Multiple Inhibition Disorder

... otherwise known as Schizomania (or to put it in layman's terms, social mood vacillation.)

Author Douglas Coupland is one for coining new terms and phrases for observed conditions and experiences not heretofore defined. Today I contribute to the literature, in my own small way.

In his latest book, PlayerOne (which I read on Thanksgiving break - yay, love recreational reading!), he defines the "Inhibition Spectrum", which is represented by degrees of deviation from "normal" (whatever that is). Here is his concept, best read by finding "normal" and reading from it in either direction, left or right:

madness <-- talks to self <-- rants <-- no off button <-- life of the party <-- talkative <-- "normal" --> shy --> quiet --> reclusive loner --> scary loner --> hermit --> Unabomber

While Coupland doesn't state it, it seems obvious that his spectrum serves to label the X-axis of the Standard Normal (or "bell") curve, with about 2/3 of the people sitting somewhere between "life of the party" and "quiet". This range would encompass +/- one Standard Deviation from the mean of "normal". A second Standard Deviation would take you out as far as "rants" and "scary loner"; 95% of the people are within those bounds. The other 5% are... out there. Way out there.

No doubt you can find yourself on the spectrum. I can, too. But... I can also find myself in more than one spot. Uh, oh.

I am usually slightly right of center (no political comments, please. Even if they are true) on the chart. But depending on the situation, the people I'm with, the level of anxiety or euphoria (not to mention caffeine or alcohol) in my system, I can just as easily be the life of the party or a reclusive loner, all within the same 24 hour period. I have not yet identified a pattern for sure, but I have some ideas about what may cause me to swing that wildly. Regardless of the onset causes, I choose to call the syndrome Multiple Inhibition Disorder, or Schizomania, the unexpected oscillation of social mood.

I'm sure it's a disability under the ADA rules. If not, it should be. If it persists through the holidays, I may apply.

Catholicism & the Secular State

Last weekend at Mass, the priest in his homily was at his usual high level of scholarly discourse, waxing eloquent in his soft-spoken unpretentious way. It was the Festival of Christ the King, and this time his focus was on a couple of Catholic distinctives: Catholicism's view of church & state, and its main structural organizing principle.

Here's a summary of his key points:

Most religious movements adhere to some kind of revelation about God or spirituality, generally coming through a prophet or holy man. Christianity, however, claims that Jesus Christ was not only a prophet, but was the revelation himself, the embodiment of God. So that is a distinctive that separates Christianity from other world religions.

Secondly, most Christian (read: Protestant) churches were organized around a key doctrine or set of doctrines. These doctrinal statements tend to then give shape to the structure of the church, and affect its organization. The Catholic Church, however, is at its core already a structure. It has doctrines, yes, but those don't determine the structure. The structure (to Catholics) is a given, handed to them directly by Jesus and the Apostles, which to some degree gives rise to doctrine. This is perhaps why dissidents find it so hard to actually split from the Catholic Church, whereas in the Protestant tradition dissidents just go off and form a new synod or denomination. To them, correct doctrine is primary, whereas to the Catholic, doctrinal differences at some level yield to the unity of church structure. What a very different perspective!

Now, as to how the Catholic church relates to the state, the worldwide church does not dictate policy to any state anywhere in the world. It does not seek a theocracy. What it does do, however, is propose principles for policymaking drawn from the teachings of Jesus. The laity, which operates and ministers in various roles in the secular world, is responsible for identifying appropriate applications of those principles, some of which involve public policy.

So while the Catholic church does not see its role as dictating public policy, at the same time it does not see itself as without influence. It seeks to guide policymaking through an articulation of principle, and the freely-chosen secular engagement of The Faithful. Because, when there is no moral authority higher than the state, the state operates unchecked. The state is nothing more than the highest expression of human nature. But if human nature is essentially, as Christianity teaches, self-centered & oft given to coercion, then... so is the state.

