An Interculturalist reads the Old Testament

“Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers who rule this people in Jerusalem.  Because you have said, “We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement; when the overwhelming scourge passes though it will not come to us; for we have made lies our refuge and in falsehood we have taken shelter”; therefore thus says the Lord God, See, I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation: ‘One who trusts will not panic.’” Isaiah 28: 14-16

One of the most mind-bending cross-cultural courses I have ever taken was “Introduction to the Old Testament”.  They were real people, the ones who originally told and wrote down those stories.  They had reasons for recording what they did in the way that they did it.  The scanty records they have left us tell us so much and so little about their lives and what they thought was important and why.

Distant from us in space and time, they nonetheless have great influence on our lives to this day.  And, of course, our understanding of them is not helped at all by the centuries of interpretation and debate that lie between us and them.

Taking these stories seriously requires readers to suspend their own perspectives and assumptions.  We have to remember that we are reading about a world we have never known and cannot know directly.  Our cultures here and now would be just as incomprehensible to them as their cultures are to us.

That’s one of the main reasons why it’s so hard to talk about “the Bible and politics”.  Because it’s so difficult to cross the chasm of understanding between us and them and to enter imaginatively into their culture(s), we mostly take the easy way of assuming that the Bible says what we want it to say.

But politics in the Bible is about authority and resistance to authority.  They didn’t have a wide range of different types of political organization to compare with each other as we do.  They really just had personal authority – men in power – who used power well or badly. 

Prophets like Isaiah predicted the future only insofar as they told people in power that God would destroy them if they did not deal justly with the poor.  They interpreted contemporary events according to how they saw God’s covenant being fulfilled by the nation’s leaders.  Politics for them was about how well (or badly) the leadership obeyed God’s will, and if it was badly, they said so at great length.

If the stories of ancient peoples are going to tell us how to live here and now in such a way that we will be prepared to participate in a future that neither they nor we can fully imagine, we have to learn to let go of what we think we know and hear their stories with new ears.  Now there’s an intercultural challenge!

Six ways to build stability in an anxiety-inducing world

Above is a link to a piece I wrote for one of my professional writing gigs.  It's a site owned by a psychiatrist who, while he uses medications, also encourages patients to follow lifestyle and non-medication approaches to living with chronic illness.

A lot of what I write there is layperson interpretations of medical studies, but a lot of it is also more like good advice, which it turns out is a good way to brainwash yourself into following good advice.  If you keep writing that the Mediterranean diet is good, you find yourself reaching for the (more expensive) olive oil in the grocery store more often.  Anyway, the blog could be of interest for a lot of people, not just those with mental illness.

Compost pit update

Here it is, phase one of the compost pit. It took about a month to dig (not every day) and now the next job is to fill it.

The second photo shows the soil that got removed.  Some of it is topsoil that I can sift out and use in the container garden.  Some is clay subsoil that can be used to build up the edges of the pit.  I will look around for manure from grazing water buffaloes to provide nitrogen, and add all the weeds from the garden and a bit of kitchen garbage for "body".

Once it's filled, I will cover it up and dig another one next to it, then the two pits will be traded off, as one matures, the other will be getting filled.

I've read that it takes 8 years to establish a garden, and now I'm in year two, so just imagine how it will look after six more years of digging!  I already got a lot of tomatoes and some mustard greens from the garden this year, so I'm encouraged to go on.

You only need a little bit of encouragement if it's something you really want to happen.

The Gift Economy

Here's a picture of the bookkeeper at church weighing up the morning's offering.  People bring plastic bags full of rice from their own harvest, and put them in the basket.  Then the bookkeeper (not sure if that's really the right word for this job, though) measures out all the rice and then the church sells it to other members for cash that is used to run its operations.

This, it seems to me is the most basic of economic activities: the gift of one's own produce.  It's not exchange that makes an economy, it's giving.  That's the foundation of all other economic activity.

Have you ever given a loan that you were pretty sure would never be repaid?  How does it feel?  When I've done it, I've felt at first a reluctance to "loan" under those circumstances.  But when it's over and done with, it feels right.  Giving and loaning and sharing are supposed to be community-supportive activities, and ways to enhance the lives of other people.  That's what economic activity is for in the final analysis.  Enhancing life.

