Letting Go

Sometimes waiting for something that we have no certainty will come is painful. Let me rephrase that - OFTEN waiting for something that we have no certainty will come is painful, particularly when it promises so much happiness (and perhaps it is this very aspect that should warn us away). I once spent three years waiting for something that I held deep in my heart that was very, very special but God’s design and my own were not in accord. The outcome was indescribably painful but in it I found a liberation to do and to be all of the things that I had put on reserve because I was waiting for the something.

Recently, I made the same mistake again. The struggle in this, I find, is not to be bitter but just to accept and to let go and, most importantly, to move on.

During the Paschal service this year, a beautiful reminder came to me. I was reminded that the Father loves me and that I should never be ashamed of who I am. I can be ashamed of my spiritual condition and of my sins before God, I can learn humility but to be ashamed of who I am is to be ashamed of the Lord who made me and loves me and has given His life to me and that is something that I hope never to do anymore.

And that is all that I have to say about that.

Expelled: Exploring the Links Between Darwinism, Nazi Doctrines and Eugenics

The public goes to the movies, by and large, to be entertained. One can see how the folks at the movie studio would be hard pressed to figure out how to get the public to shell out to see a documentary featuring scientists, atheists and a visit to Dachau. The first half of Expelled clearly tries to present deep questions in an entertaining way and does so with little success.

The second half of the film, however, presents deep questions in the way that they should be presented, particularly where mass murder, genocide and eugenics are concerned. The materialist Darwinian worldview has in the past been extended and continues to be extended to the level of a mandate for “managing” human populations. In a paradigm where life sprang forth accidentally from inorganic materials, only the strong survive and there is no life after death, euthanasia, forced sterilization, abortion and overt mass murder are not only permissible but desirable from a resource management perspective. Why should the weak and infirm drain the resources of their genetic superiors? Thus, we have the basis for the work of Adolf Hitler, the world’s most infamous mass murderer, and Margaret Sanger, the creator of Planned Parenthood, an institution designed to control the birth rate among the poor (who are a drain on everyone else’s resources, continuing the logic above).

In the film, Ben Stein visits a sanatorium in which 15,000 people with a wide range of disabilities were killed, dissected and cremated. He visits Dachau. He speaks more with accomplished men of letters who believe in an Intelligent Design.

In the end, however, we’re presented with a motivational speech about human freedom, the Declaration of Independence and how dissent is a necessary aspect of both science and democracy (the last of which I’ll concede is a valid point). The ending of the movie feels like a slap-dash effort more in keeping with the first half of the film. It looks and feels like a rally cry to religiously-oriented youth groups and evangelicals (to whom a second website offers free packages designed to encourage public debate).

That aside, if this movie is able to bring these questions to an audience that has not previously considered them, then it will have served its purpose. Ben Stein has amassed some absolutely amazing interview footage and revealed the face of something that few people have seen in its fullness. For this, we ought to thank him.

Anti-Darwinist Barnstorm

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is an observable phenomenon that everyone from the staunchest “Establishment” evolutionary scientist to the most stalwart Young Earth Creationist will concede exists. His theory of the origin of species, however, is on considerably more shaky ground. No one in the scientific community knows how life began and no one can prove how life began, despite claims to the contrary in a recent headline that some doctors had themselves created life from inorganic materials in a petri dish (working on finding a link for that - it was in the newspaper about six weeks ago).

Ben Stein’s film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed has some pretty shocking interview footage with noted atheist Richard Dawkins, who admits on film that he believes that life on Earth was “seeded” by an advanced species from another planet. Another atheist evolutionist interviewed in the film explains animatedly to Ben Stein that life began on the backs of crystals, which helped to organize the structure of the earliest cells (it would be interesting to see what a cellular biologist would say about that). Debates about whether or not the Intelligent Design scientists Ben Stein interviews in the film were indeed fired, denied tenure or otherwise punished for mentioning intelligence or design in their lectures or publications are really secondary, in my mind, to the “best and brightest” atheists admitting to belief in some rather far-fetched means of the appearance of life on Earth.

Now, admittedly, I’m not remotely as droll as Ben Stein and not nearly as attractive but I, too, have pulled off a coup, albeit a much more humble one, in interviewing an atheist evolutionist. The person in question very publicly uses his name, cites his credentials and advertises his website, so I have chosen not to exclude his last name as it appears in the original transcript. By way of introduction, allow me to say that this gentleman has a B.A. in physics from a respected university (not top-drawer, but respected) and spends each evening in a chat room repeating the same anti-God, anti-religion slogans again and again by means of “pop-up” scripts which are triggered by pressing keys on his keyboard. Among his favorites are: “No gods are detected.” and “I am old and very wise.” Last evening, he made an important admission concerning the possibility of a deity or deities.

<orchidaceae> i am only really saying that it *would be nice* if there were more honesty in science
<orchidaceae> that certain things dont add up with current understandings of evolution
<glk1> Science requires honesty
<Lifeisfunny> atheist scientist with a shi®t load of pride, dead set to prove there’s no such thing as a spirit realm and that there isn’t a God
<@pete-> Lifeisfunny, I asked u nicely to stop the offensive language, why not?
<orchidaceae> that the possibility of a creator (richard dawkins thinks it was aliens!) is not impossible
<glk1> No spirits are detected
<lazaruslupin> glk go to a bar
<Lifeisfunny> the term ‘nicely’ is arguable
<orchidaceae> glk1 many things arent detected, yet they’re promoted in various theories
<glk1> Millions of gods might exist
<orchidaceae> thank you, that is more honest
<orchidaceae> whether one is disposed to believe in them or not is a secondary question
<glk1> None can be refuted
<orchidaceae> the issue is, they are a possibility
<orchidaceae> and it is dishonest to deny that
<orchidaceae> thank you, you made my night, mr kendall
<glk1> good
<glk1> I am old and very wise.
<dysmind> and apparently modest.
* orchidaceae puts out a platter of sandwich fixings for the room

There are people who have been waiting for years for glk1 to say what he said in this transcript (you know who you are).

