Breakfast in Paradise

I slept all the way to my alarm at 6am, which is somewhat unusual with the time difference, but an almost perfect execution of my MO for westbound transatlantic travel: ~2 hours of sleep on the plane, and then 5-6 (in this case, 6.5) hours here.  Even more unusual was my resisting the pull to blearily scroll through the iPhone (other than a quick check to see if Lydia had sent me a message overnight; she hadn’t, perhaps unconsciously knowing my intentions not to look at it).  Instead I got out of bed, opened the blinds to the still darkness over the construction site out the north window,¹ and retrieved from the fridge the bowl of oats and chia seeds and dates and cocoa and almond milk that I had stirred together the night before, loosely following a recipe from the latest Gwyneth Paltrow cookbook we bought on eBay.² 

Appropriate that the chapter of Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander that I read over breakfast talks about the dawn: “Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.  It is wide open.  The sword is taken away, but we do not know it; we are off ‘one to his farm and another to his merchandise.’  Lights on.  Clocks ticking.  Thermostats working.  Stoves cooking.  Electric shavers filling radios with static.  ‘Wisdom,’ cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.”

This followed a passage in which Merton describes the daybreak at his hermitage at Gesthemani: mainly the first cries of the waking birds, at “the most wonderful moment of the day…when creation in its innocence asks permission to ‘be’ once again.”  In my case, the role of the birds would be played by the construction workers, emerging from the darkness in neon safety vests, porting hardhats and lahge coffees from Dunkin’.  They’re here as part the tsunami of biotech gentrification which continues to crash tirelessly over this part of Cambridge, so they (and certainly I) would technically fall more on the side of merchandise than wisdom, in Merton’s terms.  Still, I also find this the most wonderful moment of the day, and in the rhythm of their walk and the hum and grind of the machines and the black/blue sky I think I still catch at least glimpse of paradise.    

¹ Both windows in this apartment face north, so probably a useless qualification

² I know how this sounds, but trust me her cookbooks are really good

The Last Annual Absolute Ceiling Business Traveler's Buyer's Guide

A few months ago while thumbing through the New York Times app, I saw a headline for “The Best Gear for Travel 2019.”  Given the direction of this here website, you would think something like that would interest me, but instead I experienced a vague sense of unease. 

Perhaps it was the deflated feeling that comes with the realization that the New York Times, the sober organ that weighed down the breakfast tables of my youth with its keen reportage and dense black typeset, has become just another shill for Corporate America.  Then again, the NYT has become more and more unreadable over the past several years, so I think that particular ship may have already sailed.

Perhaps it was the use of the word “gear” in the headline, implying that the reader is preparing to hike the Appalachian Trail, when most likely she’s just headed to a conference room at a Marriott somewhere.  Of course, this kind of strategy has been used effectively for years to peddle sport-utility vehicles to soccer moms, and these headline writers know their craft. 

Or perhaps it was the implication that the inconvenience and anxiety of traveling can be overcome, or at least neutralized, through the acquisition and utilization of stuff.  “If only I had the right pair of travel underwear,” the thinking goes, “then I would be able to endure the hell that is five and a half hours in a middle seat on Delta.” 

I wonder to what extent this is about control, or rather the illusion of control – the idea that if I can somehow create an environment more comfortable, convenient, productive, and/or pleasurable, it might obviate the fact that I’m trapped here inside a metal tube, hurtling 37,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, completely at the mercy of the human beings who designed, manufactured, assembled, maintained, refueled, and are flying the metal tube.  By the way, these days many of those tubes are not made of metal but mostly of “CFRP,” or carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic, a tidbit of knowledge which does nothing to quell that particular anxiety.

In any case.  I suppose we all need certain illusions to keep us sane and functional.  Also I figure if I name-drop a few companies in here it might help my site traffic.  Thus:

The Last Annual Absolute Ceiling Business Traveler Buyer’s Guide

Bose QuietComfort 3 Over-Ear Noise-Cancelling Headphones, $350*, www.bose.com

One of the main points of this website, if not the main point, is to try to be more aware and present while traveling for work.  Thus I feel somewhat conflicted recommending that you go isolate yourself underneath a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.  Yet sometimes when on a plane or train one does want to catch a movie or enjoy a podcast, and the flimsy earbuds in plastic wrapping they distribute in economy fall short when it comes to audio quality and ear canal comfort.

I bought my pair of Bose headphones around 2006, and, apart from the leather-ish ear cushions which have eroded down to the bare fabric, they work just as well today.  The power system – involving a small custom battery which detaches from one of the earphones and clicks into an external plug-in charger, and which miraculously I haven’t forgotten in a hotel room somewhere – is a little fiddly, but it still holds a charge just fine, and it’s remained immune from extinction via the evolutionary “advance” of plugs and cables over the years.

So thanks and praise to the good people at Bose for resisting the strategy of planned obsolescence.  I like my MacBook as much as you like yours, but when the Genius at the Cambridgeside Apple Store informs me that the one I bought in 2010 is “like, vintage,” and that therefore it would be actually cheaper for me to buy a new MacBook (which of course comes with a next generation USB-C port, meaning I also need to buy an adapter if I want to plug anything into it) rather than get my old one repaired, I know what time it is.