What can we do to restore the foundation of our economic life that has been so eroded by the demand for repayment and exchange that it is now having trouble holding us all together?

Opinions

Where did you get your political opinion?  For some of us, it just gradually grew out of the environment we grew up in.  For others, at some point (often in adolescence) there was a radical rejection of the beliefs of home and parents, and a strong need to be different.  For still others, some kind of epiphany or sudden realization came, as a result of a cross-cultural experience, a college course, a personal relationship, or some other new exposure.

But you notice, I don’t add that someone persuaded you by their careful, logical argument to change your opinion.  I think this rarely, if ever happens.  My opinion is a part of me, and it’s deeply rooted in the story I tell myself about the universe I inhabit.  Everyone’s opinion is like that – almost sacred - a part of their identity, not a superficial or readily changing whim.

Lately, however, there seems to be a widely felt sense that people arrive at their opinion by carefully considering the facts and reasonable foundations of things and develop a political position as a result.  Which leads immediately to the thought that all I have to do is reproduce the logical steps and carefully reasoned positions I followed and any reasonable person will agree with me.  And then it’s very surprising and disappointing when they don’t.  What’s wrong with these people, are they stupid?  Are they deluded?

No, they are not stupid, they just don’t agree with your reasoning.  And, if you are honest with yourself, you begin to see that before you held this opinion, you wouldn’t have agreed with your reasoning either.  The opinion comes first, roots itself in the story you have about reality, and then the rationale comes later.

I’d like to advocate for a recovery of the belief that other people’s opinions are sacred, not subject to argument.  I think we could avoid a lot of problems this way, from name-calling to “alternative facts” (which are just explanations for why I believe what I do).

If we held everyone’s opinion as sacred, we could discuss with them about facts and about proposed policy changes without requiring the fact to force the person to adopt a new opinion.  A part of any discussion of this nature would be to share the story that led you to the position you now hold (not the reasons, not the facts, but the inner conviction).

This would allow each of us to use the same facts to argue for different approaches to policy.  We can do that because we hold different values and different long-term goals for our society and community, but we can still agree on what the facts actually are and how they influence our thinking.

Here are two photos I took of the Benguet Lily, Lilium philippinenses.  These beautiful wildflowers fascinate me.  They look like they should live in a greenhouse, but they come up all by themselves each June or July on the hills all around here.  They grow by choice on the worst-looking stony soil: barren road cuts and sheer cliffs.  Grace and grit, all in one glorious package.  They make me wish that I were a more skillful photographer than I am, but I had to try, and it's hard to make them look bad, they are such amazing flowers.

If only we were all able to bring such beauty out of the stony wilderness of our lives!

Compost Pit

Stories.  That was and is the plan for my blog.  Stories about meeting the Other and finding a friend.  Stories about getting outside the comfort zone and finding out that it's OK outside.  Stories about the world being big enough for everybody and their hopes and dreams.

And today's story is about making stuff rotten.  That's right, today I started work on a new compost pit.  Here's the "before" picture:

And here's the "after" picture:

 

That's right, I didn't move much dirt today.  That's about two hours' work, which is about all I can do as I am getting up towards the seventh decade of life.  If I do this much each day, by the end of a month -- or maybe two months -- I'll have a deep, stone-lined compost pit and six months or so after that, I'll have compost to put on the garden and make my vegetables healthier and stronger.

That's the thing about all this simple living, back to nature, organic stuff:  it's hard work.  Labor intensive.  A long, slow slog.  Even when you are strong and in the prime of life you only accomplish a little bit of what needs to be done each day.  Even if you use machinery, farming is slow, slow work. Raised up in a modern, hurry-up environment, this is hard learning for me.  For a year now, I've been waiting on this project, trying to think of a faster way to do it.  If I had started right away, I'd already have it by now.

"By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" says God in Genesis, and I guess we've been spending most of the time since then trying to get around that requirement.  So I'm taking the time now to learn the soil, learn the movement of the body with a shovel full of dirt, learn the time line of plants and weather. And also to dream about the vegetables I'll get someday as a reward.

I'd just like to give a shout out to the Asian Rural Institute, where I learned how to dig and how to be patient with the soil.  I was a staff member when I was there, but it's a learning community and we all learned from each other staff and students together. It was a good place to be.