Jesus has already returned, in a reincarnated form of course, according to the followers of this man . But until he dies and comes back again after three days I think I’ll take a pass.

The older I get the more I am convinced that Christianity is the only true counter culture.

I miss my brother tonight. I hope he misses me as well.

It was his picture that brought this all to mind, a slight smile with his hand on his chin that graced the cover of his funeral service bulletin. It was a photo from better times yet it called to mind the worst time of all, the sucker punch of a phone call that told me he had died.

Too soon, too young, too much left to do, none of it made sense. It still doesn’t. Probably never will. The medical facts wash right over me. The larger meaning eludes me. A bitter part of me could write a list of all kinds of people who should have died instead of Paul. Go figure.

And although I’m very sure it happened it all seems still to be unreal to me. My brain knows it but everything else is numb. I’m suspended in some kind of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual stasis. All I can do is ponder the mystery with a complete silence, the kind that comes with having the wind knocked out of you.

Yet remarkably my faith hasn’t gone away. I am totally and utterly without explanation for what happened and at a loss for any answer and yet somehow I believe. I suppose it could be a delusion, the only medicine for a sickness like this. I have trouble seeing it as some level of my maturity because I know myself better then that. Perhaps God is just holding me far enough away from the reality of things to keep my soul from shattering like a glass thrown in an angry fight.

No reasons for it all on the horizon I am left with the simple fact of his absence. Admittedly our lives took very different courses as adults and so we weren’t with each other day in and out like many friends and some brothers, yet he mattered to me in that unique way only explained by the connection of family, of the similar flesh, of the shared struggle to life, of the soulishness shaped in a common womb. And when he died a part of me died as well because of it.

So tonight I see his picture and it all comes to mind again. I pray for him in the small hours of the night when I’m too restless to sleep and hope he prays for me too as I crawl along through this world, my journey still incomplete. For some reason all this had to be and I wish I had some clue because if I did I’m sure I wouldn’t feel quite as alone as I do right now.

Made it back from Branson, Missouri, last night and all is reasonably well.

Some time last fall we promised my mother in law that we would take her to Branson for a birthday gift and we knew she liked Branson. I like it too, not because I’m necessarily a fan of a city where “Hee Haw” is a 24/7 way of life, but rather because the Ozarks have a kind of charm and natural beauty that feels like a lonesome banjo sounds.

But Branson is definitely another world. If Las Vegas is America’s raunchy old uncle Branson is our spinster aunt, neatly groomed, sitting on her front porch with a Bible in her lap and an old photo of her brother who died in WW2 over the mantlepiece. Branson is up, clean, a perpetual Bible camp with very good performers, the best sound and light systems available, and a kind of patriotism that would make a President blush.

Branson is politically the reddest area in the United States and culturally the most white. Somewhere there must be someone drinking or smoking or cussing or doing something bad with thier neighbor’s wife but if they are they’ve found a way to keep it all under wraps. You can leave your car open in Branson and your 80 plus mother in law has nothing to fear except the people trying to sell timeshares. I’ve been there twice and have yet to see a bar.

But lest one thinks this is all about good attitudes it should also be known that Branson is a huge apparatus designed to separate visitors from their money in return for a few days of being in a place where Jesus matters, America is always good, and Veterans get a standing ovation at the end of every show. There is big business behind the comedians with buck teeth, the skinny polished girl singers, and the endless stores. But if Las Vegas leaves you feeling broke and whored out at least Branson takes your money and leaves you with some hope.

There’s one other side benefit, if you’re in the 40’s Branson will make you feel positively young. I’m 46 and I can assure you I was the kid on the block, the young man in a sea of gray heads. Every one my age was working somewhere and my wife and I may have been the only tourists in town without an AARP card.

And the music, the music is really good. In a world where everything is synthesized, rapped out, and karaoked there are people in Branson who can really play thier instruments and if you have a taste for bluegrass or country some of the best working pickers around. Top tier musicians tired of the road often retreat to Branson to ply thier craft in a place where they can go home at night so don’t try getting a job here unless you can really sing or play or dance or tell a joke. The image is hokey but the show is all business and when the sidemen get set loose to show thier stuff the music is glorious.

That all being said I don’t know when or if I’ll be back. At a two show a day clip I’m kind of hillbillied out at the moment and four days was enough. It was good to be there, especially with my mother in law but I like home too and I could use a little rest.

A link to a story about a hotel that has removed the Gideon Bibles and replaced them with Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth”.

