Some words from the past

Today being a slow day, I was looking over some of my writings of the past. I came across the following sermon I gave in 2004 at the Unitarian Church on Martha's Vineyard:

As I walked to the podium today, I heard my mother speaking to me from the grave. “Now you’ve done it.”, she said. “How can you even be in a Protestant church? Let alone about to tell people about your spiritual journey without mentioning God or the one true Church (that’s church with a capital C). You’re making things more complex than they are.” 

To my mother a spiritual journey was simple; it was a known and well-charted journey. You’re born in sin, you get baptized to remove the sin; live a few years and, naturally, you sin, but you make your confession so that, as a pure soul, you can receive the body and blood of Christ. You live a few more years and get confirmed; you’re now a soldier for Christ. Ten or so years later you marry a nice girl or, better yet, join the priesthood. And then you die, but only after receiving Extreme Unction. Along the way, you obey the Church and you obey the priests, so that at the end when you shuffle off this earth, you’ll shuffle into heaven. 

And, to be fair, many dictionaries back her up. Look up spirituality and you’ll see the words ‘religion’, ‘ecclesiastical’, ‘faith’ as part of the definition. But, for me, these words do not define spirituality. Spirituality is not dependent upon a religion nor is it connected to faith. For me, spirituality is an attempt to get outside oneself, to establish a deep connection with the past, the present and the future of what we call the universe. It does not need a religion or a faith. It is an attempt to give meaning to one’s life. 

But, let’s get to the theme of today’s service - Men’s Spirituality. Is there such a thing as men’s spirituality, as opposed to women’s spirituality? In my judgment, no, despite the preachings and writings of Robert Bly and other proponents of the supposed new man; spirituality is a human endeavor. To me, there is no difference between men’s and women’s spirituality. Both strive to achieve a connection with what they perceive to be the eternal so that their life can have meaning, so that when they die they are not simply an old picture on the wall, so that they are another link in the eternal chain which strives to make this earth a better place for all people. 

Many men and women have adopted the well-charted journey of my mother and others who follow a traditional path to spirituality, a path which has been well defined by those who came before us, a path which depends, in large measure, on the gift of faith. And, believe me, faith is a gift. It’s a wonderful gift. It makes one’s life easier in that there is always a reason for the nastiness that sooner or later touches all of our lives. There is a whole spiritual edifice you can tap into, people you can consult, sacred texts with all the answers. 

It’s a gift that I wish I had. But, despite being baptized in the one true faith and growing up in a staunch Catholic household, I did not receive the gift or, maybe, it was offered to me and I was too dumb and blind to accept it. The dictionary definition of spirituality implies that if you don’t have faith, you can’t be a spiritual person. Well, I disagree. You can be a spiritual person without having received the gift of faith. You can connect with the eternal. You can give meaning to your life.

Without having the gift of faith, you can find spiritual experiences in the actions of nature or of man. The spiritual journey is hard. Without faith it is harder. You can get so caught up in your daily life that it becomes difficult to take the step back that is needed, to stop for a moment and contemplate life and your place in it.

Oftentimes the spiritual experience creeps up on you, catching you unawares. It can happen just suddenly looking up on a starry winter night in West Tisbury and seeing your place in the universe – infinitesimal yet very human and aware. Or, it can be a more intense experience of sitting on South Beach a few hours after narrowly escaping a near fatal car accident while driving to the Vineyard.

There are a variety of experiences that have become spiritual experiences for me. Reading the opening words of the Gospel of John, the first section of Remembrance of Things Past, the last chapter of The Stranger. Seeing Our Town for the first time and hearing Emily’s words: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” Hearing Brubeck introduce Take Five at Newport or Tebaldi as Mimi or Sondheim’s Move On. 

But it is not only the aesthetic that has become spiritual for me. Some conversations with a kindred soul have turned into spiritual experiences for me and, I hope, for the person I’m speaking with. Seeing my kids being born linked me to the past, the present and the future of the universe. Watching serious, trained athletes striving to achieve their potential can bring one out of his daily life and into the attempts of man to transcend this place. A variety of experiences, through all of which you try to connect with the eternal. 

