ORTHODOX

Right worship. This is the meaning of the term: Orthodox. Quite an imposing term. Quite a statement of certainty. One might presume synonym phrases, such as: Truth, Righteousness, The Right Way, The One True Way, We Have It All Together, We Have It From the Source. The term Orthodox conjures in my mind's eye images of men in black with beards, either Jewish or Greek, or maybe Russian, but then, the Russian ones are always in white robes and have white beards to match. In my mind's eye mind you.

As of late, the word Orthodox is a coveted term. And it is hardly wonder why it is a coveted word, in a world groping for answers and moorings.

For some this flail for certainty and 'right' answers sends them off trotting in one of many directions, often in circles, trying on many ideas and exploring a bevvy of behaviors, in pursuit of the relativley firm feeling that they have finally put the pieces of their working philosophy together and can now begin the "praxis."

For others, this means laying hold of what has gone before, perhaps "first", in their chosen tradition/religion. Nevermind that "laying hold" of intellectual or spiritual property is a subjective act in itself. Nevermind again that the intellectual property was subjectively gathered.

Take for instance the Russian Orthodox Church. I'm a fan of it, to whatever degree I can be, given that I have never darkened the door of a ROC Church. My fan-ness comes mostly from having read The Brothers Karamazov and really liking Father Zosima and the youngest brother Alyosha who is so influenced by him. Other than this, my only exposure to the ROC are the strange documents I found while hiking in the mountains west of Boulder near an old ghost town named Caribou. The documents were yellowed and crinkled and water stained and stuffed into one of several vw beetles rusting as invalids in the yard of an old unfinished hippie shack with three still handed clocks that faced out from a window with a sign that read: All humans who enter will not leave. Three stools were visible through the curtain and a piece of coal sat atop the middle stool. In the big room sat a large pipe organ. Silver pipes if I remember correctly. Clothes and furniture were strewn haphazard. Nothing orthodox about the house that I found the Orthodox histories and understandings of various Saints.

If the Russian Orthodox are Orthodox in the Christian sense of the word, then do their differences with the Greek Church matter? For the ROC was certainly born from the Greek Orthodox Church - which is perfectly fine, as far as I'm concerned, but what about all of the cultural embellishments? Is that Orthodox? Or does Orthodoxy not depend on cultural influence? If it did, then perhaps the Greek Orthodox would not be orthodox, for the first Chrisitians were not primarily Greek.

T-Rex and the fish

The common fish bumper decal has morphed in many different ways. Each morphing another ontological perspective using a plastic stick-on decal to do the lifting.

Today I saw a decal that was only an allusion to the fish. It expanded the fish shape riff - it was a Tyrannosaurus Rex holding a little fish and no doubt just about to gobble it up, as any T-Rex would naturally do.

Not a big deal, just another fish riff. We have seen the big fish eating the little fish already. Same idea. But, it struck me in a different way. Here was the baddest predator on land with a little damn christian fish in its claws. Sort of said to me, "Fuck you and your little piss-ant, make believe religion. The real deal is a terrible predator."I'm no doubt exaggerating the sentiment intended just a skosh, and I get the irony (whether the owner of the decal does or not I'm not sure): T-Rex is a predator that is extinct. How can an extinct predator hold a fish?
It unnerved me in that this person would prefer to champion extinct T-Rex over make believe fish story. Mind you, a fish story, make believe or not, that has incredible wisdom and themes, not to mention motifs and leitmotifs, such as love, mercy, forgiveness, humility, peacemaking. These are not make believe qualities, these are qualities we are in desperate need.
Championing the terrible extinct T-Rex, and the modern day equivalent, over the christian fish, is, well, strange to me. It is not really a scientific point. It is tedious and frankly boring to relive, seemingly everyday, the all Christians, all believers in God, are enemies and disbelievers of science. Please.
So what is the modern equivalent for T-Rex? A tiger? Not ferocious enough and the tiger is nearly extinct too. Lion? Same thing. Great White? Yes, maybe in the water. But the big fish eating the little fish has already filled that role (which is why the T-Rex is not really a novel idea).
No, the way T-Rex was used in this little decal was more like an Atomic Bomb, or a Bushmaster set loose on an elementary school. It was screaming to me, "Power and might is the only thing that matters, the rest can go to hell."
Red in tooth and claw is not the victorious way, not even in evolution. Cooperation is more in the direction of successful evolution and successful relationship and I dare say, happiness.
Just as the T-Rex.

