack Obama, hardship is not something he grudgingly studied in an assigned Charles Dickens novel, which he then put back on the shelf.

If you haven’t known hardship, you don’t see problems the same way as someone who has known hardship. If masses of people are losing their homes, that might be alright with you, as it was to Romney. His "solution": let the market bottom out, and have investors buy up homes at a bargain. The people who used to have the dignity of their own homes could pay rent to the investors who raked in their homes at bargain prices.

If you haven’t known hardship, you don’t risk taxpayer money to save the auto industry and to save jobs, as Obama did.

If you haven’t known hardship, you don’t commit money to making educational opportunities for people so that Americans can take the high-skill, high-pay jobs of the future, like Obama did. Your education model is Texas, where the guiding principle is thrift, and the result is a population prepared for low-skill labor.

4. Christians: vote your values!

If you believe in the spiritual over the technocratic, this election should be easy for you. If you believe in truth over lies, your decision is made. If you believe that a leader is stronger for having lived through both good times and bad, you have a candidate.

The Stoning of Shelomith’s Son

If people think of the biblical Book of Leviticus, they usually don’t think of love. Leviticus, after all, is the book of the Bible that says that the penalty for killing a person is death. It is literally the book of eye-for-an-eye.

Yet it is also the book where the command first appears to "love your neighbor as yourself." It commands kind and fair treatment of the aliens among the Israelites. There is a commandment not to pick clean a field, but to leave some remainders of its grain or fruit for aliens and the poor to glean.

And there is a story that at first seems to illustrate harshness. But it also a sorrowful story of love.

1. The story of Shelomith’s son, part 1.

The story involves a man who in a fight blasphemed against God. Here is the story from Leviticus 24:

10 Now the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and a fight broke out in the camp between him and an Israelite. 11 The son of the Israelite woman blasphemed the Name with a curse; so they brought him to Moses. (His mother’s name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri the Danite.) 12 They put him in custody until the will of the Lord should be made clear to them.

13 Then the Lord said to Moses: 14 "Take the blasphemer outside the camp. All those who heard him are to lay their hands on his head, and the entire assembly is to stone him. [NIV.]

The man was stoned to death.

This might seem like a straightforward tale of crime and punishment. But it’s not. It solicits compassion from the reader.

That’s true for a couple of reasons. There’s enough detail in this story that a thoughtful reader can see the side of the nameless blasphemer. For example, we know that his father was Egyptian. Entering into this tale with imagination, we can see what his life might have been like among the Israelites.

He was the son of one of the oppressors from whom God rescued Israel. How much was he accepted by his mother’s people? How much was he an outsider? How much was daily provocation a catalyst of the fight that he got into?

I believe that when the Bible gives a detail, it gives it for a reason. So I believe that the story suggests that this unnamed man’s life was hard, his life was lonely, he felt like an outsider, and the fight might not have been completely his fault.

And because he was an outsider, he might have believed that the God of Israel was not his God. At least, he might have thought that God was not his God like God was the God of the insiders who made him feel like less than them.

So in his rage he was provoked to fatal speech about that God. Again, the otherwise unimportant details of this story invite the reader to see why this hot-blooded man might have blasphemed foolishly.

There’s more. Aside from Moses, one person in that story is named. The name of the blasphemer is lost to memory. The name of the man he fought is lost to memory. The names of the witnesses to the fight and to the stoning are lost to memory. The names of the ones who threw the stones are lost to memory. But we know the name of the blasphemer’s mother; her name was Shelomith.

There was a point to giving her name. By naming her, and by naming her alone, Leviticus directs the reader to think on her. It’s like a picture, and everyone is shown in black-and-white except for Shelomith, who is shown in color. This focus on her invites us to weigh her response to this tragedy.

Her husband, the Egyptian, very well might have stayed in the comfort of Egypt, rather than to pack his bags with the slaves. If that’s true, then it might have been  that Shelomith's future support and welfare depended largely on her son. The loss of him would have been everything to her, even beyond the natural love she had for her son.

So this is not a simple morality tale of just deserts. It’s a tale of sorrow.

2. The story of Shelomith’s son: Part 2.

This is an exercise in imagination, about the stoning of Shelomith’s son.

Shelomith’s son missed his father. His father had said, "Why should I carry my property in a cart with slaves into the wilderness instead of eating melons in my own land?" But Shelomith’s son went with his mother.

But if he was his mother’s son, he was also the son of an Egyptian, and it was rare for him to have friends among his mother’s people. For that matter, his mother too was slighted for her marriage to an Egyptian. People said, "Were the men among her own people hiding down a well? Did she have to marry with a cock that broke our backs?"

Shelomith’s son and his mother were kind to each other. Few others were.

Shelomith’s son herded goats. On this day, he was bringing his goats back from watering them. He suffered the usual taunts. The taunts were about himself, about his father, about his mother.

