Book Swap

Last week, I came across a book exchange cart near one of the gates at Orlando International Airport (MCO).  None of the titles on display called to me (Nora Roberts and Outdoor Photographer magazine were heavily represented), and I hadn't yet finished any of the books I had on me, so I didn't take or leave anything.

I'm not sure who or what was behind this; there's no mention of this on the MCO website.  And I don't know if there's any connection between the book cart and the National Women's History Month display behind it, featuring Oprah and J. Lo alongside Amelia Earhart.  I thought for a minute that all the books on the cart might have been written by women in keeping with that theme, but I see Daniel Silva and Gordon Thomas in there, so that's not it, unless somebody else left those there.

Anyway.  This is not a revolutionary concept: there's a book exchange at our office in Amsterdam, and a couple more within a few blocks of where I live.  Still, this seems like something hopeful and good: an island of art and ideas and slowness and sharing and human connection (albeit anonymous), in a river of haste and commerce and transience.  Like a flower on a highway median.  This book cart will probably suffer the same fate as the flower, but we can appreciate it while it's there.

Airport Ceilings, Vol. 1

The architects who design airports seem to put a lot of effort into ceilings.  Maybe they anticipate that those of us inside will spend a lot of time gazing upward -- out of boredom, or exasperation, or in search of divine succor in one form or another. 

Paris Charles de Gaulle, Terminal 2, F Gates.  Beautiful, impressive, audacious, and generally uncomfortable to spend any amount of time in.  Not unlike Paris.  Although this is a step up aesthetically from the rest of of CDG, which has the design sensibilities of the Death Star.

Geneva International Airport, A Gates.  My home airport tries hard to be sophisticated and modern yet approachable, with little touches like the Rick and Ilse photo display here (Rhett and Scarlett are downstairs on the way to baggage claim).  I'm not sure if they completely pull it off, but I'm not complaining, especially as I can get from my front door to a departure gate in less than 30 minutes.  A direct to Boston would really be nice though.

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Schiphol Plaza.  Steampunk mushrooms.

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Terminal 1 Security.   Heh, heh, "grass," get it?  I sense a theme developing.

Boston Logan International Airport, Terminal E.  Going for the high school gymnasium vibe -- I expect to see a "State Champions, Girls Tennis, 1983" banner around the corner.  The nod toward internationalism is welcome, especially in a US airport, although the super-sized stars and stripes doesn't let you forget who's numero uno here.

I found this in my photo files without a label, and I'm actually not sure where this is.  I think maybe Porto, Portugal?   It's pretty though.

Aeroporto di Milano-Malpensa.  Not much to look at on the ceiling, but the floor looks like outer space, especially if you squint your eyes a little.

Flughafen Zürich, my Favorite Airport in the World.  Calm, quiet, well-conceived with earth-tone marble and high windows and the corny-but-irresistable tram to Terminal E with the cowbell / alpenhorn soundtrack and the Zoetrope Heidi.  Swiss Quality, indeed.

Belated Christmas

If you suddenly found yourself as VP of Marketing for Christianity, one of the "signature tactics" in your annual marketing plan would have to be the Nine Lessons and Carols service.  Originating in the Church of England in the late 19th century, it has since gained a foothold in other Protestant congregations, including mine in Geneva and many others around Europe and the US,  In roughly one hour, you pretty much get the Christian faith in a tight, energetic nutshell: nine Bible readings that span Genesis (the fall) to Isaiah (the prophecy) to Luke and Matthew (the Christmas stories you're familiar with), interspersed with nine or more carols.

The readings are the same every year, but the music playlist varies: this year we were treated with an anglicized version of the absolutely kick-ass Swedish carol "Jul Jul."  All leading up to a first-class climax in terms of depth, significance, and emotional power: "O Come All Ye Faithful," followed by John 1:1-14,* followed by "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing."  John 1:1-14 is a tour de force, covering, in John's characteristic mystical tone, all the key ideas you want people to walk out with: light shining in the darkness, word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, grace and truth.  I imagine that "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" have popped up once or twice on your Spotify holiday playlist this year, but I would suggest that until you've heard them, and sung them, in full voice in a packed congregation, you haven't truly experienced them.

I realize that I do a lot of hand-wringing around here, about faith and what it means and how I try to get my head around it, and maybe this entire website is no more than an exercise in such hand-wringing.  In any case, the Nine Lessons and Carols are a good reminder and example of how essential the practice of faith is.  By its very nature, faith is not something you can simply talk yourself into.  Later on in the New Testament, James will make this point even more emphatically, claiming that “faith without works is dead.”  Just like thinking about running a marathon has very little in common with actually running a marathon, thinking and reading and writing about faith is different than practicing one's faith, whatever form that might take.