The church has a role to speak against any policy which is essentially fallen in nature, as well as to point to Jesus as the clearest revelation of God's desires for humankind.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Since I'm working my way through OT502, and just finished up a section on Psalms, what more appropriate way to start off Thanksgiving Day than with psalms of thanksgiving? :)

Psalm 118

1 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
his love endures forever.
2 Let Israel say:
“His love endures forever.”
3 Let the house of Aaron say:
“His love endures forever.”
4 Let those who fear the LORD say:
“His love endures forever.”
5 When hard pressed, I cried to the LORD;
he brought me into a spacious place.
6 The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid.
What can mere mortals do to me?

Psalm 103

A Psalm of David.

1 Bless the LORD, O my soul;
And all that is within me, bless His holy name!
2 Bless the LORD, O my soul,
And forget not all His benefits:
3 Who forgives all your iniquities,
Who heals all your diseases,
4 Who redeems your life from destruction,
Who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies,
5 Who satisfies your mouth with good things,
So that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

Ingrid Visits The Casino

Maybe my initial rants about this city not having a decent music scene were a little ... over the top? :)

Since seeing Sheryl Crow in August, and The Weepies in October, Ingrid Michaelson this month, and Relient K next month, that makes me ... retract at least the tone if not the actual remark! One decent show every month or so would not be so bad. :)

The particular show we took in Sunday night was actually a benefit for the local food pantry. All the ticket proceeds went to the charity, thanks to the corporate sponsors taking care of the artist's costs (and from the tone of her on-stage remarks, perhaps Ingrid settling for less than normal rates).

The venue was odd, though - an event ballroom in a casino.



Ahhh, the ambience.. dinging bells, clanking coins, rattling chips.. and cigarette smoke. Boy, it had been awhile since I'd been in a facility with smoke hanging in the air. Guess when the Casino is the property of a "sovereign nation", they can do what they want.



The ballroom was smoke-free, though, and also chair-free. :( Lots of people pulled up a nearby chunk of wall and watched the jumbotrons instead of the stage.



The opener this time was only so-so: lots of emotive bellowing. Sitting in the hallway in comfortable chairs was far more preferable to actually being in the hall when this dude was belting it out. But Ingrid... ahhh. Nice.



She is so funny on-stage, and (apparently) completely spontaneous with comments, stories, antics with her band-mates, trying to mess up the lighting guy who worked the spotlight, you name it. Very entertaining. And I love the songs - she does so many in 3/4, 6/8, 12/8 time.. you'd think you were at a skating rink. :) And her ukulele work is just priceless.



The highlight of the night, though, was her completely amazing cover of R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming", which she did acapella by using a looping pedal and layering her voice about 12 levels deep. Extraordinary! It's not available on mp3, but there is a similar clip out on YouTube from an earlier concert which sounds pretty much the same. It's amazing. Great show, and great cause!

Social Skills: Cats vs Dogs

Ran across an interesting article the other day on the differences between cats and dogs when it comes to social engagement with humans. Here's a little excerpt:

The limited research that has been done on human-cat interaction has shown that cats do not readily socially engage with humans, unlike dogs, primates, sometimes horses, and even dolphins and whales (to some extent) and other marine mammals.

For example, a 2005 study by Ádam Miklosi and colleagues showed that both pet dogs and cats were able to use human pointing gestures to find food. This is not really surprising. However, when the animals knew the location of the food but it was inaccessible to them - and the human owners were naive to the location of the food - only the dogs could effectively engage their owners to help them gain access to the food. The cats simply kept trying in vain to get it themselves.

Importantly, all of these animals were family pets, and had plenty of experience with their human owners. One could argue that these animals were able to use human social signals because they had simply learned them through experience. Other research, however, has provided evidence that even without significant human experience, [even] domesticated foxes will socially engage with humans to solve a problem.

