False Premise

The premise that human beings can own property seems silly the more I think about it. We believe in the authority to claim parts of Earth for ourselves, be they land or material. The fact is, though, those things will exist long after whatever human that claims to own them has passed away. We don't even own our bodies, though we may indeed control them for these short periods of time. Really they are made of energy that existed long before we did and will soon pass entirely out of our control. So it is stewardship, rather than ownership, that we may claim.

All claims of ownership eventually trace back to one person who owned something merely because someone said he did. And of course we set up systems that validate those claims, but where do we get authority even to do that? According to natural law, no human being has the right to claim property or to give it to someone else; the earth, space, and the elements belong to no one. We assume our systems for division and transfer of property are valid, but they are actually man-made and very shallow.

Unknown

The writer I love is the one who offers me questions. Anyone can spout what they know, but to address that which we struggle to know - to explore the most deeply felt uncertainties - is a gift beyond measure.

Maybe it is because, deep down, I understand that I really know nothing, and to pretend anything different feels closed - like a lie. To acknowledge a poignant mystery, on the other hand, is like the rapture of prostrating yourself before God and acknowledging he is far greater than you can even fathom - that you are nothing before him. Only by doing this does his power become our own. Only by acknowledging the unknown can we avoid being destroyed by it.

Giving and Receiving

Receiving with gratitude is a profound form of giving. What offering has full meaning that is not received in the same seriousness and joy with which it is offered? What bond can we create if the love is not mutual - if the profoundest generosity is not returned with abiding gratitude? This is what love is made of, and this is why it grows.

Last Day

I begin a new job Monday. Today was the last I will see of the life I have lived the past nine months - not insignificantly the length of a pregnancy.

You live in the same place for months, years, and every day is relatively the same. You look to the future for change, and you want that change. Then one day it comes, and in that instant those places and people become your past - things which you can no longer touch, and by that very distancing – that rarification – they become precious in a way they could not be while you possessed them. You keep memories, but they are documents subject to loss and distortion, and in a way you lose them.

Perhaps this is why we need the future - so we have something to replace the loss - and perhaps this is why we fear death: we cannot know what will come to replace the people and places we have loved and which, painfully, we cannot help loving even more upon losing them.

Naming

Until the past century, culture has not changed rapidly enough to merit the identification of decades as culturally significant periods of time. Now, American culture changes so rapidly and in so many simultaneous directions that describing it has become difficult.

Fitting, then, that we don't have a ready name for the decade we have just lived. Fitting, too, that the most likely candidates identify absence as a defining feature (e.g. "zeroes"). Perhaps with the distortion of time we will more easily understand and therefore more readily brand it. The need to distinguish the first decade of this century from the decades to follow will bring a word critical mass, but I am not sure we even have that word yet.

Picture

In forty years, this photograph of a man and his son standing in front of those mountains, that trailer full of wood scraps, will signify to the son something very different from what the father perceives on the day it is taken. To the father, a difficult but satisfying day of work; to the son, an obscure piece of his own history – meanings he will understand only through the photograph itself, which is to say not well at all.

He will see the young father, then strong and handsome – the evidence of a day’s work yet unfinished in the trailer ready to be taken to the dump. The grown boy will see record of himself as a child and wonder how he spent this day as his father worked – how he could have so little memory of this place which must account in some way for what he has become.

America's religion

Talking this month with a staunchly atheist co-worker (one of my great friends and a fantastic source of perspective and knowledge) about the meaning of holidays, I realized for the first time that consumerism is America's religion: on our holiest of holy days, we practice ritualistic consumption which, even in a devout Mormon household is thinly veiled in metaphors of gift giving and receiving, if it is veiled at all.

Part of me is perfectly fine with this: I caught part of the Christmas Story last night and felt genuine emotion watching that boy yearn for his toy gun. I wanted him to have it because, on top of the problems in life we can't escape, not having resources could potentially break the human spirit. Christmas can represent a celebration of the significant fact that we have resources.

But we are so ungrateful and so wasteful.

I often consider that, working a job, we literally exchange a portion of our lives on Earth for a portion of money, and much of that money goes to things which do not enrich us but can in fact be like drugs to an addict: the desire for more can become insatiable and, rather than enriching, can rob us of the things that could have brought happiness: faith, work, love.

I do love Christmas, including gift giving and receiving. I feel moved when I receive even a simple card from a friend, let alone generous gifts from my parents. I struggle, though, to always worship correctly, and I know I am not alone.