The saddest part of it all, perhaps, is that the Bible they got rid of is probably the most “green” book in existence, calling those who read it to a stewardship of the Earth as God’s creation in which we are all merely tenants. Had those who currently practice environmentalism as a kind of religion actually bothered to open it and read they would have discovered it advocates letting the land rest from the stress of growing crops every seventh year, the sharing of our planet’s resources with the poor, and calls us to hope for a day when the lamb and lion together possess the earth.. It admonishes us with the reality that we reap what we sow and bring upon ourselves the consequences of endless consumption. It calls those who have much to voluntarily give for those who have little and we are called to care not just for the planet itself but to love our neighbors as ourselves and live lives of peace and moral purity so we do not destroy our own bodies, the summit of creation.

What they will have missed is the context of it all, and context makes all the difference. There has never been anything wrong with the idea of conserving, of living as simply as possible, and seeking to move through our short time here with a minimum of impact on our island home in the depths of space. But its never an end to itself, it must live, like all things in a proper framework or suffer from a kind of faddishness which never transcends any moment in history. The Bible puts all things, including the way we live in our environment, in proper context, in right relationship with God and each other and the larger meaning of things. Absent that we go lurching from one movement to another, on scare to the next, one theory to whatever follows, ideas unrooted from the whole and ping ponging through history.

Years after the current environmental hysteria runs its course and “An Inconvenient Truth”, if it exists at all, is relegated to the bargain rack at Half Price books, the original environmental book, the Bible, will still call us not to fear but to a reverence of God the creator and all He has made, to right relationships with each other and our Maker providing a larger and consistent whole which transcends us and any moment in history with something greater than any inconvenient truth, namely wisdom.

That all being said the good thing, of course is Al Gore’s books can be recycled and used for Bibles. Imagine that.

An insightful article from Peggy Noonan about how we in this country are selling fear to our children and, quite frankly, each other. Worth the read.

Like many related articles, though, it identifies a problem without providing a solution (a common phenomena among our current roster of pundits). I’m not sure why that is, maybe its the same culture of fear, maybe its about our relativism and the widespread understanding there can be no real understanding about anything (the one dogma of modern man). Perhaps its just a matter of column inches.

And while some think the solution is technical or environmental and see a world where people have implanted chips and everything is locked up and tracked as the solution to fear (then, of course, we’d have to fear the people controlling the technology) there is something more. The beginning of the cure for fear is metaphysical, something inside a person needs to be transformed by a world view that allows them to step out of the moment and see everything beyond mere flashes and emotions, a way of life that embodies ethics and purpose and meaning and transcends life as we understand it.

Say Christianity?

I have to admit I couldn’t resist when I read the story about Sheryl Crow and her public advocacy of using only one or two sheets of toilet paper to help save the earth. It was too tempting a target, an idea so absurd that most people when they heard it just said “Huh?”

And after the laughter dies down the really scary stuff starts. She means it. And there are more like her, maybe many more. They really have no idea of the radical disconnect from reality required for a millionaire rock star to lecture all of us “unenlightened” about the dangers of toilet paper. They have no framework to see the irony of promoting environmental awareness and then flying home on a private Boeing 707 .

But the truth is if you cut yourself loose from a solid anchor you drift wherever wind and tide may take you and one way or another you become mad as a hatter as sense and nonsense merge. The world you inhabit is the asylum you have created where you, as the most insane of all, have free run of the place. So up can mean down and this that and a person can think using one piece of toilet paper on the trip home in a private jet will save the environment.

And we have cut ourselves loose in a big way. We have given God the metaphorical middle finger and set about creating ourselves, reality, and everything we touch in our own image. Its the oldest sin in the book and while we’re thinking we’re novel and radical and chic and adventurous the downside of it all is the consequence, death of soul and body, is still the price we pay. Along the way to that inevitable end the road is paved with confusion, intellectual drift, the gnawing pain of unsatisfied spiritual hunger, and a million blind alleys.

Modern culture, unaware of its own irony, often suggests Christian faith is the product of delusion, of fanciful myths to soothe those unable to live in reality. But as our society grows increasingly dysfunctional a question should be asked. Which is the more strange and delusional; a world where people are obsessed about toilet paper, carve themselves into mannequins in the fear of a wrinkle, drug themselves into oblivion, work themselves to death, and pursue with fascist passion the very things that are murdering them or the carpenter from Nazareth who asks those who follow him to “love thier neighbor as themselves”? Who is more together, more grounded, more in touch with the truth of life? Who do you want to call the shots?

I thought so.