Unfortunately, and speaking of Apple, I find that I don’t use my headphones to listen to music as much as I used to.  I think this began around 2016, when I started subscribing to their Apple Music streaming service.  In some ways this has been a good thing: I can now listen to a lot more new music and see how I feel about an unfamiliar act before plunking down $12.99 for an album based only on faith or a suspiciously high Metacritic score.  I still do buy the occasional album via iTunes, mainly because I spend a lot of time on airplanes and I want to be able to listen to them while offline.  But generally I use Apple Music as it was designed, streaming the songs via an Internet connection.  And I’m sure that Apple is betting that those remaining few islands of non-connectivity will soon be swallowed by the rising waters of ubiquitous wifi, and that the quaint act of “listening offline” will go the way of the cassette tape.   Still, I’m not sure how comfortable I feel about this whole thing.  Does “renting” rather than “owning” music change my relationship to it?  To what extent do I want to define myself by my record collection?  And what happens when my “record collection” evaporates into a bunch of server farms in the desert, only accessible to me for as long as I keep sending money to Cupertino, CA?   To what extent does a third-party mediator influence my relationship with music, and the artist responsible for it?  Of course, all the recorded music I’ve listened to my entire life has been delivered via some kind of mediator, whether it’s a record label or a radio station or Jack’s Music Shop in Red Bank, NJ.  Still, when the artist/listener relationship starts to drift towards the transient, the transactional, and especially the conditional, I’m not sure that takes us in a good direction. 

And, what do you know: Apple announced in June that it will be shutting down its iTunes software, replacing it with “three all-new apps that greatly simplify and improve the way Mac users discover and enjoy their favorite music, TV shows, movies and podcasts.”   Don’t worry, Apple assures us, users will still have access to their entire music libraries.  We shall see. 

Maybe I’m overreacting here.  Or maybe I’m not.

* Bose doesn’t sell this model anymore, so this is an estimated price for an analogous new pair.

Freitag HAZZARD Backpack, CHF340, https://www.freitag.ch/en/f303

Choosing a bag for your work things can be complicated.  To begin with, there's no consensus on what one should call it these days: “briefcase” is out of style; “backpacks” are for schoolchildren; one is left with the generic “work bag,” which sounds moronic and soulless.  Whatever you call it, it should be functional yet portable, practical yet at least a little stylish. So what are our choices?  The traditional rectangular leather attaché with latches that could be sprung open dramatically in a courtroom seems to have reached extinction.  In my 20’s I had a brown leather “messenger bag,” but those things tend to be pretty heavy and un-ergonomic: my former boss once told me (with a disconcerting hint of pride) that one of her shoulders had become several centimeters lower after years of humping a bag like this from one airport to another.  In the US, one sees a lot of logoed hiking-style backpacks (Ogio seems to have cornered the market on these).  I suppose all those zippered compartments are handy, but they tend to encourage over-stuffing, and the Americans tend to make matters worse by dangling water bottles, hand sanitizer, mini-stuffed animals, carabiners (?) and other bric-a-brac from exterior loops.  On the other end of the spectrum, a friend of mine tells me he’s managed to strip down, Kondo-esque, to a single, sleek neoprene laptop sleeve, which I can only admire longingly.

My Frietag backpack has a polarizing effect on my colleagues.  The Germans all tend to like it.  The Swiss are nonplussed, as you can’t swing a cat in Zurich or Bern without hitting half a dozen Frietag bags.  The Americans are a little confused but tolerant.  And every single one of my French coworkers hates it.  To wit, this exchange with my colleague Eric:

Eric: “Tom, when is your birthday?”

Me (eyebrows raised in pleasant surprise): “My birthday?  Why, it’s September 2^nd.”

Eric: “Good.  I will buy you a new backpack so I don’t have to look at that ugly thing anymore.”

I admit that CHF 340 is steep, but Frietags have a lot going for them.  They make all their bags out of the tarpaulin-like material which they recycle from the side of container trucks.  On top of the ecological benefits (many Frietag bags also use recycled seat belts for their shoulder straps), this also means it’s waterproof, it will probably last forever, and the design and color of each bag are unique, in a “found art” kind of way.  It’s certainly not going to get mistaken for someone else’s bag going through security.  Frietag also has a cool website with stop-motion-animations of their products, starring the people who work in their factory.  If you find yourself in Zurich, go check out their flagship store, which, on-brand, is made up of repurposed shipping containers.

Mivolis Meerwasser Nasenspray, €1.45, www.dm.de

A doctor told me once that no one would ever get colds if they used saline nasal spray every day during the winter.  I don’t know about that, but airplane cabins are pretty dry, and this seems to help.  My in-laws like to bring me these when they visit. 

FALKE RUN Socks, €15, www.falke.com, (they also have a great store in the Munich airport)

I’m aware that there’s a need for self-expression, or even self-definition, going on here.  We want things which will not only make our travels easier and more enjoyable, but which will also say something about us to the guy sitting across the aisle.  I can admit that at least part of my own motivation here is contrarian, as if waving around my German nasal spray is somehow going to make me more interesting / unique / better than your average American pharmaceutical executive.