Close to his tent, he passed one of his usual provokers. The words stung. They always stung. Every time he took an insult and did not respond, he felt a little of his manhood slip away.

A kinsman of his mother was nearby. He was big, beefy, handsome, and he was younger that Shelomiths’s son. Shelomith’s son always assumed that this kinsman would get a good marriage. His family was well regarded, unlike his own.

The kinsman stepped beside Shelomith’s son and put his hand on his shoulder. He told the taunter to settle down – to leave alone this son of his kinswoman.

Shelomith’s son eyed his kinsman. However the kinsman meant his intervention, to Shelomith’s son it was condescension. It was a pronouncement that Shelomith’s son needed to be defended by his big, beefy, handsome, young kinsman.

Shelomith’s son slapped his kinsman. He slapped him across the face.

Shelomith’s son discovered that that felt good. He tried to do it again, but his kinsman pushed away the second slap. And he pushed away every slap after that that Selomith’s son tried to land on him.

Finally, the kinsman raised his fist as if he were going to strike Shelomith’s son. When Shelomith’s son ducked his head to avoid the blow, the kinsman locked his strong arm around Shelomith’s son’s head. Shelomith’s son wrestled furiously to escape, but his kinsman was too big and strong. A crowd gathered. Finally, Shelomith’s son stopped struggling. Then his kinsman pushed him to the ground.

Shelomith’s son lost any remaining dignity when he landed first on his buttocks and then on his back. His head struck a fist-sized rock, hurting him further.

He clambered to his feet. He shouted, "I spit on your God! I spit in the face of your God!"

The crowd erupted. Shelomith’s son suddenly was afraid. The crowd surged at him and grabbed him. He couldn’t move. Then they bound his hands and feet and lay him on his stomach.

They carried him to Moses. Shelomith’s son waited on his face. Then Moses pronounced judgment. The crowed carried Shelomith’s son, still bound, out of the camp.

There, he lay on his back surrounded by many. He could see faces. Some were angry. Some were glad. Some were grim. Some were blank.

He saw his kinsman. His kinsman’s face was sorrow.

Back in the crowd, he caught a glimpse of his mother. Compared to his kinsman, her face was a mirror of deeper sorrow. And Shelomith’s son knew that she could not save him; nor, in years to come, could he protect her or comfort her.

Then the stones came.

3. The implications of the stoning of Shelomith’s son.

I believe that we are supposed to feel compassion for Shelomith and her son.

In times to come, we would see this compassion in Jesus. Men of high position would wonder aggressively why, if he was a righteous man, he spent time with sinners. Simon the Pharisee would wonder why, if Jesus were a prophet, he permitted an immoral woman to bathe his feet with tears and wash them with her hair.

Jesus was invited to condone the stoning of the women caught in adultery. He saved her life; then he forgave her.

Sometimes I look at people I know with the eyes of Simon the Pharisee. As I judge them, these people exasperate me. The story of the stoning of Shelomith’s son reminds me to have compassion. It is compassion that Jesus taught. These are people he died for.

Salvation is a matter of high stakes. The future of humankind and every human is determined by choices people make from the beginning of history to the end. The ultimate choice was made by Jesus, but the Bible from beginning to end is a story of choices.

In the story of the stoning of Shelomith’s son, we see that choices have consequences. We also see compassion. It is a story of sorrow, but in that story love is the other side of sorrow.

Why I Pray

1. Without hope.

For over a decade, I believed that I was lost to God. I won’t describe the whole reason for that. But one sliver of the reason was that a voice without a body told me that I was going to hell.

I’ve had a history of hearing voices, and in past decades I was hospitalized for a disorder of the mind that relates to hearing voices. But now that I’m in my right mind, one of the puzzles of my life has been to sort my experiences from when I was homeless and fleeing a vast satanic conspiracy. I put my supernatural experiences from that time into piles. I try to discern what was from God, what was from madness, and what was from evil.

Even as that voice shattered me, I didn’t believe that it came from God; I believed that it was demonic. But I believed that voice because what it said mirrored the upheaval that I had at that moment experienced for weeks and months, and it matched what I saw about myself as I looked back at my life.

In the years after I heard that demonic voice, I would sometimes dream that God had forgiven me, and that he had welcomed me into his good grace. In those dreams I was overjoyed. Nothing else in my life has made me that happy. But then I would wake up, and I would not believe the dream. I groaned under the weight of that hopelessness.

For most of this decade-plus of heaviness, I could not bear to read the Bible in any depth. I could not bear to step inside a church. I could not pray; prayer felt like trespassing.

2. Hopeful.

Within the last two years, I’ve taken steps back to hope. The journey back started with loneliness: I wanted to date. My computer dating service seemed to match me up with Christians. This was a problem. One beautiful woman rejected me after I explained to her my dismal beliefs about myself. I had to confess them to her. I couldn’t build a relationship on pretense about who I was.

