Authority

Again, the Devil took him to very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, "all these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me."

-Matthew 4: 8-9 (NRSV)

Our national history with authoritarians and dictators has been checkered at best.  We like to think of ourselves as the beacon of democracy and freedom in the world, but the fact of the matter is that we can be rather complacent when it comes to strongmen.  The history we have had with the recently deceased Manuel Noriega is a case in point.  We set him up, because it seemed critical to our interests to have a stable nation controlling the Panama Canal, which is a major boon to ocean-going trade.  Then he got out of our control and so we had to take him down.  Likewise Saddam Hussein, because I paid attention in social studies class in high school, I first learned about the noble cause of the Iraqi people, bravely fighting against the brutal theocracy of Ayatollah Khomeni in Iran.  Saddam Hussein, beret clad, mustachioed, military man, versus the black turban and intense maniacal stare of a madman.  Then as it turned out, things took a sideways bounce and all of the sudden Saddam was not our buddy any more.
Ferdinand Marcos, Pol Pot, Rodrigo Duterte, Idi Amin, and let's not forget the Saudi Royals and all their sweet, sweet oil, we have not exactly distinguished ourselves in picking our friends.  We seem to not mind going to the dance with the school bully one little bit, as long as we think they serve our interests.  Which is why I suppose Trump's authoritarian posture is not quite as shocking to many of us as perhaps it should be.  After all, the logic that told us Saddam Hussein was a good guy because he managed to hold Iraq together or that Duterte is a good guy because he's cracking down on drugs, also tells us that if our own authoritarian can "make America great again," why not give him a shot?
I have read a lot of articles recently that wonder out loud how many Trump voters can still steadfastly support him, even after the plentiful blunders, embarrassing faux pas, and undiplomatic tweeting.
I think the answer lies in the fact that they were not actually duped, as some commentators would like to believe.  They actually knew exactly what they were voting for: a loud, crude and hopefully strong lead dog.  I think that the reason the Steve Bannon's of the world believe in Trump is not just because he could be a tool of their xenophobic nationalism, but because he is a walking, talking advertisement for alpha male mythology, which is perhaps an even deeper core conviction of the Alt-Right/Breitbart crowd than simple prejudice or racism.
The Strongman is a powerful lure to those who feel (rightly or wrongly) set upon by the establishment, whether they are leftists freaking out about Big Brother or rightists railing about the liberal elites, there is something in our nature that takes a perverse sort of pleasure in having some version of "the man" to blame for our woes.  The appeal of Trump, as near as I can come to describing it (because it doesn't resonate with me), is that he promised to be the deal-maker and the voice of the forgotten Americans.  Never mind that his deals were borderline delusions, never mind that he actually has very little understanding of what his constituents really want and need from their government, it doesn't matter, because he's going to make us great again, we don't need details.
That is the lure of the false messiah: you don't need to worry, the great one is going to make it all better, and you're not going to have to do the work, all you have to do is worship him, put your trust in him.  Over the past month or so I have run across the reality that Jesus' disciples kept trying and trying to get him to be that kind of messiah, the kind that would topple the principalities and powers and magically put them on the top, where we all think we belong.
Jesus steadfastly refused to be that sort of messiah.  Donald Trump has wholeheartedly embraced that call, and disturbingly a whole bunch of people claiming to represent the Body of Christ, have welcomed him in a big bro-hug.
I find myself at least a little grateful to this season in our politics, because I feel like the masks have been dropped.  I admit, it's reaching a bit for something to be thankful for, but I have hope that maybe we will finally see that strongmen, and false messiahs will lead us nowhere.  As for me, I am trying to learn something important about these false messiahs, because I do not doubt that some day, maybe soon, a messiah will come along who resonates with my own vanity and blindness, maybe he or she will be the anti-trump, but that will not prevent them from being the anti-Christ, if they offer us the same deal: worship me and I will give you the world.  I've heard that deal somewhere before.

Everyday Is Like Monday

Everyday is like Sunday,

Everyday is silent and gray.