The same could likely be said about these socks from FALKE, an outfit out of Schmallenberg, Germany, which has been making quality “legwear” (their word) since 1895.  In fact, the FALKE people are already several steps ahead of me when it comes to brand-as-self, as evidenced by their website: “The FALKE scene* is made up of multilingual globetrotters, headstrong individuals, curious explorers, fanatical perfectionists, sensitive creative types and incorrigible aesthetes.  Their imagery, their interior design and their clothing are visible expressions of their instincts.”   This is what Brits in the advertising trade would call a “pen portrait.”  Remember we’re talking about socks here. 

In any case, these socks are truly fabulous.  Soft and cushiony but not too thick, left/right customized so they don’t bunch up around the pinkie toe, with just enough elastic to grip your feet and ankles without strangling them.  I suppose you could run in them, as the name implies, but they’re perfectly fine with a pair of trainers or casual shoes.

* “scene!”

Eric Bompard Cashmere Hoodie, €395, www.eric-bompard.com

Okay, I suppose no one really needs a cashmere hoodie.  But the cabin temperature on an overnight transatlantic typically fluctuates +/- 20F degrees, so this comes in especially handy during the winter months.  When I’m home and the outside temperature is 40F or below, I wear mine essentially every waking hour, so from a cost/utility point of view, it’s probably one of the cheapest things I own. 

Olive Tree Bible Study App, free, www.olivetree.com

I’ve been at this – trying to write about business travel and God and things – for two years now, and I find that it doesn’t get any easier.  On the contrary: paths between various destinations become worn and familiar; the urge to execute the rituals of business travel – transferring electronics and liquids from bag to security bins back to bag with maximum speed and efficiency – draw our attention inward.  It takes more and more effort and discipline to appreciate one’s experience, to try to observe the sacrament of the present moment.    

With this in mind, I try (and I fail, a lot) to spend as much time as possible not looking at my phone when I’m traveling. To try to avoid that blurry, strung-out state when you’re mindlessly scrolling through Twitter, not even recording half of the words traversing your screen, trying to capture something you can’t quite identify and also know you’ll never actually find.       

Of course, if there’s an app that makes your life easier when you’re on the road, then by all means use it.  Likewise, if a piece of “gear” will make you a little more comfortable in your travels, go for it.  But while you’re at it, try to take a moment to weave in something that is more than just a dopamine fix.  Talk to a stranger.  Read and think about a Bible verse if that’s your thing.  Look up and admire the ceiling architecture.  Call a friend you haven’t talked to in a while.  Close your eyes and say a prayer of thanks to the divinity of your choice, or to none at all.

Technical difficulties

I read once that certain German nursing homes have fake bus stops.  Evidently the patients on the dementia ward find comfort in the act of sitting on a bench under a little shelter and waiting for the bus, even if the bus is nonexistent and will never show up.  We followed an analogous ritual this morning when we all got on the plane that was to take us to Athens, only to get off it again around an hour later due to some kind of technical glitch that the engineering crew couldn’t sort out.  The pilot sheepishly informed us in Swiss-accented English that he “couldn’t accept the aircraft,” a phrasing which (perhaps by intent) gave me some comfort that he was looking out for us.  As if someone had offered him a Bombardier C Series 100/300 and, after giving it a once-over, he shook his head and said that it would not do.

So we lingered by our original gate for another half hour or so, until they told us that we would be taking a different airplane from another gate.  We redeemed the 5CHF voucher they gave us for some sandwiches.

I think it’s good for one’s soul to run into an issue like this every now and again.  It reminds you just how complicated and miraculous it is that we can get from one side of the planet to another in a matter of hours, and that always expecting this process to go perfectly smoothly (or, even worse, making plans with that expectation) is an unreasonable, if not immoral, thing to do.

Easter

We spent Easter weekend in South Tyrol, also known as Trento/Alto Adige, a semi-autonomous region in northern Italy.  It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I, when the Allies handed it over to Italy as a thank-you gift for coming to their war.  Later, when the Fascists stepped onto the scene, they attempted a full-on “Italianization” of the region, banning the teaching of German in schools and assigning Latinized (and often goofy-sounding) names onto all of the towns – hence Salthaus, the town where we stayed, is recognized by my GPS as “Saltusio.”  As you might imagine, the locals didn’t (and still don’t) have a lot of love for their Roman landlords, but things have evolved into a sort of equilibrium: the dominant language is now German, but all the signs are in both German and Italian.  Almost all of the tax revenue stays within the region.  According to a guy I know from Siena, jobs in Alto Adige pay very well and are highly coveted, the catch being that you need to speak German to work there.  All that being said, if you ever find yourself in conversation with a Südtirolese, you probably shouldn’t refer to them as “Italian.”