I started going to a church so that at least I wouldn’t have to explain to these Christian women why I was un-churched. The teaching at that church was almost always very good, and it got me re-interested in scripture. At first, my reading was topical – I would search the Bible on a topic when the teaching had provoked my curiosity about it. Eventually, I started reading the Bible more methodically. I started reading it to read every book from Genesis to Revelation, as I’d done several times when I was young.

In the meantime, I changed churches. The change came with a blessing.

In my new church, which is Episcopalian, we celebrate communion every Sunday. For months, I didn’t take communion. This was because I remembered reading that it is a poor idea to take communion when you aren’t right with God. And I still felt outside of God’s grace.

But that changed. The story of the prodigal son affected me. I came to believe that I was the prodigal son. I was a man who had squandered God’s blessings and God’s gifts, but, like the prodigal, I came to my senses and made the long journey home. I believed that I could be welcomed back like the prodigal.

One Sunday, I went forward to take communion. When I returned to my pew, I had something like a vision. Looking up at the architecture of the church, I had a sense of its alive-ness – its alive-ness through generations of believers who had worshiped there and in the wider Episcopalian church, of whom I was now a part. I strain to put into words a vision-like experience that came without words.

I’ve described the moment when I heard a voice that convinced me that I was lost. The lead-up to that voice was long, and it came like pronouncement of guilt and sentence after trial. The lead-up to my vision-like experience that caused me to believe in God’s mercy toward me also was long. But it was like a verdict of acquittal.

3.  Hope, not assurance.

I don’t believe that my salvation is a sure thing. I accept what the apostle Peter says, that salvation is something that we grow into. (1 Peter 2:2.) This is not the teaching of my former church; it is not mainstream in modern America. But it accords with my reading of the Bible, and it’s supported by other reasons personal to me.

4. The fruit of hope.

Sometimes I marvel that I don’t rejoice more for having the belief in sure damnation lifted from me. And it’s true that, intellectually, I realize that any trauma that I might suffer will be more bearable because of my new hope. This has yet to be tested by adversity.

But my spiritual life now flows as if a dam has burst. I have zeal in my spiritual life – the zeal of someone who thought that he was lost to God, but who has discovered unexpectedly that that isn’t so.

I study the Bible at length. I read, generally, twelve chapters a day.

And I pray. I think that I pray a lot by most standards.

When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God is an excellent study of the admirable Vineyard Christian Fellowship Church. Author and anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann tells that Vineyard members are encouraged to pray for at least half-an-hour every day. Some do, some don’t. Some pray more. Prof. Luhrmann describes a woman who is admired for her ability in prayer; that woman prays for three hours a day.

At first, I would interleave my prayer with my Bible study: read a chapter, then pray for five minutes or so, then read another chapter, etc.

Now I study the Bible and pray in discrete chunks of time. I read three chapters in the morning, and then pray for half-an-hour. I read nine chapters at night, and then pray for an hour to an hour-and-a-half. My evening goal is an hour; usually I go longer.

This hasn’t been going on for very long, but already I sense changes.

Some changes are physical. At first, I prayed largely in my chair. I couldn’t bear to kneel for the whole time of prayer. My legs couldn’t take it. They can now. Part of the reason for that is that I’ve learned to shift kneeling positions. Another reason is that my knees and ligaments and ankles have better stamina from practice.

Some changes are changes to how I pray. I’m learning. I used to check my watch often to see how long I had prayed and how long I had left to reach my goal. (And I said "sorry" to God for watching the clock in the middle of this manifestation of his grace to me – the fact that I could pray.) I watch the clock much less now. (Sometimes I still apologize when I do.)

I learned about ACTS from Prof. Luhrmann’s book. ACTS stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Some teachers teach that those are the four components of prayer. At one time, I tried to divide my time of prayer into four chunks devoted to each of those categories. I still use ACTS, but flexibly. I go among those elements in my time of prayer.

Lately, the C in ACTS has also meant Conversation. I talk to God about things that happened during the day and about parts of the Bible that I don’t get.

Sometimes, the S stands for Silence. I wait in silence for some guidance from God about what to pray for and how to pray. This time of silence is normally brief.

Sometimes I remember hymns in my heart as I pay. Sometimes I sing them out loud.

Sometimes, I pray the same prayers that I have prayed before, pretty much in the same way. More recently, I worship God and pray in new ways for my church, my president, my relatives, my friends, my clients, strangers, enemies, and myself. I pray for the living and the dead.

Bible study is important to my prayers. The Bible gives me ideas about what to pray and how to pray.

5. Gratitude.

I’ve been blessed. I’ve known hopelessness; this new hope is God’s grace, and it is a wonder.

I can look back on my lost years and see God’s grace in them. They have made me more grateful and they have grown my faith and my knowledge of God.

James 4:8 says "Come near to God and he will come near to you." (NIV) In Sunday worship and in my private devotions, I strive to come near to God, trusting that he will come near to me.