Hm. That kind of leaves cats in the dust when it comes to "working the system" to get what they want. Now if we overlay onto this the popular analogy of gender differences, that men are like dogs and women like cats, where the heck does that leave us? ;)

We're movin' on up...

to-ooo the East Side... " Oh, wait - that's from The Jeffersons. Actually, we're on the West Side.

People ask me how I like it here compared to my previous city. Usually I say that except for the non-existent music scene, it's much more my speed. I like the smaller footprint of the city, yet with a well-built-out highway & transit system. It has a small-town, middle America feel, while at the same time having every kind of trendy retail outlet there is (now that TJ's has opened).

Unemployment is low, so is cost of living. Summer was nasty, but maybe winter won't be, we'll see. Fall has been great, maybe Spring will be, too. I can see why Yahoo would consider that I moved up a couple notches in livability.

It is home yet? Well.... no. But it seems like a good fit, so maybe it will become home in not too long.

War in the Old Testament, Love in the New?

I'll give the professor in my Pentateuch class this: he asks really provocative questions for our weekly discussion board posts. They are not ones you can give simplistic answers to (not that I tend in that direction anyway...), and this week's was no different.


Q. How does a Christian interpret and respond to war in the Pentateuch, particularly the use of war in judgment and punishment? (use Numbers 31 as a reference point).


A. I have a dilemma here. And it's not just struggling to reconcile Jesus' NT teachings on loving your enemies with what seems to be God-sponsored genocide in the OT. It's a bigger issue than that. It's reconciling Jesus with ... Jesus. Here's what I mean:

As a Christian, I hold certain doctrines about God, which help me interpret and respond to the Bible, including parts of it that are difficult (like Numbers 31). For example:

Christian doctrine holds that God does not change; He is immutable, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Do I believe that? If not, am I ready to argue that God evolves, improves?

Christian doctrine also holds that God is a Trinity, three persons, one unity, Father/Son/Spirit. Do I believe that? If not, am I ready to embrace the idea of multiple Gods... or to reject Jesus' divinity?

Christian doctrine also holds that God is eternal; He was, and is, and is to come. Do I believe that? If not, am I ready to argue that God had a beginning, or that God has not been eternally Triune?

Maybe this doesn't yet seem relevant to Numbers 31, but let me try to tie it together. If God does not change, if God is Triune, and has been so from eternity past, then here's what I really have to face:

The Son of God was involved with, and complicit in, the God-sanctioned wars of the Old Testament! I mean, how can it be otherwise, if Jesus is the second person of the Trinity and was "The Son" from the beginning?

The Jesus who spoke of loving enemies, forgiving those who wronged you... also told the Israelites to annihilate the Midianites (incl. all boy babies) in Numbers 31, as revenge for a prior affront to Him. (31:2,3,16) Jesus, as the LOGOS of God, present in the cloud, the fire, the Shekinah Glory, ordered them put to death.

Who is it that I worship, exactly, when I worship Jesus, the embodiment of forgiveness and turning the other cheek?

I submit that, if we're honest, none of us are exactly sure Who Jesus is. We (I) would rather not make it complicated by thinking about it overmuch, either. The problem with that is that God IS complicated, and not as simple as we'd like. God is to some extent unknowable, and if we trust Him it has to be without perfect understanding on our part - no theological education can get us there.

The other dilemma we (I) have to deal with is the popular notion that war can somehow be eradicated. Jesus Himself doesn't give us that as a legitimate hope in this age (Mt. 24:6-7; Lk. 21:9-10), any more than He allows us hope to eliminate poverty (Mk. 14:7; note His quote of Dt. 15:11). We can no more eliminate war or poverty than we can drought, disease, or disasters. It is part of this life to have troubles (Jn. 16:33; Lk 17:1), but woe to him by whom they come.