We left Geneva around 2pm on Maundy Thursday.  There are two ways you can get there from here: up and over the Alps, taking a right at Zürich and crossing one of the mountain passes; or down and under the Alps, through the Mont Blanc Tunnel, past Milan and then hanging a left a Lago di Garda.  We opted for the latter, which is less scenic but usually a little faster.   I was on teleconferences for the first two hours of the trip, so time passed in that choppy, disoriented way that happens when you’re on the phone and driving at the same time.  East of Milan we stopped for dinner at an Autogrill, an Italian chain of highway-rest-stop restaurants which are prevalent in this part of Europe, and superior to most restaurants you will find anywhere in the United States.  It’s cafeteria style, but there are always different sections – a salad bar, a pasta station, a meat station, dessert.  Even though they’re cooking for hundreds of people, somehow they manage to get the pasta al dente.  The silverware is actual silverware.  Out where you sit and eat, a collection of glass bottles of olive oil and vinegar are waiting.  We split a tortelloni with spinach and a bowl of clementines.  I saw a guy in his 20s with a plate of grilled zucchini in front of him.

At the cashier, the woman asks you if you want a coffee (I do).  This is added to your bill, and after you eat, you carry the receipt down to the coffee bar where they serve you your coffee.  The server then executes some kind of personalized ritual – tearing the top half of the receipt or marking it with a thumbnail – to note that they’ve processed your order.   You drink your coffee standing up at the bar.

As it got dark and we drove north toward Trent/Trento, we listened to a Fresh Air interview with Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest who left her church to go teach religion to college students, and who has since found some modest interviewed-by-Oprah-level of notoriety.  Terry Gross bubbled with excitement every time she said “ePIScopal PRIEST,” suggesting that interviewing a member of the clergy on NPR is some kind of subversive act these days.    In the interview, Barbara Brown Taylor gave one of the best descriptions of God that I’ve ever heard¹.  She also said how she felt like she couldn’t go to Good Friday services anymore, because of things said about the killers of Jesus in the Good Friday gospel readings which she thought might be hurtful to her Jewish friends.  I’m certainly not qualified to debate scripture with Barbara Brown Taylor, but I think she might have seen one too many Mel Gibson movies.  As I read it, the point of the Good Friday story is not at all that one group of people was good and another was evil.  It’s that all people were unwilling to see that God was right there among them (“…He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him (Jn1:11)).”  It’s that, when push came to shove, some of JC’s own disciples were more interested in saving their own asses than in recognizing the son of God (Mk 14:66-72).  And it’s that Pilate himself, generally considered the villain in this drama, and scorned from the Apostles’ Creed to Telly Savalas, wasn’t convinced that Jesus had done anything wrong; it was the crowd who in the end called for his crucifixion (Mt 27:23).

Meanwhile, back in Boston.

I realize that I didn’t say much earlier about giving up sugar for Lent.  At first, it was more difficult than last year, when I didn’t eat meat.  I can’t think of too many circumstances in which I’ve been “craving” a hamburger, but I realized this year that I was eating, and craving, sugar every day.  A little chocolate in my muesli at breakfast (or a pain au chocolat at the airport), some dark chocolate with after-lunch coffee, and some kind of dessert after dinner.  When traveling and eating out, I would never refuse dessert; the cupboard in my apartment in Cambridge usually contained a bag or two of those fiendish² Tate’s cookies you find at Whole Foods.  I wouldn’t call my eating behavior out-of-control (or unusual), but when I consciously stopped eating sugar, it made me more aware of the difference between feeding myself and feeding a craving.  It drove a kind of wedge between my “self,” which is me, and my desire, which is something I feel but which is not me.  This is hard to describe without sounding flaky.  Paul gives it a shot in Romans 7:15:   “For I do not understand my own actions…For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out…Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who does it, but sin that dwells within me.”  The Buddha serves up more or less the same dish, hold the guilt: the origin of suffering is “craving, desire, or attachment.”    

Meanwhile, back in Salthaus, I celebrated Easter with a piece of cake, layered with dark and white chocolate and whipped cream, topped with a layer of passion fruit jelly.  It was delicious, and I savored it like someone who hadn’t eaten any sugar for 6 weeks, but I didn’t find myself mindlessly shoveling it into my face.

I think I was hoping for some kind of Easter revelation at the end of all this.  It didn’t really come, as holiday trips are always busier than you think they’ll be, with driving around and doing things.  Also, there were a couple of work emergencies that I had to deal with, and my sense is that one’s opportunities to experience the mystical are inversely proportional to the number of PowerPoint slides one encounters in any given week.

Still, there is something unavoidably divine about South Tyrol.  The way that the mountains seem to rise vertically from the pool-table-flat valley, and thus how, when you’re in the valley, your field of vision is completely occupied by earth tones, or rather by earth itself, and a mysterious calm comes over you.  The way that the farms are perched high up on the mountains, with plowed rows gripping onto the steep grade, and you feel like some kind of harmony between man and nature has been realized here.  The way the smell of the apple blossoms overtook us as we hiked the Schildhöfenweg.  The white noise that the Passer river makes as it flows over rocks that seem so perfectly placed as to be man-made.  In Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor talks about the Irish concept of a “thin place,” where the membrane between the mundane and the mystical seems to dissolve into almost nothing.  This is one of those places.

Late afternoon on Easter Sunday I went running, out and back along the Passer River, and then up the steep hill past our hotel.  I crossed the street and walked over to St. Michael’s Church in Salthaus, which I’ve never seen in service, but whose doors always seem to be open whenever I try to go in.  It’s a newer church with a modern design, built to complement the surrounding landscape.  A wide window to the right of the altar affords a view of the mountains; the ceiling is wavy parallel slats of wood.  I sat alone and said a prayer of thanks, and drops of my sweat made a little slapping sound as they fell onto the vinyl kneeler in front of my pew.