I’ll close with some words from Thornton Wilder. They are spoken by the Stage Manager at the start of Act 3 of Our Town: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

Remember Josephine Baker?

She was a big hit in Paris nightlife in the 1930s and 40s. She moved to France when racism became too much for her here. She was black and female. President Macron has just given her a place in the Pantheon, where she will rest with France’s national heroes. She was selected because of her work on civil rights and for the Resistance during the Second World War.

It's going to be cold

“This coming winter could well be one of the longest and coldest that we’ve seen in years,” said Janice Stillman, editor of The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

An escape in action

Wives of Japanese Mafia

Would you eat these?

Living on potato chips

A museum of mobile phones

Mountain stairways in Norway

Many people don't know that Norway is the world capital of outdoor stairways: superbly engineered wooden and concrete steps that lead to the country's most beautiful viewpoints.

Aviation in 2045

Where is democracy going?

These charts were created by the International Idea Institute For Democracy and Electoral Assistance. It produces a Global State of Democracy report every year. Here are some charts from this year's report:

The computer and the body

3D-printing has reached the state where eyes, ears and maybe noses can be printed and then placed on a person's body.

This week scientists will be placing a 3D-printed prosthetic eye for the first time ever. I'm inexperienced enough not to fully understand a 'prosthetic' eye but the 3D eye will be more realistic than a traditional acrylic prosthetic eye. Also, it will cut the time it takes for patients to be fitted with their prosthetics in half, from six weeks to three.

A young girl from England has a condition known as microtia and was born without a properly formed left ear.

Scientists have built the necessary cartilage via 3D printing. They will combine it with plant-based materials to rebuild the ear.

Is vegan better for you?

Our share is getting smaller

 

Reducing plastic waste

It's possible if a new type of recyclable meat packaging tray designed by a Swansea University student works as well as it has so far. A PhD candidate in England created a meat tray without a separate piece of absorbent plastic padding underneath.

The tray is 100% recyclable and allows consumers to look at meat from all angles through clear plastic. The packaging can then be washed in a sink, meaning the plastic is chemically and biologically safe to be recycled along with other household items.

The inventor thinks that the technology could be used in other areas, like diapers. 

Wildlife in the city

Are they going to have kids?

It's raining cash

Some oddities

The attack of the boars

A champ at 6

Mosquito-free

That just about describes Iceland. The last mosquito was seen in 1986. Iceland's climate keeps them away. According to one group of scientists, “When mosquitoes lay eggs in cold weather, the larvae emerge with a thaw, allowing them to breed and multiply. Iceland, however, typically has three major freezes and thaws a year, creating conditions that may be too unstable for the insect’s survival.” 

Will Iceland remain mosquito-free forever? Not if climate change works its spell and raises the heat.

An overlooked asset

Some cabins from around the world

Playing with his foot

Burying a whale

Crabs, crabs, crabs

Are Monarch butterflies coming back?

They may be, at least the orange-and-black Western monarch butterflies in California. Last year the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies. This year’s official count started Saturday and will last three weeks but already an unofficial count by researchers and volunteers shows there are over 50,000 monarchs at overwintering sites.

Did you know that Martin Luther King spent a few summers in Connecticut?

In the 1940s, a group of Morehouse College students came up from Atlanta to work on tobacco farms in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley as part of a tuition assistance program. King was one of them.

 

Some excerpts from his letters home:

“I had never thought that any person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate at one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,” young Martin wrote to his mother from the farm.
It was an experience that helped reshape his worldview and prompted “an inescapable urge to serve society,”
“After we passed Washington, there was no discrimination at all,” he wrote to his father, adding that up North, “We go to any place we want to and sit anywhere we want to.” 

For recreation, the student laborers would head into town and on Sunday to one of the local churches. Even at 15, he was selected as a religious leader to direct his fellow student-farmhands in discussions about the injustices that Black people faced back home. 