Because the soul is vital

The other night I was at a party and someone asked me what I did. Instead of mumbling out something about working at a church (like I might usually do), I sort of had a renewed energy. I said something like - "I work at a church because our souls need to be cultivated and inspired to action.  We live in a society that emphasizes politics and business and entertainment - mostly to the exclusion of the soul. And why wouldn't we? It doesn't make us any money. It doesn't usually make you famous (and if it did, it would require too much for most of us [think mother teresa]). All the while, the things we say we care about: the forests and the mega-mammals, are dying off as we go about our business of raping the earth and one another. All the while our children are born into toxicity. I think we need to put some more emphasis on cultivating the soul. On finding our soulful intuitions and following them and taking action, so that our politics and business and entertainment are seized by the soul and not the other way around, because the other way around brings us selfishness, greed, hubris, mass extinction, exploitation - you name it."

The person I was talking to, at a big fancy party in an absurdly large and self exalting house in Boulder, acknowledged that yes, they supposed this was true. I sort of felt like I had just put them on the rack and asked for a confession. The beer made it feel better to both of us.  

And so this brings me to the why of Alt C, the thought of emphasizing soul in community. Commonly called church or sangha.
Reason for being: Because the soul is vital - to:
love others
                  be kind
                                    be generous
                                                      seek the common well being
be sacrificial
                  be wise
                                    be a peacemaker
                                                                        live in hope
seek justice
                  be humble
                                    mourn for suffering
                                                                   
see and cultivate the good in others
                                     be a force for good

Fans of track and field you are ...