Truly, this was the cherry on the cake of an evening at the theater.

Speaking of the Far Side of the World…

Thanks to the beautiful reality of Creative Commons licensing, you may now hear the birds sing and the church bells ring at the Kiev Perchersk Lavra in Ukraine. I’ve uploaded a captivating 28-second track to the home page our homeschool website.

Enjoy!

How Joy Was Restored

Through the exclusionary talk of others in a matter of their expertise during my formative years, I was turned away from a natural interest of mine. Years passed and I thought nothing more of it.

As it happens, I have a habit of keeping a very small selection of DVDs at home which I tend to watch again and again; among these is Master and Commander. In case you are unfamiliar with the film, one of the main characters is a surgeon aboard a vessel of the Royal Navy, which is sailing the Pacific in pursuit of a French privateer in 1805. This surgeon is an amateur naturalist whose fascination with and knowledge of a variety of birds, reptiles and insects is stirred when the vessel stops at the Galápagos Islands. The subplot that deals with this subject plays heavily into the film’s climax and denouement but I have suddenly realized that seeing this movie again and again has subconsciously stirred my long-forgotten interest to the surface, an interest that has given me joy. I enjoy plants again! Thus, I am beholden to a movie for this restoration.

(It is no coincidence that the icon in our house that is dearest to me is an icon of the Lord creating the plant kingdom.)

Epiphytic Ferns Again

My recent enthusiasm for epiphytic ferns yielded two additions to the indoor garden today: the Hawaiian (?) staghorn species I mentioned a few days ago and a specimen being sold as a Kangaroo Fern that is either a cultivar or possibly a hybrid. The latter was half brown and showed evidence of having lost dozens of fronds to sunburn (it surprises me that no one at the nursery remedied this - the plant was embarrassingly neglected). The fronds on this new plant are more tender than the Kangaroo Fern (Microsorum pustulatum) I previously brought home and they appear to have a different growth habit; there are too few sori (spore cases) present to determine how they like to occur. Cultivar or hybrid? More investigation is needed.

Now that I’ve brought home the Platycerium bifurcatum, I’ve fallen in love with another Microsorum, this time thailandicum, a shade-loving fern with deep blue-green coloration verging on iridescence.

Microsorum thailandicum

The Hours

We’ve begun a new exercise in daily life: the reading of the Hours. I’ll be posting more about that later.

Existential Homeschooling Crisis

I’m fairly certain that I’m not the only homeschooling mother ever to have an existential crisis of sorts in asking the question, “But what is GOOD?” where curriculum and methodology are concerned. I had one of these a couple of weeks ago and (mercifully) the pieces have been coming into focus more and more clearly. The point of all of this, SAT scores aside, is to live a life that points from all areas to God and God alone. I asked my daughter the other day what sort of grownup she wanted to be one day, to which she replied that she wanted to be “well educated” and “nice.” This was painful to hear, of course, as it showed me my own deficiencies in how we approach life and learning in our household. To be fair, for the past two years we have been living under the roof of my atheist/agnostic parents, which has had no small impact.

Soon, however, we will have a household and a rhythm of life that is a world apart, for which I am profoundly grateful.

“I Am Woman!”

Hear me roar, or something like that.

It’s Mother’s Day and we had a satisfying breakfast this morning at a perennially popular local restaurant chain. The establishment was handing out chocolate truffles, coffee and cookies to placate the burgeoning wait-listed crowd as heavy rains and gusting winds assaulted the world outside.

This afternoon, I had the idea of popping over to Hausermann’s Orchid Nursery to escape the icky weather for a bit and enjoy a spectacular world of light, air, moderate humidity and beautiful orchids. As it so happened, my daughter (bless her heart) had planned to give me a gift certificate for an orchid for Mother’s Day. As we’ve been thinking of moving to a predominantly Latino area and have been practicing our Spanish, she gave me a store-bought Spanish language Mother’s Day card, which was very cute (especially as it was dedicated to a dear “sobrina”, or niece - oops!).

It’s been about 25 years since I’ve spoken Spanish with any frequency, the last time being the year we spent in Panamá, so it’s been quite fun to dredge it up from the depths of my (aging) brain.

The Fifty Yard Dash

Today’s main event will be a dash through the streets and neighborhoods of several towns in search of desirable real estate. If you’ve never shopped foreclosures, you’re missing out on a heady piece of cultural anthropology. My notes will be posted later.

UPDATE:

We saw 30 houses. All but five or six of them were hopelessly water damaged, plagued by neighborhood woes or otherwise uninhabitable. The following day, we saw a few more houses in Cicero and Berwyn. Two of them were habitable and one of them - although freshly broken into and sprawled with a few Latin Kings tags - was absolutely beautiful. Some financing questions still hang in the air and the budget may or may not be increased (which I hope it will be - as this would enable us to bid on this last and wonderful house).

After determining that the last house had indeed been broken into, we called Cicero’s Finest, who appeared on the scene in about five minutes and cleared the premises for us (the door-kicker or kickers were long gone, thankfully). I was impressed. These were good cops. The incident showed me how little I know, however, about gangs in general and about their activity in the area where we’ve been looking for houses. After doing some reading, I have a new and healthy appreciation for the real dangers of living in a town where approximately a dozen different gangs vie for territory but am nevertheless undeterred. On a block where the yards are cared for and street trees are thriving, it must be possible to live a moderate life in moderate safety.