¹ “When I use the word God, I do not envision a large person with two arms, two legs, a nose, and two eyes.  I envision, instead, some presence so beyond my being, a presence that both knows the stars by name and knows me by name, as well, that is not here to be useful to me, that is not here to give me things as much as to ask me to give myself away for love…(W)hen I say I believe in God, I mean I trust.  I trust in the goodness of life, of being.  I trust that beyond all reason.  I trust that with my life.  And that’s what I mean by God.”

²  It’s not insignificant that we often use diabolical metaphors like this to describe food.   

Lent Back Nine

April 2, 2019 – GVAàAMS

A day trip to the office in Amsterdam, originally planned for a bunch of meetings which several people now can’t attend, so I will fly to the Netherlands mainly to participate in videoconferences that I could have done from home. 

Lent reading this morning was the parable of the prodigal son, and a bit from 2 Corinthians about regarding no one according to the flesh.  This, coupled with some of Laurence’s sermon from last Sunday, led me to a tidy summary of God’s message to man via Christ: “You’re all fucked up, but it’s okay.”  (also lends itself well to repeated chanting)

April 6, 2019 – GVA B gates

One of those early spring days in Geneva when there’s still a slight chill in the air, but some of the trees (I want to say alders but that’s probably completely wrong) are sporting precocious leaves, and you know that by the time you return from a week in Boston (where it will still be cold and grey) all the leaves in Geneva will have come out. 

Flying transatlantic on a Saturday feels like the definition of “free time,” since you have a whole non-workday after you land.  This is an illusion, of course.  The same amount of work which will be waiting for me on Sunday night is waiting for me now.  But I will have the chance to sleep in a little tomorrow before going to the MS Walk and, and then I’ll get to see Mia play soccer at 6.  Part of me wants to have a few drinks on the flight over, but there’s really no point.

Through the glass barrier to my left, people are getting off the plane that I’ll soon be getting onto.  Tired parents dragging children with zoomorphic roller bags.  Young girls in leggings and neck pillows, clutching mobile phones.    

April 7, 2019 – Cambridge, MA

My flight last night arrived a little early, and I wasn’t feeling too tired, so I drove to the Plough and Stars in Central Square to see a band.  I kind of knew the guitar player, who was in a band with someone else whom I was in a different band with years ago, so we were connected through the Transitive Property of Rock Bands.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that I didn’t stand out as the oldest person in the room: there were certainly a lot of student-aged types there, as one would expect in Cambridge, but also a lot of what I probably would have called “aging rocker” types, a category to which I probably belong myself.  Several men with grey beards and ample guts and horned-rim glasses.  Also a few of those deadpan record store types, one of whom, with long, straight hair and numb affect, sidled up next to me.

I realize that this is not really my scene: the music was fun, but I don’t feel super-drawn to the loudness and the booziness and the ringing skull the morning after.  There’s a certain romanticism to driving all over the US in a van (as this band does), but late nights in divey bars with rotating sets of mostly drunken people is something I would get very tired of very quickly.  At the same time, there was something beautiful about the scene: people who were not 20-something making music, and smiling while doing so.

Lent reading this week focuses on parenthood.  There’s a strong pro-adoption angle on the CTBI website, and it is nice to see so much space given here to people in “nontraditional” family situations: for instance, those who might be uncomfortable during “Mothering Sunday” service (which is evidently a thing, although my church didn’t do anything with it).  The Bible readings cover this as well: on the cross (Jn 19:25), Jesus bestows a mother/son relationship upon Mary and “the disciple whom he loved” (probably John).  And there is a mysterious passage in Luke (Lk 2:33), in which Simeon the quasi-mystic tells Joseph and Mary that their son is a big deal, but also that “…a sword will pierce through your own soul.”  This probably refers to the crucifixion, but part of my wants to read it also as a more general statement about that feeling when your children grow up and become their own people and you become less important to them.  I may be projecting.

April 9, 2019 – Cambridge, MA

I left the office after 7pm and took the red line to Harvard Square, where I walked around in the drizzly chill, picking up some things at Lush for the twins’ birthday.  I poked around the Harvard Book Store for a while, but emerged with only a used collection of E.B. White essays.  I gave a dollar to the homeless guy sitting outside.  I recall how it used to be acceptable to refer to people like this as “bums.” 

April 13, 2019 – British Airways Lounge, Terminal E, Boston Logan Airport

I felt a curtain of sadness fall when I was leaving my apartment in Cambridge for the airport tonight.  I’m not sure why: I will be extremely happy to be back home after a long and trying week.  I won’t be back in Cambridge again for more than a month, and as I turned the thermostats down, I imagined the empty apartment, with a few of my second-tier suits hanging in the closet, and some stray dirty laundry in the hamper.  Like a dead person’s house before the next of kin can get in there and clean things out.

Jose, who works at the BA lounge in Boston, always says hello and shakes my hand when he sees me here.  We don’t have much to say to each other, but it’s nice to say hello, and I’m always impressed at his friendliness, which seems genuine.  And out of place in a transient place like an airport lounge.  But every place is transient, in a certain sense.   I watch the Masters on TV in the window reflection.  Everyone swings left-handed except for Phil Mickelson.