Track and Field = Globally Aware
Of all sports fans in America, track and field fans are arguably the most globally informed. Think about it. If you were to give a test on matters of foreign affairs, which fan base do you think would score highest?
Soccer fans immediately strike as strong candidates for being globally on the ball. Yet, Major League Soccer remains largely ensconced within our American culture; and though American soccer fans might well watch Premier League English Football or Primera División de Mexico on satellite television, is the U.K. or Mexico really foreign in terms of world affairs? Hardly. Cycling pops to mind as an internationally savvy sport, but it is largely limited to athletes and fans from Western nations - not exactly global.
To be a track and field fan is to be, by definition, globally aware. You have no other choice. The runners at the top of the sport hail in preponderant numbers from Africa, who each year come to America and routinely win the New York, Boston and Chicago marathons. The most intriguing thing for me as a boy and a fan of track and field in the 1980s was the strange names connected to the runners who were native to obscure places such as Mozambique and Romania, competing in what seemed to me exotic locales such as Göteborg, Oslo and Zurich. I learned about Apartheid by way of South African Zola Budd who was born in the Orange Free State and made headlines for her world championships, world records and bare foot running, along with the controversy of running for the Apartheid suffering nation that in turn made her ineligible for the Olympics. She resolved this by immigrating to Great Britain.
In 1984 the Moroccan track star named Said Aouita became as familiar to my ten-year old mind as Magic Johnson. This was not because my elementary school specialized in teaching the current events of Morocco, nor was it because Moroccan culture is popularly known in the U.S. I knew of Aouita, and therefore Morocco, because I am a fan of track and field. Aouita dominated the middle-distance events from the 800m-5000m throughout the eighties, winning the 5,000m gold in the 1984 Olympics, the 800m bronze in ’88, and for several years held both the 5,000m and 1,500m world records. Aouita not only captured my young imagination but also the imagination of the young Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj, who shares my birth year of 1974. It is said that El Guerrouj was inspired to run by watching Said’s performance in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. It makes me wonder: where did he watch the race? Did his family own a television with rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil, or was there a favorite café that hosted for soccer matches and track events?
El Guerrouj, dubbed the King of the Mile, is the current world record holder in the 1,500 meters (and the mile, 2000m and indoor 1500m/mile), wresting it away from Algerian Noureddine Morceli who dominated the event through the nineties, winning gold in the ’96 Olympics, the same race that El Guerrouj made his Olympic final debut, only to trip and fall at the gun lap. He would have to wait until 2004 for his first Olympic victory that came in a pair, becoming the first Olympian since Finland’s Paavo Nurmi won both the 1,500m and 5000m in the 1924 Olympic Games. Following his twin victory, El Guerrouj acknowledged the Flying Finn as one of the great legends who marked the history of athletics, “He left his name at his point in time. Now I’m able to put my name with his. He is from another time, a time when my grandfather was watching him. To stand alongside him now, how can I express it? There are no words.” The intimate respect of a fellow runner is tied together by the bonds of knowing the same distance raced and the pain and glory that goes with it.
Aouita, Morceli and El Guerrouj are all men of small stature, sinewy and light boned, built for running speedily and with endurance, each 5’8” or less, no more than 140 pounds. Three men descended from tribes of the Atlas Mountains on the fringe of the southern edge of the Mediterranean, home to the ancient Berbers and more recently Arab tribes that includes luminaries such as St. Augustine, born in present day Souk Ahras, Algeria; Tertullian, who coined the term Trinity in reference to Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Arius, who generated the famous theological battle with Athanasius that shaped Christianity; and Ramses the Great, a Pharaoh of Pharaohs. Anthropologically, these North African tribes are related closer to Sicilians, Egyptians and Spaniards, then Nigerians, Ethiopians and Saudi Arabians. These athletes wear on their singlet the red star and crescent of Islam (Algeria), and the interwoven pentangle star symbolic of occult law in ancient days and the five pillars of Islam today (Morocco). This is a people with a long and variegated history who have weathered centuries of hardscrabble living as farmers and herdsmen over rugged land that has developed a tenacity of mind and body. These intangibles of genetic lineage and adaptation cannot be prescribed by a coach standing on an all-weather track holding a stop-watch, but they do arguably help produce world champions in the sport of track and field.
My familiarity with these North African track athletes made possible an appreciation for Muslim people when the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and despots like Libyan President Momar Khadafi were the types of Muslims popularly featured in the news. Because of track and field, I know Muslims to be amongst the greatest of athletes in a sport I cherish. I watched Abdi Bile of Somalia compete long before the Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in the Battle of Mogadishu. This is not to say that my appreciation for Somalia’s superb miler changed the impoverished and violent horrors of the country, but it changed me. It expanded my perception of who a Somalian could be outside the realm of guerilla warlords, terrorism, and politics.
When Hassiba Boulmerka, the Algerian middle-distance runner was forced to move to Europe to train because of the fundamentalists at home who deemed her running attire unacceptably immodest, I realized just how significant the Muslim culture war with the West is. Through exposure to the international competition of track and field, nuanced aspects of the Muslim culture were revealed to me long before the Taliban and Al-Qaeda became household names and popular signifiers of the Islamic faith. Despite opposition, Boulmerka went on to win gold in the 1,500m at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
Most recently, Moroccan born Rashid Ramzi, competing for Bahrain at the Beijing Olympics, won gold in the 1500m, perpetuating the long-line of gold-medal middle-distance runners from the Maghreb nations of North Africa. In these days of protracted struggle with the Muslim world, we in the West would do well to familiarize ourselves with the story and lives of individuals who cannot be easily vilified as Evil Doers. Recognition and gratitude for athletes such as Rashid Ramzi gives a human face to the diversity of Muslim people who are relatively unknown and often misunderstood by Americans. When we can acknowledge people for something more than the politics, religion, economics, and leadership of the nation states in which they live, the people become human and therein of value. By virtue of being a fan of track and field, and a friend so to speak of the sport’s greatest runners, my global awareness of troubled and little known nations is enhanced, leaving me more astute in matters of foreign affairs and sensitive to world events. In the words of the Glasgow based indie-pop band Belle and Sebastian, “the stars of track and field are beautiful people.” Indeed. How has your sport influenced you lately – on a global scale?