-The Smiths

When I was in junior high I started listening to this music from across the pond.  It was not like the things that I heard on the radio in the 1980's.  It was sad and beautiful and wryly humorous, and it was sung in a voice that stood out from the crowd, a silky smooth tenor with a sort of bell like clarity.  That voice was Morrissey, the band was The Smiths, from Manchester England.  A lot of their music was about the desperation of existence for the young, the poor and the misfits.  One of their most famous songs is Everyday Is Like Sunday, which talks about wanting something, anything, to change, even if it means blowing it all up and tearing it all down.  Perhaps not for everyone, but when I was in 7th grade that sounded like exactly what I wanted, I felt left out of most things, pushed past and ignored by a lot of the world.  It was not a good feeling, and I'm glad that I had Morrissey to sing me through it.

Some people feel that way and they don't just have songs about blowing up the world to sooth their souls.  They have less winsome men than Morrissey encouraging them to actually do it.  Whether it was the anger of punk music, or the raging intensity of metal, or the jangly ennui of The Smiths, music and art can give you an outlet for a lot of negative emotions that cannot be safely vented otherwise.  Listening to Johnny Rotten sneer: "I wanna destroy passers by," can be cathartic, and much safer for society than disenfranchised youth who actually go and try to do it.

Fundamentalists don't get this about art.  Which is why you constantly have concerned groups wanting to censor artists, whether it was NWA or Marilyn Manson.  The thinking goes: stifle the expression of negative things and people won't think about them.  Except that is absolutely the opposite of what really happens.  The young man who blew himself up in an Arianna Grande concert Monday night, in the same Manchester that Morrissey wryly suggested ought to be "bombed down" in his song, did not get the humor of that suggestion.  He had people suggesting to him that such artistic expressions of alienation and angst were probably of the devil, signs of the decadent and jaded demise of western culture. Morrissey would most likely agree, however his approach to addressing that decadence and decay would be writing scathing lyrics not improvised explosives.

This is not a defense of the terrorist who has committed the latest atrocity.  This is an attempt to understand him, and I guess also a defense of art as a means of trying to sort through this sort of mess.  I felt alienated in my teen and young adult years, and I had music to help me sort through those feelings.  All things considered, I wasn't as much of an outsider as I liked to imagine; I was a white (read majority population), middle-ish class kid with a stable family and a decent education in process.  I didn't have everything I could want, but I had enough of most things that I really needed.  Whether I knew it or not, I lived in the middle of immense privilege. I could not see the forest for the trees.

What if, instead of Morrissey, I had some angry white-supremacist telling me about how I ought to take back what is rightfully mine.  Skinheads (the neo-nazi type) were an actual thing then, I might really have run into some of that.  I might have been Dylan Roof, or James Holmes, please do not forget that terrorists grow in all kinds of skins.  Thinking that your people are immune from perpetrating this sort of violence is highly problematic.  There is a system in almost any culture that can create these broken pieces.  Middle Eastern Islam has ISIS and Al Qaida and suchlike, we have the Klan, and the Alt-Right, Africa has Boko Haram, there are even Buddhist terrorists in Myanmar.  All it takes is for people to feel disenfranchised and set upon by a majority.  Islam has had the most recent waves of it, because the parts of the world where Islam is the primary religion have been wracked by war and poverty, and on top of that, the values taught by conservative/fundamentalist Islam are directly at odds with what they call decadent lifestyles of the West.  The Western powers also happen to be the ones dropping bombs and Tomahawk missiles on them.

Does any of this justify, blowing up a bunch of teeny boppers at a concert?  Absolutely not.  What it points at is that we have a big problem that cannot be solved by ratcheting up our security.  These dangerous, unstable and violent people can be homegrown, and increasingly, they are. Don't get distracted by shiny objects and the desire for easy answers.  ISIS will take responsibility, and they have some claim, but they wouldn't be able to reach this young man if he didn't experience the very real isolation that besets immigrant populations. They would not have been able to hone his hate so sharply if he had other voices to assure him that other people, maybe even those kids at the Arianna Grande concert, were going through the same pile of crap he was.