Like I said it was a difficult week at work, but I found myself comforted by Philippians 3:12 (“Not that I…am already perfect, but I press on to make it [the resurrection] my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”).  I feel my heart warmed especially by the “press on” line, even though what Paul is writing about has absolutely nothing to do with pharmaceuticals.  People look for encouragement wherever they can find it, even if the context is all wrong.  The Bible is a target-rich environment for this.  I believe this is what one would call cognitive bias.         

Lent Halftime Report

6 March^, 2019 – TGV Paris-Geneva

Today is Ash Wednesday, and I didn’t have time to go to church.  Not that I’ve ever gone to church on Ash Wednesday before, but I am trying to take Lent a little more seriously these days.  This year I’ve decided to give up sugar – as in so-called “added” sugar, so fruit is okay, but pain au chocolat is not.  Granted, 12 hours without sugar is not anything to congratulate oneself about, and today I was in our office on Rue de La Boetie, where the cheese cart in the canteen is a helpful distraction.  Nonetheless, the day was long and mentally tiring, and right now I would typically find myself lashing into a cookie or an EAT NATURAL bar or something. Richard Rohr writes some good stuff about the importance of aligning heart, mind and body when it comes to contemplation.      

16 March 2019 – GVAàFRA

Starting a 10-day trip to the US, which will bring me to Boston for a bunch of meetings, then to Las Vegas next week for three days.  A clear, bright morning in Geneva, almost empty going through security, and I found a smooth, easy rhythm, tapping the smiley-face button to indicate my satisfaction with things.  This feeling likely won’t last long, as the rest of the week will be busy and stressful and will not lend itself willingly to reflection and quiet.

On that note, I am trying to use this trip to get more into Lent study and reflection.  I am keeping with my sugar abstinence, which Lydia points out is kind of hypocritical since I eat roughly my own weight in dates every day, but still I think it does its job of making me more acutely aware of my own desire.  I imagine “temptation” is the proper word here; that is indeed the word used in my Lent study guide, which comes courtesy of something called Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.  Week 1 focuses on Luke 4, and the forty days in the wilderness and the temptation of Jesus.  I noticed for the first time this morning that the real drama in those passages comes at the end of the forty days, when Satan shows up to tempt JC.  To draw a weak parallel to my business travels, it’s relatively easy to stay disciplined about things when you’re breezing through GVA airport security on day one; the harder part is at the end of a trip like this, when all the fatigue has accumulated and your willpower has eroded and you flick mindlessly through your phone as you wait for your connecting flight home.

Isn’t this essential to what being a Christian is all about?  Truly living by choosing the good and deep and true, instead of succumbing to baser desires (and in so doing living a life that is more like death)?  I did slog through all of Augustine’s Confessions last year, so I should know something about this.  To quote Nasim Taleb (quoting Procrustes): “Love without sacrifice is theft.  This applies to any form of love, particularly the love of God.”

20 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Up early with jet lag and managed to get myself down to the gym at least to run a little.  One always feels better. 

A study question for this week is “Where and when did God manage to get your attention?”  This is preceded by a story about a thunderstorm and some lines about the “power and intensity of nature” as a sign of God’s presence.  Today, I read Genesis 15, when God tells Abraham that he will have as many descendants as stars in the sky, etc.  While reading it in my (highly recommended) Olive Tree bible study app, I found a note I had written, probably several years ago now, at Gn 15:12 (“…And behold, dreadful and great darkness came upon him.”).  My note said, “Is darkness necessary for light/God to appear?” 

This got me thinking about my own faith, which, to tell you the truth, has felt kind of forced and lukewarm lately.  Over the past months, I haven’t felt that strong emotive pull, while at church or anywhere else, that I felt, say, when I was reading the Bible deeply for the first time, or when I started to go to church regularly several years ago.  Maybe this is because things are relatively stable and comfortable for me at the moment (ed: abrupt scraping sound as the writer falls out of his chair to touch all the visible wood in the apartment).  Yeah, my job is stressful and there’s some uncertainty about the future, but I don’t feel any heavy darkness.  This was the exact word that I used to describe that feeling I would have, around the time my marriage was falling apart, when I would wake up in the morning and feel this heavy and intense sense of remorse, dread, fear: darkness.  Back in Genesis 15, God doesn’t come down and hit Abraham with the heavy pyrotechnics right off the bat.  He waits for a “dreadful and great darkness” to fall upon him, and only in the midst of that darkness does He make His covenant with Abraham.  So, perhaps God reveals Himself to us only (or most powerfully) when darkness falls.  One of our jobs, especially during Lent, is to at least be conscious of this, and perhaps learn keep an eye out for Him even when light is shining.  And (touching wood again) to be mindful that darkness is never that far away.

21 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

In a hurry this morning between the gym and meetings.  Just time to read Psalm 27, and a great line in verse 13: “I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  Not bad for a one-line philosophy, and a good, slightly cheeky, answer to the question, “What do you believe in?”  It’s always tough to parse the words too closely when you’re dealing with a translation, but I find the fact that it specifies “in the land of the living” interesting: this is not about just waiting for a kingdom of heaven later on, it’s about appreciating and glorifying God here, in this life, in the land of the living.  And rhythmically, it forms a catchy heptameter up until “Lord” (if you combine “I” and the first syllable of “beLIEVE” into one beat).   Right on.

