Just south of Lake City the highway winds narrow along Lake Pepin and apparently this past Saturday an accident opened up a tank of ammonia. Ammonia, specifically ammonia nitrate I believe, is used as a fertilizer in farm country and if a tank truck of the stuff rolls over or a train carrying it derails it can poison the air for some distance so the authorities weren’ taking any chances. All traffic moving south was diverted to the side roads.

So off we went and it soon became apparent the sheriff told us where to divert but we were on our own to find the road that would take us back to highway 61. Around Minnesota highway 60 we flagged down some folks stopped at a light and found out that 60 was closed as well so out came the map and we decided to make an adventure of it.

And our risk was rewarded. Not only did we find the trip south to be a beautiful run between bluffs and valleys we also discovered the county roads were actually in better shape then Federal highway 61. Our journey took us to towns with names like Plainview, Elba, Altura, and my favorite, Rollingstone. Along the way we traveled through a state park and though the road was winding we lost little time. This fall, when highway 61 is full of tourists looking at the leaves and the river, we’re going to take these side roads and see everything they’re missing by playing it safe and sticking to the main highway.

I suspect there’s a lesson in there somewhere, something about the narrow less traveled way and heaven or just about how sometimes good things come from unforseen happenings, or maybe about risk and reward. Plain old living life is sometimes the best textbook and I’ll get back to you when I figure it out.

Its around 10:20 am on Saturday morning and its time to get ready for the trip ahead. The sun is out and the air is crisp, temperature in the 30’s (farenheit), and it feels like early morning in late October. In the nearly two years I’ve been on the road most every weekend I’ve gotten the routine down to the point I basically never panic and packing is easy when all you wear is black.

Usually every morning I get up and spend a little time in front of the computer. I’ve always been curious and I like to find out what’s been happening when I was asleep. About half the world is always awake or asleep at any given time and its good to see how the other half has been living while I’ve been in bed. I’ll type a few notes here and then get on to work or travel or on a rare day off some precious hours watching Westerns on TV.

I like the scenery in Westerns and the subtle shifts of character and story that occur wrapped in and around the obligatory shoot outs. Sometimes I think Westerns are a kind of dream world, a genre where you reach beyond the characters as you see them and find the greater meaning somewhere in the panorama of place and people. A good western like “Pale Rider” or “Rooster Cogburn and the Lady” simmers with life and meaning just below the surface and despite the usual violence often speaks of a longing for something better even if its just the next valley over the mountains in the distance.

There is that restlessness in the human soul, a restlessness in me, that understands why places only hold a person who’s truly alive for so long and then its time to ride off into the sunset. And you can feel that way even if you’ve lived in the same place all of your life and only have those feelings when you look up from chores out the window and for a moment your heart travels where you yourself, bound by invisible ties, could never go.

So on the morning before the road calls me back to LaCrosse I’m looking out the little window in the upstairs front of my house, thinking about life somewhere else, time that has past, people long gone, and perhaps something better in the next valley over the mountains in the distance.

Time to ride.

We’ve had some recent dust ups here in Minnesota about the role of religion and the workplace centered on Muslims doing, or rather choosing not to do, certain things like handling pork or taking dogs in taxi cabs because of their faith, or at least what they believe is ther faith.

Most of the feedback has been fairly harsh and filled with words about how this is America and you should go back to your own country if you don’t play by our rules etc., etc.. Some of it has been very vicious and racist but I think there’s something more underneath it.

People complain about Muslims asking for rooms to pray because they have a cycle of prayers which must be said throughout the day. Well, so does historic Christianity of the both the East and West. We call them things like sext and lauds and compline and in the East 3rd hour and sixth hour and so forth but they’re there, always have been. The difference is that somewhere along the line we just dropped the idea of actually saying them. Oh there’s a shadow or two of it in the daily Mass at some Catholic Churches or the Lenten schedule of the Orthodox but largely we’ve just jettisoned the idea of taking time out of the day to pray.

And Christianity has food rules too. There have always been days and seasons when the Church calls upon us to refrain from eating this or that and they’ve been around for a long time. But for the most part we’ve tossed them aside as well. If we’re Protestants we’ve just thrown them out. If we’re Catholics we keep chipping away at them until they’re basically meaningless. We Orthodox, who’ve actually and officially preserved the historic cycle of fasts get out from under by saying we believe in them but grant ourselves “economia” for the smallest of reasons to pretend that were complying even when we’re not.

So when we see a Muslim taking time out to pray or refusing to handle pork a part of us is perplexed, I think, not so much because of racial or cultural things but rather because we’ve grown so secularized, so out of touch with the reality of our faith that we find a person who actually believes what they say they do and is willing to live that faith to the point of being inconvenienced startling, even freakish. In a world where our true god is more often than not commerce a person who refuses to bow stands out and the powers that be scream and holler and threaten.