One of the ways we can understand each other better is through art.  Islam has given us art.  So have all the other religions, so have atheists and agnostics, so have happy people, and sad people, stable, sane people and mentally troubled people.  If I want to understand the experience of black people in this country, and touch the anger and the trouble, I can listen to Public Enemy, KRS-One, or Ice T back in the day, it won't tell me everything I need to know, and it might not actually present me with the most fair and balanced perspective, but it will get me feeling things from a different angle.

Salman Abedi, and the people who groomed him and sent him on this path, only feel from one angle, the angle of hatred. They see an Arianna Grande concert as a way to strike out with that hatred, at the "decadent" culture they see as their enemy, they also see a way to inflict the pain of dead children on the nations that have dropped bombs on "their" cities. They are not convinced that Manchester is their city any more than Morrissey, they have the same feeling of alienation from the world they live in, but they can't just sing it away.  We need to understand that in all it's complexity and terror.

Can art save us from this violence?  I don't know, but I do know that bombs are doing a really terrible job of saving anyone, so lets try something else.

Sorting Through the Futility

Ironically, until people have some level of inner God experience, there is no point in asking them to follow Jesus' ethical ideals.  It is largely a waste of time. Indeed, they will not be able to even understand the law's meaning and purpose, Religious requirements only become the source of deeper anxiety.  Humans quite simply don't have the power to obey any spiritual law, especially issues like forgiveness of enemies, nonviolence, self-emptying, humble use of power, true justice towards the outsider, and so on, except in and through union with God.  Or as Jesus put it, "the branch cut off from the vine is useless." (John 15: 5) - Richard Rohr's Daily Devotion 5. 21. 2017

As many of you know, I have been reading Richard Rohr's daily devotions every day for several years now.  This has stuck with me as a devotional practice for longer than most of my disciplines manage to hang on.  Not every day produces an "aha!" moment, but enough of them do to keep me going.  I think Rohr's perspective: Catholic, contemplative, mystic, is just the right balance for me.  I am Protestant, and rather enthusiastically so.  I am not so much contemplative as I am reflective; honestly I don't find the sorts of practices generally extolled by Rohr to be terribly helpful.  Then again, as a life long introvert and lover of solitude it is possible that my reaction to them is more of a "well duh" sort of response.  I sometimes like to think of myself as a mystic, but honestly I am much more of a pragmatist, I tend to want reality and concreteness in my world.  I quickly become either frustrated an annoyed with those who want to dwell in abstraction.
The thing is though, mystery and mysticism intrudes on my world enough that I cannot simply walk away from it entirely.  Thus Fr. Richard's thoughts from two days ago have been kicking around in my head.  I am involved so deeply in church things that I sometimes peek out from behind the curtain of the institution and wonder how it is that so many just seem to live without it.  I remember a time, even when I had experienced something of an "inner God experience" where I hadn't really fully committed to being a follower of Jesus.  I always thought of myself as a Christian, I grew up as one, but the journey towards really being convicted by the "ethical ideals" that were taught by Jesus the Christ didn't really start in earnest until I was actually already engaged in vocational religion.
It's more than a little odd to look at it that way, but I think it proves Rohr's point that you can engage in religious requirements, you can come to some level of mastery of the systems of religion, all the while holding only a tenuous and legalistic grasp of what Jesus of Nazareth might actually be calling you to be and do.  I sometimes describe the process as a sort of erosion, it was like the steady and long process by which wind and water wear away stone.  It took me dealing seriously, academically, and most of all consistently with Scripture, through the process of preaching and teaching, over the course of years, before I realized that the Word actually throws down a fairly clear and unavoidable challenge to the practice of empty religion.
It is all too possible to be "cut off from the vine" and not even know it.  The sort of fruit that that the law points to and the gospels inaugurate is nothing that comes easy to us.  It requires that we move beyond the old dualism of reward and punishment that forms the center of a lot of religious practice. It implies that we grow into Christ, which is rather a bridge farther on than just sort of "believing in him" whatever that means. The implication of the above statement, that it is impossible to make any serious progress on that front until you have been changed by grace, is perhaps the most reformed thing that you will ever hear from a Roman Catholic, but there you have it.  The "religious requirements only become a source of deeper anxiety." I feel like that essentially sums up what I have heard from just about every lapsed Catholic I ever talked to about why they stopped going to Mass.  But we Protestants can ride that wagon too, we're not immune to the process, in fact, in as much as we have tried to buck that tendency we have generally just let more and more people ride off into the sunset.  I know, I'm not at all okay trying to get people to go to church because of guilt, or feeding on their anxiety, that has become anathema to me.
I am confronted though, by the reality that I find so much in Christ that is life-changing, purpose-building, peace-giving, and love-driving. I don't know how to give that gift the way that I should.  I have to say that, at this point, I have really only sorted through some of the things not to do, and Fr. Rohr has been a helper along that way.