22 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Friday morning, up early with a couple of free hours before work, so I do some laundry and have breakfast and read and write a little.  Today was the story of the Transfiguration (Luke 9:28), and again (as in Genesis 15, see above), God arrives on the scene only after darkness falls and the three disciples are “heavy with sleep.”  Later we hear the voice of God, but not before a cloud comes and overshadows them.  The bit at the end, when Moses and Elijah step off stage, and God seems to single out Jesus above the other two, feels like it was tacked on later by someone who really wanted to make a point.  Of course this is a pretty important point for Christians: the other two were just prophets, while JC was God incarnate.  But then again nowhere in this passage does God say anything like “never mind about all that stuff Moses said;” only, “This is my son…listen to him!”

I also pause a bit at the very end, when Peter, John, and James come down from the mountain and don’t tell anyone what they’ve seen.  Why not?  There were three of them after all, so it’s not like later on (Luke 22) when a solitary Peter, trying to save his own skin, denies knowing Jesus.  And evidently at some point later they did tell someone about what happened on the mountain, or else we wouldn’t be reading about it in Luke’s gospel.  This could be a message about our own fearfulness, and our reluctance, even after seeing glowing visions and hearing the voice of the Big Man himself, to put ourselves out there and seem like we’re crazy or blasphemous. 

23 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

I went to Kendall Square Cinema last night and saw a German film called Transit.  The backdrop was the spread of Nazism – people were asked for their papers a lot, and characters made a few hushed references to “cleansings” – but it was shot in the present day, mostly in Marseilles, as German dissidents of various stripes tried to get the hell out of Europe.  The filmmakers didn’t try to modernize it per se: there were no cell phones, everything is done on paper, the passage out of Marseilles is all by boat, etc.  More like they might have thought about making it faithful to 1944, when Anna Segher wrote it, but then decided to spare themselves the expense and hassle of rounding up a bunch of old cars and fedoras.  Many people spoke German when you didn’t expect them to – like at the Mexican Consul in Marseilles.  Anyway, the movie was a bit better in theory (“Casablanca meets Kafka” said Anthony Lane in the New Yorker) than in practice. 

On the way home, I stopped by the Smokehouse, where I ate pulled pork and coleslaw and drank beer while watching both the NCAA basketball tournament and the NCAA wrestling championships simultaneously on two flat screens next to each other on the wall opposite.  With TVs on practically every open wall space, American restaurants are always handy for people who are eating alone, or who would rather look at something other than the people with whom they are eating.

This morning we read Isaiah 55 and Psalm 63.  Some nice imagery in both around feeling a physical desire for God: “My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you” (Ps 63:1).  Again the theme of resisting earthly desires for the transcendent, and in this case, cleverly picking up the weapons of the enemy, so to speak. 

25 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Back from a not-too-exhausting orangetheory workout on a Monday morning.  Coffee, grapefruit, toast with peanut butter.  Although I just noticed that the bread has freaking sugar in it, even though it’s “whole wheat” from Whole Foods.  The tricks that marketers play.  I am allowing myself to have some anyway, as I feel like I need some carbohydrates after the gym, and therefore this is not about satisfying a craving for sweets.  This may be a flimsy rationale, but maybe it raises an interesting question: does intent matter when it comes to sin?  Maybe an extreme example would be someone who kills in a war, or in self-defense, as having different “intent” than someone who murders for money, or hatred, or a more “selfish” motive?  Or someone who steals to feed his family?  It’s tough to think of too many examples here.  JC doesn’t split hairs in today’s reading (Luke 13:6-9) and offers only two choices: repent or perish. 

A short but enjoyable weekend with my daughters.  We ate cordon bleu and Brussels sprouts with bacon and rice pilaf, and we played hearts and Not Alone.  On Sunday, breakfast at Friendly Toast and Ellie’s soccer tournament, and a trip to the movie theater, and Chinese food.  Boys send Sarah messages over Snapchat.   

26 March 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Today’s we covered the “Jesus Prayer,” which is not too hard to remember because it’s only one line: “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on me as a sinner.”  There was also link to something called orthodoxprayer.org, which has a detailed analysis of the Jesus Prayer.  It talks about how it helps “focus our mind exclusively on God with no other thought occupying our mind but the thought of God.”  This gets my head nodding, as I’ve been thinking lately about how in a certain way Christianity and Buddhism are two sides of the same coin (or maybe even the same side).  This website itself talks about prayer as a discipline, “to help our soul gain control over our overactive brains and create stillness…”; Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation and Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True  both cover the same territory.  I know Merton (a Trappist monk) has written extensively about Buddhism itself, which I need to get around to reading one of these days.

And yet, the last section on the orthodoxprayer.org page, there’s a whole section called: “Jesus Prayer Is Not a Form of Eastern Meditation.”  I don’t have time to explore this all in detail right now, but some of it I disagree with (especially the insistence of Buddhism espousing an “impersonal God”) and some of it I don’t (stuff about nothingness).     