Could it be that these Muslims, who worship a harsh god birthed in the arid desert are actually shaming us and exposing how far we have fallen, how unwilling we are to actually live our faith, how little what we claim to believe matters in the business of the day? We can dismiss it as “fanaticism” or “medievalism” but the truth is that in moving from a world where the sound of church bells could actually stop the tasks of the day to the point where faith and church and God are profoundly peripheral we have lost something and continue to pay a terrible price.

You may think it’s foolish to stop a line at a cash register for a few seconds so your Muslim cashier can get someone else to scan the pork, after all we’ve got to keep that assembly line rolling and every second counts. But doesn’t God choose the foolish things to shame the false wisdom of the proud and couldn’t God be using the devotion of that person, even if we don’t understand or accept its motivation, to to remind us of how cold and distant and estranged we’ve become from our own God? And if we as Christians don’t accept Mohammed as a prophet could it still be that the woman with a head covering is still prophesying to us by calling us to remember there are things larger than us, our machines, our money, and the puny sniveling gods of commerce?

A link to a Miami Herald columnist on the nature of the news and the nature of ourselves in these times.

It’s always easier to blame the media then to change that part of myself that craves spiritual. social, and emotional junk food media.

As I get older I ponder more, and a lot of the time my ponderings have been about peace.

Now I’m not thinking about peace as in the lack of war but rather peace as the ability to live in the ebbs and flows of time without being overcome. Its the discovery of that personal place somewhere between mindless and never ending involvement in the world and escapism. Its the ability to see things as they are and move through despair to the constant redemption of time and history that is the mandate of humans in a broken world. Compared to that the end of war is probably easy.

And I see very little true peace in the world. Some days it seems like the world is a very mad place where everyone seems to be grabbing for any sliver of whatever they think helps them get through the day. Would a person really at peace with themselves and their faith feel the need to kill someone else in its cause? How could a person with a settled heart trample over others in their pursuit of power? Does one with rest in their soul go from person to person, body to body, thing to thing to keep feeding the emptiness inside? There are people out there who’d sell their children for 15 minutes of air time, follow movie stars and pro wrestlers as if they really mattered, and know everything about their favorite team but never read a decent book. So some days a person with any bit of sanity might actually wish global warming was as catastrophic as the fear industry would like it to be just to stop the noise.

The older I get the less I trust organizations and structures to be instruments of authentic peace. Your company doesn’t want you to be whole, they want you to feel the endless urge to do more, to get paid more, and climb their ladder. Governments are made up of people with selfish ambitions who spend endless energy trying to get others to enable them and a global government would just be about enabling a selfish bastard of global proportions and we already have enough of those. Academia often speaks of peace in broad strokes, the world of theory isolated from reality and often truth itself. Even the Church gets caught up in the cultural winds and neglects its core gifts to the emptiness of souls.

Nothing from the top down will bring the lasting peace we humans crave. Something has to change within and then life touches life like one candle touching another and change begins. There is no other way and to the extent we don’t get that we’ll continue to wander, empty and troubled, through the night.

One of the things every Priest comes to face in the course of their service is the reality they’ll never be everything everyone wants them to be. It won’t be for lack of trying or soul searching. It won’t be for a shortage of a certain sadness that some may be lost and others found. It just is the way it is.

If a Priest takes this personally they’ll chew themselves up from the inside. It’s just one of those things you don’t have to like but have to get used to. Your life is a screen on which those for whom you care project their hopes and needs, their strengths and pathologies. And it can all change in a moment, in a word, in a second of something, anything, beyond your control.

The truth is that Priests should examine themselves, but sometimes they should be careful about examining themselves too much, or at least every time they find themselves up against the reality that despite their best intentions they can’t be all things to everyone. At that point its not about growth but rather about banging your skull against an unyielding wall.

And its not worth the headache.

Had a chance to meet another “east sider” from St. Paul today and the topic went to a local watering hole called the “Cherry Pit”.

It seems that St. Paul, in its desire to protect the common welfare banned smoking in all of the bars but soon discovered that people have cars and can go to bars not in St. Paul if they wish and so came up with a solution. No it wasn’t letting people be grown ups and choose whether they want to be in a smoky bar or not. Instead the city, at taxpayer expense, decided to build outdoor patios for bars with fireplaces, heaters, and lights so the customers can still smoke, and what’s more important for tax purposes drink, in St. Paul.

So if I get this straight its okay in St. Paul to drink a lot and go home with a stranger and do whatever as long as you don’t smoke while you’re in process. Unless, of course, you’re thinking about doing that outside of St. Paul then the city will use all that spare taxpayer’s money to build a nice place outside for you in the hope that you’ll be lured to satisfy your alcoholic urges where they can get that precious per drink tax money.

And they wonder why people don’t vote.

In these days it seems the truly heroic person will be the one who has learned to transcend their immediate emotions, wants, and desires for higher things. Those who seek to do this will find their enemies are not merely armies but the whole force of culture arrayed against the quest for the noble but financially unprofitable authentic humanity.

An interesting article on the topic of death and bio-ethics and a good reason to drop in to “Paradosis” every once in a while.

An article on apocalyptic visions of weather and human history.

Are the “global warming” folks the secular equivalent of the religious purveyors of various “end times” scenarios?