Black Days

Pearls and Swine, bereft of me.

Long and weary, my road has been.

-I am the Highway, Audioslave

It has been a bad stretch for my music people.  It started with David Bowie, stretched through Leonard Cohen, and now has hit really close to my generation.  Chris Cornell, age 52, lead singer of Soundgarden, Audioslave, and main collaborator in Temple of the Dog, is gone.   He's not the first to go.  Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone was gone before the Seattle sound even growled its way out of the northwest.  Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, the reluctant voice of Generation X, could not manage the pain of his body and the wild success of stardom for very long.  Lane Staley, Alice in Chains, went out in 2002, but by that point it wasn't a surprise.  Neither was Scott Weiland, Stone Temple Pilots, even though we maybe thought Scott had grown out of it.

Cornell is a freaking shock though.  Cornell and Staley are the two of that group that actually had technically impressive, transcendent voices.  Cornell had a range that would shame an opera singer, he could do smooth, he could do growl, he could do a controlled primal scream.  He also seemed, from the outside at least, to have his stuff together in a way that Weiland, Staley and Cobain certainly did not.  He was a thoughtful guy, and a hard working musician.

If I'm honest, as I have grown up into middle age, Soundgarden is the band that has aged the best out of all the Seattle explosion.  They were a little more metal and less punk than Nirvana, they were a little less metal than Alice in Chains and a bit too hard edged for the Pearl Jam crowd, but Badmotorfinger and Superunknown get on my list of albums I do not ever want to live without.  Cornell has done some absolutely stupendous solo work too, his cover of Michael Jackson's Billy Jean is absolutely perfect, as is his cover of Prince/Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares to You. 

Cornell's work with the "supergroup" Audioslave is sometimes scoffed at because it was just so good, and the parties involved were so beloved for their other bands, that it almost immediately got over-hyped and people constantly whined and complained about how different it was from Soundgarden or Rage Against the Machine.  Cornell sunk some really amazing lyrics into those catchy tunes.

I honestly thought he was going to be one of those singular musicians, like Bowie, Cohen and Dylan, who managed to actually grow up and keep making good music, reinventing as needed, innovating, reaching back for the best and slamming us with the new. He had the tools, he had the voice, as it turns out he just didn't have the time.

I don't know what it was that took Chris away, I assume we'll find out in due time.  It doesn't much matter to me what it was, his voice is still, and our world has less music in it.

Stay healthy Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, you're about all we have left.