* Which your humble author had the honor of reading this year, and which, directly following "O Come All Ye Faithful," he was worried he would be too choked-up to get through.

 

Conquest of the Skies

Anyone seeking some divine awesomeness while on a long-haul flight could do much worse than spending a few hours in front of a David Attenborough documentary.

“Conquest of the Skies,” playing last night on LX52 (ZRH-BOS), was, I imagine, selected by whoever curates Swiss Air’s in-flight video collection for obvious contextual reasons.  And, I also imagine, with no small sense of corporate pride: as the painted lady butterfly (vanessa cardui) and peregrine (falco peregrinus) have conquered the skies, so have we at Swiss International Air Lines, a member of the Lufthansa Group.  I myself was not feeling quite so smug, casting several nervous glances out the window to confirm that the plane's wings were indeed proper airfoils, like those of the griffon vultures of Segovia (gyps fulvus).

One wonders if, 300 million years from now, similar films will be made by our cockroach ancestors’ version of David Attenborough, examining the fossilized remains of an Airbus 330-300, and speculating about the parasites it must have carried to and from their various colonies. 

Well I guess it would be nice

In case you missed it among the trick-or-treating and World Cup qualifying and steady drumbeat of mass murder in my home country, October 31^st was the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s famous door redecoration in Wittenberg.  Fortunately, his slim “Ninety-Five Theses and Selected Sermons” doesn't take up much space in my backpack, so it’s been riding along with me for trips to Amsterdam and Boston the past couple of weeks. 

Thanks to Mr. Moir, my leftist 11^th grade European History teacher, I’ve always been able to recall Luther’s main point about “justification by faith alone.”  To the extent that I had ever really thought about this, I had always interpreted it to be an easier, somehow more sensible position on Christianity.  It was, as Luther intended, a just rebuke of the abuses of an institution that was putting money and power ahead of the Gospel. To my 15-year-old self, it also seemed like a more user-friendly alternative to the Catholic Church, where I was baptized but never really felt at home.  Forget Catholicism with all the guilt and ritual and fussily keeping one’s spiritual balance sheet in order.  To be a good Protestant, all you had to do was believe!  Easy!

It turns out that “just believing” is, actually, incredibly hard.  I’m not talking about stuff like creationism, or feeding the five thousand,¹ or resurrection in the flesh.  I mean just believing in a loving and merciful God.  This kind of faith demands that you, without a whole lot of solid evidence, reject all sorts of rational arguments to the contrary: that this God of yours is no more than an opiate of the masses, or a neuro-biological phenomenon, or a myth perpetuated by certain power structures to keep people fearful and in line.  It demands that, in certain “progressive” socio-cultural circles, you risk appearing as a glassy-eyed, backward Pollyanna.  It demands that you reconcile your image of God with the aforementioned steady drumbeat of mass murder, and accept that your God is somehow okay with a bunch of poor souls getting murdered while they’re out riding their bikes along the Hudson River, or while they’re shopping at WalMart, or in a church on a Sunday morning while they are actively worshiping that loving and merciful God.

I don’t have a clever or reassuring conclusion at hand here.  Faith is hard.  Luther’s advice about coming to faith involves complicated, paradoxical concepts like being broken to pieces and rejecting our own merits and confessing one’s incapacity to do good.  Stuff that doesn’t play too well in the circles I usually travel in. 

¹ Although I think there’s a strong case to be made for reading the story of feeding the five thousand metaphorically, as the Gospels contain no descriptions of fish and bread magically multiplying, only that “they all ate and were satisfied.”(Mt 14:20) 

Breakfast in America

I had a long business trip to Cambridge coming up, and all of my usual haunts were either sold out or prohibitively expensive, so I decided to give the Residence Inn a try.  As the name implies, this place is designed to approximate someplace one would actually reside, rather than stay for a couple of nights.  This means that many of the rooms, like mine, include kitchenette areas, and that all the frou-frou one might find in a boutique hotel – the in-room yoga mat, the bedside luxury lifestyle magazines, the hip bar and eatery – have been eschewed in favor of more practical features, like ample power and USB outlets, and a laundry room, and a “mini-mart” just off the reception, where the road warrior may find 24/7 fortification.  “Consultant Functional” would be an apt way to characterize this place: it’s where the young, sleep-deprived MBAs go after sitting in meetings all day to work on slides for the next day’s all-day meetings. 