Lessons and Carols Redux

This year I raised the stakes on the Service of Lessons and Carols and volunteered to sing with the church choir.  I’m still not sure what motivated me to do this.  I like music (I play the drums and sometimes sing in a cover band) and I like singing in church, but it’s not like I have 17^th century choral music in heavy rotation on my car stereo.  Also, and probably more importantly, my formal musical training is nonexistent: I downloaded a free piano app for the iPad so I could hunt-and-peck my way through my parts at home, but I had to turn to google to remember what the notes on the bass clef were.  Nonetheless, I found myself at the church fair in mid-November telling Peter our choir director that I’d really like to join them for the Christmas concert. 

This year, it would actually be two concerts: our choir would join up with the choir from the Swiss German church, and we would perform on Saturday at their place and on Sunday at ours.  We would do a mixed repertoire of around a dozen songs, some in German, some in English, one or two (like the old standby “Veni Veni Emmanuel”) in Latin.  Peter would share directing duties with their choir director, Stanislava, a Bulgarian with frosted hair who unlike Peter is an actual pro musician.  This led to some tense moments in the days leading up to the concerts, like when Stanislava told Peter he was wasting precious rehearsal time working on nuances, and Peter angrily stomped off and threw his sheet music binder at the organ.  Or when Peter, during a rehearsal of “The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came,” allowed the tempo to slow down almost to a complete halt and Stanislava sat in the front pew holding her face in her hands in anguish.  This didn’t seem to faze the other choir members much, though, as they happily offered me glasses of white wine during the mid-rehearsal pause.

There were roughly 30 of us singing.  I would put the median age of the tenors and basses around 75: this likely explained Stanislava’s asking me to sit near the middle of the tenors, my lung capacity partly compensating for my lack of chops.  From time to time I would observe a few of the basses nodding off during rehearsals.  The altos and sopranos skewed younger.

I became friendly with Moises, another tenor from the Swiss German choir, who had grown up in Bolivia but had come to Geneva 50 years ago as part of a scholarship established by some Bolivian who had made his millions in mining.  His wife was a sorprano, and from time to time they would interact in a very sweet way: “Chouchou, t’as un stylo?” (“Sweetheart, do you have a pen?”) he would ask her, or she would turn around and offer him a sip of tea from her little thermos.

The rehearsals passed quickly, and we almost certainly needed more time before the first concert on Saturday night.  We were joined by a string quartet + flute, which definitely raised our overall game musically.  Two young organists tag-teamed: Oscar, a teenage musical prodigy from our church with an androgynous vibe and a watch chain dangling from his waistcoat, and Arthur, who had a mop of dirty blond hair and round Harry Potter glasses and who became my secret ally when I suggested to Peter that we try not to let the tempo drag so much on one of his songs.   

The concerts themselves went well enough: no horrific flubs, and I even managed to execute a solo, as Gaspard in “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” alongside Peter and a different Arthur, a bass with a white beard, a smooth singing voice, and essential tremor.  As usual, there were several truly moving moments: on Saturday when Arthur the organist slowly opened the swell box shutters as he played the prelude, which introduces the melody from “Joy to the World” with slightly different chords; during several of the really kick-ass German carols*, especially “Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen” and “Kommet, ihr Hirten;” on the fifth verse of “We Three Kings,” when we come roaring in with “glorious now behold him arise;” and of course during the murderer’s row of a climax of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” the John 1:1-14 reading, and “Joy to the World.” 

Yet the service itself felt different somehow.  Obviously, the visual perspective is completely flipped, as the choir is facing the audience.  And afterwards, I noticed an uneasiness that I found hard to pin down.  I compared my post-concert experience to what usually happens after my band plays a show: you have drinks with some of the people who came to see you, you get compliments, you pack up the gear and do some post-mortem critiques with the other guys in the band, pictures and videos get posted on social media, you get “likes.”  Considering this, I realized that at least part of me had gone into this looking for some kind of recognition, to have one of the people from my congregation come up to me and say, “I didn’t realize you could sing,” or something.  Now maybe this didn’t happen because we actually sucked.  But I think more likely it’s because it’s not at all the point: performing music in this context is not about impressing your friends; it’s about glorifying God and celebrating His arrival on earth.  And perhaps this is part of the “lesson:” stop thinking about yourself for a second and instead glorify God, the Creator, the Force, or whatever you want to call it.  And maybe consider for a minute what things would be like if everybody did that a little more often.

Afterward, I encountered the most intense case of earworm I have ever experienced.  I literally could not stop hearing these songs in my head, loudly and insistently, for days.  Like relay runners, one song would hand off dominance over my neurons to the next.  I’m sure there are easy explanations for this.  I did of course sing those songs several times over the course of four days.  Since my sight reading is not so fantastic, I tried to memorize my parts as much as I could.  And especially on some songs where there’s a strong impulse to follow the melody (e.g., “Joy to the World”), I would really have to bear down and concentrate on the tenor part.  Or it could simply be because these songs are just that good.

* Since I know like five words of German, I’m basically singing these songs phonetically, and I wonder if that actually makes them more emotionally evocative. Like with the words stripped of significance, you’re left with only the music and the feeling itself.  A more direct path to the mystical, if you will.