Blessed Mother

As an act of rebellion against the Hallmark holiday, I choose to honor Mother's Day on a Wednesday.
Don't get me wrong, I hope you all had a good dinner, or at least a phone conversation with Mom on Sunday. Mothers deserve to be honored and celebrated, as do women who approach motherhood from less traditional angles.  George MacDonald described a matronly character in one of his novels as "one of God's mothers," who, even though she never had children, managed to be a mother to pretty much every wayward castoff that came her way. This is for my wife, my mom, and all the women who have taken up the important job of nurturing, teaching, protecting and raising up the ones they love.
As a protestant, I never much understood the Catholic preoccupation with Mary.  I mean, I get that she is a compelling character, a young girl who found herself in a frightening situation, but who chose to answer God with trust instead of fear.  However, I always sort of gravitated back to the way that her situation was made precarious only by the stupid rules the men around her seemed to hold over her head.  Joseph, her betrothed, has to set aside a rather large chunk of his male ego, just to come to the place where he is going to "send her away quietly."  It is only a dream of an angel that convinces him to actually take the responsibility of being a father.
Father's seem to always have a choice, even after the child is a reality.  Mother's don't have that much of a choice.  Oh, some do abandon their children or are forced to make agonizing decisions, but think for a minute about how much more heart-wrenching the idea of a motherless child is than one with an absent father.  The latter is sad, yes, the former is an epic tragedy.  Mary was investing her blood and very possibly her life in Jesus, Joseph just had to set aside his pride.
I think maybe the reason we Protestants need to celebrate Mother's Day, is because we don't really deal with Mary as we should.  I understand that maybe some medieval traditions got carried away, but it really is comforting to find the blessed mother, in her little corner of an old church, praying for the sinners with such peace and beauty. To see her face is to know what love looks like.
The Eastern Church has a place for Mary, they call her Theotokos, the God-bearer, she has an indispensable role in the incarnation.  It is true that God did not do this thing alone.  The thing that mothers teach us from the time we are born is that we never do this alone.  They are constantly with us through those years that we can't even remember.  When we form our consciousness they are the most important person in our world.  As we grow up and start testing things out, even as we learn they are actual people with gifts and faults of their own, we know that we have a relationship that cannot be broken by anything less than a catastrophe.
We don't really need to be sappy and sentimental about this, because the thing itself has weight, it is sacred.  The problem I have with the Hallmark Holiday is always that, it falls back on saccharin platitudes and does not deal with the real power of the word mother and the blessings that should always come with it.