Jesus promises punishment for wrongs done. (Lk. 17:2) God also somehow uses governments (Rom 13:4) and nations (ex: Rome against Jerusalem, Mt 23:36-38) to administer punishment. Sometimes people, especially Jesus' followers, are punished unjustly. (1 Pet. 3:16-18) Abraham Lincoln quoted Luke 17:2 in his 2nd Inaugural Address (in the midst of the American Civil War), following it with this comment: "The Almighty has His own purposes". Right! And we (I) don't understand them.

Lincoln also quoted Psalm 19:9, which helps me know how I must approach the topic of war in the Pentateuch: "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." I approach this topic, as well as all others which I don't understand, by admitting first that I don't know God exhaustively. But I do know enough to still believe (even in the Old Testament accounts of war) that God is who He says He is:

Ex. 34:6-7

"The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, 7 keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,

AND

by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”

He is both, even though I don't understand how. The God of the OT and the God of the NT are the same, even if it's unsettling, confusing, embarrassing, or I just don't like it.

Loads of leaves

Finally most of the leaves are down or dropping.



The parking lot at work is buried in them, so the grounds crew is out in force after hours when the lot is empty, pushing them to the center, then the edges.



I've never seen leaves getting cleared away by a front-end loader before. Seems a bit like overkill.



Then they run them through what can only be described as a "leaf chipper", I suppose. The dust does fly!



Wonder what happens when it snows? Flamethrowers & napalm?

Intellectual Assent or Emotional Trust?

In my last few terms in Seminary, I have had multiple opportunities to mull over the "call" of God on our lives, what it entails, what it implies, what it demands, if anything. As my hermeneutics professor made clear, we come to the interpretation of Scripture with a measure of both personal subjectivity and cultural bias. I've begun to recognize at least some of this in myself.

It seems to me that we are in the midst of a cultural shift, as powerful as the one that led humanity from Mediaeval times into the Enlightenment. Except this shift is leading us OUT of the Enlightenment (or Modernism) into post-Modernism. And right now, the shift straddles the generations currently living on this planet (or, should I say, in the West).

I think the Baby Boomers are the last of the Moderns, the generation during which Modernism finally crumbled. Generation Y is the first generation of true post-Moderns, leaving Generation X as the transition generation, belonging to neither Modernism or post-Modernism - a generation filled with both angst and ambivalence. As the Brits would say: poor sods!

Here is what I see as the key differences in these world-views:

The Modern Western emphasis is on rational belief in objective truth (usu. with scientific or mathematical proof)

The post-Modern emphasis despairs of objective truth, admits to none but subjective (individual) truth, and will trust only in clearly demonstrated and evident character

Each of these are different yet again from the Mediaeval (and prior) pre-Modern emphasis on faithfulness to duty and to the essential nature of a given relationship (esp. master/servant, governor/governed)

When it comes to religious belief, pre-Modernism was defined by duty to the Creator and to the Creator's given order of things. It was simpler and more clearly defined: there were the obedient... and the disobedient. The standard was clear, and humankind was measured against the standard.

Modernism in religion led to either rational adherence to humanism (humankind became the standard - man as the measure of all things), or to a non-rational unquestioned belief in fundamental doctrines about God which are essentially unprovable, but necessary to sustain against creeping scientific Modernism.

Post-modernism, when applied to religion, is divided between disbelief in objective, universal truth, and a longing for some solid footing on which we can stand to deal with moral questions (hence the looking back to ancient traditions which is becoming more and more common).

So as Christ-followers today attempt to articulate the truth of the Gospel to the post-Modern generations coming up, we must abandon the methods that spoke to Moderns: apologetics, a defense of the historical Biblical record as proven to be reliable by archaeology, critical analysis, etc.

Instead, we should focus on those things that connect with post-Moderns: community, living your beliefs and commitments, character demonstrated in actions - something in which to place trust at a personal, emotional, experiential level, not take a mainly intellectual and scientific approach.