It was that second summer in Simsbury that prompted the “inescapable urge to serve society” that pushed him toward the clergy, he would later write in his application to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. “In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.”

The town of Simsbury, where King lived, will now preserve the farm on which King worked as public open space and nominated for historic designation. 

Diapers and old people

The older population in Japan is growing rapidly and these older, incontinent people use more diapers than babies. Handling diaper waste is becoming a major problem. For example, at the Daisen Rehabilitation Hospital, where 8 out of 10 of the approximately 200 patients require disposable diapers, residents produce about 400 pounds of such waste a day. The amount of adult diapers entering the waste stream in Japan has increased by nearly 13 percent, to almost 1.5 million tons annually, in the last five years, according to data from the environment ministry. It is projected to grow a further 23 percent by 2030, when those 65 and older will represent close to a third of the population.

The diaper challenge is especially great in Japan, where more than 80 percent of the country’s waste goes to incinerators — higher than in any other wealthy nation — despite a near obsession with sorting trash. While most other sources of waste are declining in volume as the Japanese population shrinks, incontinence products for seniors are growing by the ton.

Because diapers contain so much cotton pulp and plastic, and swell to four times their original weight after soiling, they require much more fuel to burn than other sources of waste.

Creating their own power

Vaccination Rates Around the World

An international dress

It's never too late to get your PhD

Manfred Steiner was awarded a PhD in physics by Brown. He is 89 years-old. His desire to become a physicist originated when he was a teenager in Vienna and had read about Albert Einstein and Max Planck. However, his mother and uncle advised him that studying medicine would be a better choice in that day's turbulent times.

He earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1955 and moved to the United States just a few weeks later, where he had a successful career studying blood and blood disorders.

Steiner studied hematology at Tufts University and biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a hematologist at Brown University. He became a full professor and led the hematology section of the medical school at Brown from 1985 to 1994.

Steiner found medical research satisfying, but it wasn’t quite the same as his fascination with physics. At age 70, he started taking undergraduate classes at Brown. He was planning to take a few courses that interested him, but by 2007, he accumulated enough credits to enroll in the Ph.D. program.

Guinness World Records says a 97-year-old man in Germany in 2008 was the oldest person to earn a doctorate, while news reports describe even older people pursuing such degrees.

Attachment Theory

It's frightening

You want to read an article by Rajan Menon, the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. It appears in Tom Dispatch. It's about something you do every day - drink water. Here is how it begins: 

"The United States, however, has the world’s largest economy, the fifth-highest per-capita income, and is a technological powerhouse. How, then, could the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have given our water infrastructure (pipes, pumping stations, reservoirs, and purification and recycling facilities) a shocking C- grade in their 2021 “report card”? How to explain why Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. only 26th globally when it comes to the quality of its drinking water and sanitation? 

Worse yet, two million Americans still have no running water and indoor plumbing. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack this rudimentary amenity than Whites; Latinos and African Americans, twice as likely. On average, Americans use 82 gallons of water daily; Navajos, seven — or the equivalent of about five flushes of a toilet. Moreover, many Native Americans must drive miles to fetch fresh water, making regular handwashing, a basic precaution during the Covid-19 pandemic, just one more hardship."

Should we adopt Rapid Testing?

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He did not need 40 weeks

Curtis Means spent only 21 weeks and a day inside his mother.  A full-term pregnancy is usually 40 weeks, making Curtis nearly 19 weeks premature. His brother, C'Asya accompanied him. Curtis survived leaving his mother,  C'Asya did not.

Curtis weighed only 14.8 ounces at birth, but, 16 months later, he is doing well. He has been certified as the world's most premature baby to survive.

He was taken off a ventilator after three months and discharged this April following 275 days in hospital. Therapists had to help him learn how to breathe and use his mouth to eat. He still needs supplemental oxygen and a feeding tube.

How effective is the vaccine?