Harvey Milk

“My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you.” This was the phrase Mr. Milk became known for in his struggle for the gay community in the United States during the 1970s. After moving to San Francisco in 1972, Milk lived and worked as a businessman, activist, organizer, politician, and was the first openly gay man elected to a major political office (San Francisco Board of Supervisors/City Council).
The recently released movie, Milk, starring Sean Penn, who plays Harvey with devastating effect, is a masterful homage to the man.
Admittedly, what I know about the late Harvey Milk is largely limited to the well-crafted film, written through the sympathetic pen of an openly gay man who was brought up in a Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) family. And this is exactly why the film has the power that it does. It provides a poetic insider view to the personal experience of what it was, and is, to be gay and fighting for identity, understanding, personal dignity and civil rights. Doubtless, there is much more to the story of Milk’s life and the public and personal events than can be depicted in one film.
However, this picture provoked in me reconsideration for the struggle that gay individuals encounter. This film should evoke compassion, especially from the Christian community in the United States that is sadly and deservedly known for being anti-gay. Sadly, I doubt the response to Milk by the religious community will be characterized by an up-swelling of goodwill. Likely, the film will serve to promote an entrenched opposition expressed with righteous platitudes for what it is to live a righteous life before God. The film specifically targets the Christian Right’s strident attempts to fight off the ‘homosexual scourge’, by way of several propositions across the country, most notably Prop 6 that proposed outlawing gay and lesbian school teachers in the state of California. There is a clip of then President Jimmy Carter saying, “Vote against Prop 6.” President Carter was not the kind of Christian that the Christian Right likes. But perhaps he is a Christian more in the likeness of Jesus Christ – the one whom Christians purport to follow.
The story of Prop 6 is especially relevant, and interesting to me because of California Prop 8, recently passed, limiting marriage to a man and woman. Not surprisingly, the proposition was aggressively pursued by the Religious Right, perhaps especially the LDS Church. Ironic that the LDS church would enter so prominent a fray that deals with what a legal marriage is, given the history and ongoing polygamy within the family of the Latter-Day Saints.
My name is Zach Hancock and I want to recruit you – to be a person who will vow to seek friendship with at least one gay person(s) before you make any attempts at opposition to the gay community. Begin by viewing Milk.

Abortion/Freedom

We have a Constitutional Amendment on the ballot this year in Colorado, addressing said issue from a State level. 

The Amendment seeks to define a Person as taking legal effect at time of fertilization. As it stands today, and has, 

to the best of my knowledge since 1876 (State's birth), a person is recognized at birth. The complications with the

Amendment are legion, so to speak. What about invitro for example? Eggs are fertilized and then disposed of. You 

all know some one who has had this procedure done, if not you. We had better check our hearts on this. For example, 

inflammatory language by "Christians" such as Partial Birth, is not helpful. And what about the personhood of mothers - 

and all of the complications that enuse in the many circumstances that can arise in pregnancy. How do you use, we use, 

technology of ALL kinds. When do we talk about individual right? Repubs and Libertarians and Dems love individual rights 

for everything they support personally, but then want the LAW to step in for everything they don't support. My suggestion 

is that you and I "vote" our conscious by being a living example of what we believe in. Caesar's Politics are not, and never 

will be God's Politics. Where do we get on and off the political platform? Good question. But I sense very little real listening 

to the opposition - and a lot of answer giving.

Ease & Oblique

There are several different sorts of people in the world. Victor Hugo taught us that there were at least five. But out of these several I observe two primary categories, which don't have any definite name necessarily, but they could generally be labeled as: Nuanced and One Dimensional. If you find yourself in the nuanced category (all of life really resides in this category, only tragically, many don't realize it) you are likely sore beyond belief in your general appraisal of society, and peppered with riotous moments of joy and painfully good humor. If however you find yourself in the One Dimensional category, well, life is a peach, except for when it is not. This sort of sunny disposition is often praised by religious types who take it as sure sign of peaceful, God-induced harmony, made possible by utter submission.
There are two authors who plainly represent for me these two sides of life, and each of them, in my experience, has routinely, if overly, used a word in their respective writing that gives their temperment away: John Grisham - ease. J.D. Salinger - oblique.
Early on in my reading career I devoured the novels of J. G., these easy tails of intrigue and witty turns of plot made for enjoyable reading, until that is, I discovered the word that was used to distraction: Ease. I began underlining it with red ink. I routinely found the word within four or five pages of the last use. Every character was easing in or out of this or that room. Easing into this or that chair. It became intolerable, and probably ten or more years ago I put down a half-finished J.G. novel out of exasperation with the word that had become a nauseating presence. This was fortuitous, and is probably the same sort of reason that drives all who read better writing than pulp fiction onto better authors and their titles. It is not so much that we aspire to anything more, but out of necessity if we are to maintain reading as a hobby and also value our sanity to any measurable degree. So off I went to explore authors beyond the likes of Grisham. In so doing I realized a world of writing awaited me that loomed large, something like the high mountains climbers from the East coast find when they come out to climb in the West. These ranges were heretofore unexplored for me, as my high school education wasn't exactly rigorous or inspired beyond the thin writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other thin works deemed manageable for our teenage middle-class mainstream intellects. For the first time I confronted authors such as Herman Melville, Dostoevsky and Salinger and along with him, the word oblique.