Dipping My Toe Back In

You may have noticed that these blogs have become somewhat less frequent of late.  That is partly due to a resolution on my part to stop engaging in the relentless cycle of outrage that has become our political milieu.  It's just not constructive.  I owe this in part to my wife, who gets very nervous when I talk to people or write about politics.  I do not agree that conflict or argument is a bad thing, but I appreciate Michele's elevated sensitivity to human emotional states and I think that, during the election and in the first few months of the Trump presidency, I did get a little too wound up about things. I needed to think a little more and talk a little less, in short, I just needed to take a deep breath.
I'm trying not to go back under water, so I'm going to just talk about something I think is important and constructive for all of us. I will try to express the equal disdain I feel for both sides of the aisle, because one thing I have become reasonably convinced about is that the whole system is pretty broken, it's not just Republicans, it's not just Democrats.  As tempting as it is to just make blanket pronouncements about the thieves and liars up the road, I would like to try and offer something constructive and maybe a little bit hopeful.
Thus, I'm going to dip my toe back in the water of politics, just for a minute.  I want to say something that I did not expect to be saying, but here it is: I do not want Donald J. Trump impeached, or otherwise removed from office.  I am not saying there is no cause, or that there is.  My opinion of Donald Trump, after watching for several months remains that he is an inveterate and possibly compulsive salesman.  I do not believe he is evil.  I will admit that some of his behavior is troubling, his loose attitude towards the truth ruffles my sense of trust in his decision making process. His authoritarian sensibilities seem like a threat to our democratic republic.  His constant appeal to our most isolationist and xenophobic demons is not to be shaken off, and I truly regret the fear that his rhetoric has fomented in our immigrant and minority communities. And perhaps most of all, I lament the way that his election has seemingly created strife in our nation.
The thing is though, he is a symptom, not the disease.  The strife was there before he ran.  Our anti-immigrant prejudice was there before he started talking about a wall.  Our fear of Muslim terrorists was there before he started talking about an immigration ban.  The sense, deeply felt by much of middle America, that they were being left out of the conversations and the decisions of "coastal elites," was there before he put on that red hat that said "Make America Great Again," and got people chanting, "Drain the Swamp."
Impeaching Trump will not cure that disease, in fact, it might make it worse.  What I read in the overheated, breathless panic of the neoliberal establishment is a sense that Trump is a Russian Stooge, or a budding Mussolini.  There may be evidence of that, but I think it is correlative, not causative.  Our enemies, whether we are talking about Russia or Al-Quaida are pleased with a Trump presidency, because he is exactly what they have always said we are: pompous, impetuous, decadent, fraudulent, imperious and imperialistic.  They point to what Trump winning this election says about America, and they say, "see, we told you the west is not all freedom and democracy, they hate you and fear you and they will bomb your cities if we give them an excuse." Trump is basically an incarnation of western decadence and arrogance, and Putin, ISIS, Kim Jong Un, or the Taliban will have no trouble pointing to that with glee.
But we need to own this reality, he represents who we are at this particular moment.  He mobilized enough people in the right places, and played on his opponents most glaring weaknesses.  He won the democratic contest as fairly and squarely as it is possible to win it.  He still has the support, if we believe the polls, of most of the people who voted for him, even though that number is woefully small as a portion of the general population, our own apathy and the flaws in our system allowed him to legitimately win the electoral college, it is not worth whining about now.
These voters were not swindled or gaslighted, they thoroughly expected Trump to be what he is and so the fact that he is proving to be just that does not change hearts or minds.  The narrative that the people who voted for Trump were somehow fooled is a fantasy of the neoliberal corporatocracy who basically had the political market cornered until Trump and Bernie Sanders showed up. After controlling the "center" of both Republican and Democratic parties since WWII, the rise of candidates that drew support from what they thought were the fringes seemed impossible.
Trump voters are not drowning in regret, they are waiting to see if he delivers on the promise of "Making America Great Again."  If he does, fine, if he doesn't, so what? They have no confidence that the system or their lives were going to improve under Hillary and the Democrats anyway (I can't say I blame them).
The thing is, I think the Donald has a clock ticking.  Very few of the people who voted for him are die hard supporters, they were desperate for something different, and he certainly is different.  If he does not deliver, and I mean really deliver, not just claim victory, they will not swallow the same pill twice (I hope). On the other hand, if we do squeeze an impeachment out, he will undoubtedly go out shouting that he was framed and that the liberal elites and the residents of the swamp were out to get him.  Some, maybe a lot, of Trumpland will buy that story, and the fabric of our nation, and trust in our institutions will continue to erode.
If Trump is, as I said, a symptom of a disease, it is a disease that I think our natural immune system needs to learn how to handle.  It's sort of like when doctors find a tumor, the knee jerk reaction is to want to just remove the tumor, but you need to be able to be sure that the tumor is contained, that its limits are discreet and that you get the whole thing.  If you don't, you have just created a metastatic time bomb.  If we focus too much on Trump and not on the conditions he represents, I fear we will get sicker and sicker.  If we endure and abide and see this sickness through to the end, maybe we will develop a better immune response for next time.
This is my bit of constructive advice: don't buy into the breathless panic, this disease does not have to be fatal to our republic.  Don't think that getting rid of Trump will make it better, in fact, stop looking to politicians to be your savior.  Encourage them to do their job and do not support them blindly because they have an R or a D after their name.  We the people are the lifeblood of this grand experiment we call democracy, our own involvement, awareness and convictions are the immune response to tyrants and crooks, we need to stop abdicating that function to the viruses of greed and selfishness, or to the cancer of corruption. The next time someone offers you a placebo in place of a real solution, learn to see it for what it is. Keep breathing America, the fever will break.