Yesterday morning, I headed down to the breakfast room around 6:40 (early breakfast room opening hours being another CF benefit).  Several people were already sitting and eating: indeed a few consultant types, an (out of place) family of four, a pair of guys speaking German.  The ubiquitous CNN feed was glowing on the large flat-screen facing the entrance, and for once the “BREAKING NEWS” in the fire engine red banner wasn’t crying wolf.  Someone had fired many bullets into the audience of a country music concert in Las Vegas.  By then, the death toll stood at 20, although the local sheriff’s redundant comment that “we have in excess of more than 20 victims” suggested that the tally would get much grimmer soon.  A shaky mobile phone video, shot by one of the poor souls at the concert, played in a nightmarish loop. 

Perhaps, a few years ago this sort of scene would have made people stop and gather around the screen and watch and shake their heads.  But this one, layered onto all the others before it and the ones almost certainly to follow, had become simply part of the ambiance of America in 2017. We all sat and ate our breakfasts.  On CNN, one woman’s repeated screams rose above all others, then fell into a dissonant weave with Lana Del Rey, whose voice came through the hotel PA.

Out of Dodge

A few Saturdays ago, I spent the weekend at my father’s in Asbury Park, and I took advantage of the jet lag to go running on the boardwalk early Saturday morning.  Around Belmar, I noticed a few people starting to assemble on the beach, around my age, or maybe a little younger, in typical American “casual fitness” gear:  some species of stretchy black pants for the women, cargo shorts, baseball hat, and functionless vest-like-thing for the men.  They didn’t really register as I passed them; I thought it might have been a yoga class starting to coalesce, or (much more unlikely) a seaside church group congregating.  Though there is that outdoor chapel on the boardwalk up in Ocean Grove, so that last thought is not completely out of the realm. 

 

Anyway, after turning around in Spring Lake and heading back north, there they were again, now on the beach, arranged in a square marked off by blue smooth-edged garbage cans, around 20-25 people on either side, like a chessboard set up by a hyperactive 5-year-old with a tenuous grasp on the rules.  For an instant I thought this arrangement confirmed my earlier yoga hypothesis, but then someone blew a whistle.  A couple of the more athletic guys on either side sprinted out to the middle of the square, and the scene revealed itself: a dodgeball game.  One of the athletic guys pegged another guy, who yelled at him, “DUDE! I’m on your TEAM!”

A quick recap:  It’s 7am.  Sunday morning.  50 or so young people have woken up, gotten dressed, driven to the beach, and assembled in formation, in order to engage in an activity typically seen on a middle school playground during recess.  Someone brought a whistle. 

Questions for discussion:

1. What conclusions (if any) about American culture and priorities can one draw from this scene? Does the concept of Sunday morning as the Sabbath,* a time of rest, contemplation, and thanks-giving, have any relevance or significance anymore?
2. Hang on a minute: what’s wrong with a group of young, healthy people gathering on a Sunday morning to engage in some harmless, mildly competitive physical activity?  Certainly this is more admirable than sleeping in, or watching infomercials, or lying in bed flicking through one’s Twitter feed, right?  And, after all, how do you know that everybody, after a few quick games, didn’t pile into their cars and head to the nearest church for 9am services? 
3. Okay, fair enough.  But might it also be beneficial to examine the role and importance that one’s culture assigns to “fun?”  Might it be worth considering the possible relationship between the American desire for constant stimulus, entertainment, and pleasure on the one hand, and the current political state of affairs on the other?**
4. Jeez, lighten up, old man.  Now you’re going to try to blame Trump’s election on a Sunday morning kickball game (in New Jersey of all places, which, I don’t need to remind you, went heavily for Clinton)?  And it’s not like you spent your Sunday morning at home praying the rosary.  At least the people on the beach were doing something remotely social.
5. All right, fine.  But back to my first point: is it worth considering the place of rest, contemplation, and thanks-giving in American life at the moment?  Where are the structures or rituals that encourage this?  As a thoughtful American, how do you reconcile the elements of American culture on display here, both “good” (community-oriented, active, physical, healthily competitive) and “bad” (hyper-stimulated, overly competitive, immature, irreverent) ?  Or perhaps it’s all good, so to speak, and there’s nothing that needs reconciling?

* Yes, I realize that I’m making assumptions here about the religious demographics of the dodgeballers.   For the sake of argument, let’s agree that a) there was at least one person out of this group who would self-identify as Christian, and/or b) you would be just as likely to see a similar scene on a Sabbath day for any of the other major faiths one might encounter in Monmouth County, 

** The short answer is yes, and it's been done already, at considerable length.