 

Gambling is back

The nation’s commercial casinos won nearly $14 billion in the third quarter of this year. It was their best quarter ever. It looks like they will break their annual record of $43.65 billion, set in 2019. Ten out of 25 states with commercial casinos saw quarterly revenue records, including the four highest-grossing commercial gambling states in 2019: Nevada, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. 

These results were probably the result of people returning to their pre-Covid life. But sports betting and internet gambling revenue helped as through the first nine months of the year revenue from these activities was $5.36 billion, up more than 200% year over year. 

Not an inexpensive Apple

An original Apple computer built by firm co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in 1976 sold for $400,000 at auction. It is still functioning. Its original price was $666.66. They made 200 kits; it's likely that 20 are still being used.

A report from COP26

He likes to walk

What's your answer

Batteries and climate change

Diamonds vs. Trees

Industrial plants and cancer

A recent study by ProPublica concluded that air pollution from industrial plants is elevating the cancer risk of an estimated quarter of a million Americans to a level the federal government considers unacceptable. Things are so bad in a section of Louisiana that it is referred to as Cancer Alley. ProPublica looked at more than a thousand hot spots of cancer-causing air. They are not equally distributed across the country. A quarter of the 20 hot spots with the highest levels of excess risk are in Texas, and almost all of them are in Southern states known for having weaker environmental regulations.

The pollution caused by these plants spreads to adjacent neighborhoods. For example, a chemical plant near a high school in Port Neches, Texas, laces the air with benzene, an aromatic gas that can cause leukemia. Or a manufacturing facility in New Castle, Delaware, for years blanketed a day care playground with ethylene oxide, a highly toxic chemical that can lead to lymphoma and breast cancer.

The EPA is not helping the situation. The way the agency assesses this risk vastly underestimates residents’ exposure. Instead of looking at how cancer risk adds up when polluters are clustered together in a neighborhood, the EPA examines certain types of facilities and equipment in isolation. When the agency studies refineries, for example, it ignores a community’s exposure to pollution from nearby metal foundries or shipyards.

The ice is melting

This is scientific research?

The widow of a 98-year-old World War II veteran donated his body for scientific research. She handed the body to Las Vegas-based firm Med Ed Labs for research purposes. 

Well, the company sold the body to a company called Death Sciences for $10,000. Death Sciences runs the Oddities and Curiosities Expo, which happens to include an autopsy show that sells tickets for $500. 

The ticket buyers got to watch a retired professor of anatomy use a surgical knife to slice into the veteran's head, limbs and chest cavity, and remove his organs and brain. Plus, the audience was invited to prod his body during the three-hour procedure.

Deng Deng

An abandoned dog who became an internet sensation in China has sold at auction for 160,000 yuan (£18,500; $25,000).
The Shiba Inu called Deng Deng had been left at a pet training centre seven years ago and his owner never returned. A Beijing court ordered the eight-year-old dog be put up for auction after the owner could not be located.

The online bidding generated enormous interest, with Deng Deng selling for 320 times the initial asking price of just $78. The auction was supposed to last for 24 hours. But it had to be extended by a further five, after attracting 480 bidders and more than 166,000 views.

The job market

One view of the future

One view of COP26

Greta Thunberg says COP26 was “sort of turning into a greenwash campaign, a P.R. campaign,” for business leaders and politicians.

Some other quotes from her:
“Since we are so far from what actually we needed, I think what would be considered a success would be if people realize what a failure this COP is.”

 
“This is the misconception,” Ms. Thunberg said. “That what we as individuals do doesn’t have an impact.”

“And I’m not talking about not using plastic and so on,” she said. “I’m talking about going out onto the streets and making our voices heard, organizing marches, demanding change.”

What's your point of view?

Clean fuel?

His friend Emma

One way to lower carbon emissions

Earning a living

What is he looking at?

Inside COP26

An electric plane

A virgin birth

US wildlife researchers have discovered that two California condors, a critically endangered bird, gave birth without any male genetic DNA. Virgin births have been recorded in other bird species, as well as lizards, snakes, sharks, rays and other fish. This is the first time for condors.