Yard Sale

Every spring Good Samaritan has a yard sale. It's one of our traditional fundraisers, and a lot of times, because we have it in early May, it rains.  Other than meteorological non-cooperation, May is a good time to have a yard sale, because a lot of our folks are in spring cleaning mode and ready to bring us boxes and boxes of stuff.  Predictably, the forecast calls for nearly three whole days of rain, so right now, the whole upstairs of our Church looks like somebody's basement exploded all over it.
Every time I walk down the hall and through the narthex I am astounded by how much stuff we are trying to get rid of: art, tools, glassware, furniture, dishes, even an old science project apparatus about solar panels.  It's a visually arresting scene this year, set up like it is to take place indoors.
There is just so much stuff.
I have seen people dropping it off.  They are happy to be rid of it. I know the feeling of getting rid of things that amount to clutter in your life.  Come Saturday, people will appear, some even jumping the gun on the 8:00 AM start time, and enthusiastically and gleefully take home a lot of this stuff.  They will buy it because it's a good deal, they will buy it because they think they need it.  They will buy it and before too long it will end up in another yard sale (I'm pretty sure I've seen some of this stuff before).
I still have some nagging questions, where does all of this stuff come from?  Why did people keep it? Why are they getting rid of it now?  Why will someone else probably buy it?
I admit there are some things that I think: "Hey, I could use that," but I start asking myself, "do I really need it," and the answer is pretty universally, "No, I do not."  I'm not talking down at the yard sale stuff, I'm absolutely as guilty of over-consumption as anyone else, and usually I don't have the good sense to pick up my pointless junk for 25 cents.  Why spend hours scouring yard sales when Amazon is so darn good at getting me what I think I need in less than two days with free shipping.
Occasionally, I have been pleased with myself if I manage to "up-cycle" some piece of something that I had been holding onto for nebulous reasons.  Honestly though, I think that only feeds my desire to pack rat things away.  If I actually use something that I probably should have tossed, it certainly reinforces that behavior.  I hear my Grandpa in my ear, "you might be able to use that someday."
Maybe I will.  Maybe I might, or maybe someday my kids will be hauling all of that junk to the dump, or to a yard sale.
The thing is, I can kind of make an argument for de-cluttering, and I can kind of make an argument for waste-not-want-not.  It's not as clear cut as zealots of either camp seem to make it.  Maybe that's a lesson we could apply in other areas as well.

Stone

Today is my wife's 42nd birthday, and no, I'm not going to get in trouble for telling you that, she is a fanatic about all things related to her nativity.  Her birthday present this year was five tons of #57 bluestone gravel delivered by dump truck.  No, that is not a joke, and no, she is not upset in the least about it.  In fact, she was walking around for days telling people how she was almost as excited for that rock as she would have been for the kind of rock she wears on her finger.  That is where we are in our lives, solidly in our fifth decade.
We're aware of the fact that, while we haven't necessarily reached the point where we are starting to feel the crunch of old age and the need to weed out clutter, we are at a place where we want the stuff we get to be truly useful.  The desire for a truckload of gravel has been with Michele for a while now.  The edge of our driveway has a bit of a drop off into a nice bare spot that is mud when it rains and dirt any other time.  People use it to turn around before leaving, and she felt bad about how bumpy and nasty that could be, especially for the UPS and Fed-Ex guys who make nearly daily stops at our house, because we have taken to ordering a whole lot of stuff on-line.  Amazon Prime and Target.com both do free shipping on just about anything we need.  We're pretty busy, so we don't always have time to go browsing around big box stores like we did earlier in life.  We now order pretty mundane stuff, like dishwasher detergent and even toilet paper for delivery, shipping is free and prices are low, and we don't much care if we ruin the excitement of getting packages delivered for our kids.
The point is that the rocks are a gesture of practical hospitality.  It's not glamorous or flashy, but it is the sort of gift that both of us really crave about this point: tools, useful things.
She is probably going to laugh at me for going on about this in a blog, but that too has a dual purpose.  See, a lot times we have written each other little letters for birthdays or anniversaries. These letters aren't always necessarily about trying to out mush each other, a lot of them are just little remarks on where we are right now.
I noticed the other day that I had a few of them stashed somewhere and I didn't quite know what to do about that.  It seemed wrong to just toss them, I have too much of my grandfather in me for that, but there are these folded sheets of paper stuffed away somewhere and the question is what is going to come of that? It may be that someday one of our kids, sorting through our stuff, finds them and reads them and gets all emotional, or whatever.  But putting this sort of thing here, as long as I can avoid severely embarrassing Michele, means that it is around, out there in the matrix, it can be found without clutter, without degradable paper, without cluttering up some drawer.  It's here, it's useful, it's actually more permanent than stone.
All my Geek peeps out there will know that 42 is an important number.  In Douglas Adam's Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is the answer to life, the universe and everything, which the most powerful computer in the universe spits out, a single number.  That idea is absurd, of course, like a lot of other things that make that book so great.  Life can be absurd and unpredictable, and it's always good to have a towel handy, which is the sort of thing that hopefully we have all learned by the time we're 42.
Happy Birthday Michele, enjoy your stones.