The Modernist focus on rational belief definitely influenced the evangelism techniques of the last several generations. The emphasis has been on intellectual assent rather than on emotional trust. Take, for example, this oft-quoted verse, John 3:16:

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

The word for "believe" in John 3 can also be translated as commit, trust, be faithful to. The feel of the verse is much different if the key phrase is rendered "whoever commits to Him", or "whoever trusts Him", or "whoever is faithful to Him". We are no longer talking about intellectual assent, about rational belief in objective truth. We're talking about emotional reliance on proven character, about committment to a trustworthy and Holy person.

The Evangelical church we're now attending has this little summary on it's weekly bulletin cover:

Believe
Accept
Switch
Express

It starts with intellectual assent, which leads to life change. Hmpf. Well, at least it's an improvement from the way Evangelical churches have often expected newcomers to assimilate into the church:

Behave
Believe
Belong

First, clean up your act, then sign this statement of belief, and then.. you can join. Yuk. Better to reverse the process:

Belong
Believe
Behave

In other words, come join us, hang out, catch the vision. When you see that it's for you, commit yourself to follow. The life change stuff will happen as a matter of course.

A better metaphor for "conversion" might be the process of apprenticeship. When a person is considering taking up a trade, there are several stages to it. You have to move progressively from neophyte to journeyman. First, you hear about it, then you check it out, then you sign up, then you show up, then you watch & learn, then you practice what you learned. The same stages could apply to becoming an apprentice to Christ:

Hear/Observe/Consider
Seek/Inquire/Discover
Identify/Accept/Sign on
Participate/Belong/Connect
Follow/Submit/Commit
Learn/Imitate/Practice

And somewhere in there, you trust. Trust the process, the teacher, the experience, the group, the Master Craftsman. And that trust, that emotional commitment, is the stuff of conversion to a new life.

Virtual friend group

Here are excerpts from an L.A. Times story that describes what friendship has come to mean in the age of Facebook. No comment needed, really. The guy makes his point all by himself.



By Neal Gabler, Special to the Los Angeles Times
October 17, 2010
With the new television season upon us, here are a few things you are virtually certain to see again and again and again: lots of folks spending the better part of their day surrounded by their friends and family in happy conviviality; folks wandering into the unlocked apartments and homes of friends, family and neighbors at any time of the day or night as if this were the most natural thing in the world; friends and family sitting down and having lots of tearful heart-to-hearts; Little League games, school assemblies and dance recitals, all attended by, you guessed it, scads of friends and family.

You're going to be seeing these scenes repeatedly because the basic unit of television is not the lone individual or the partnership or even the nuclear family. The basic unit of television is the flock — be it the extended family of brothers and sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers, nieces, nephews and cousins, or the extended circle of friends, and, rest assured, it is always a circle. On television friends never come in pairs; they invariably congregate in groups of three or more.

What makes this so remarkable is that it has been happening at a time when it is increasingly difficult to find this kind of deep social interaction anyplace but on TV. Nearly a decade ago, Harvard professor Robert Putnam observed in his classic "Bowling Alone" that Americans had become more and more disconnected from one another and from their society. As Putnam put it, "For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago — silently, without warning — that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous current." It was a current that pulled Americans apart.

Moreover, the current that Putnam observed has, according to more recent studies, only intensified in the last decade. One study found that Americans had one-third fewer nonfamily confidants than they had 20 years earlier, and 25% had no one in whom to confide whatsoever. Another study of 3,000 Americans found that on average they had only four close social contacts, but these included family members like one's own spouse.

This decline in real friendships may account in part for the dramatic rise of virtual friendships like those on social-networking sites where being "friended" is less a sign of personal engagement than a quantitative measure of how many people your life has brushed and how many names you can collect, but this is friendship lite. Facebook, in fact, only underscores how much traditional friendship — friendship in which you meet, talk and share — has become an anachronism and how much being "friended" is an ironic term.

In Putnam's view, based on several studies, "TV is apparently especially attractive for people who feel unhappy, particularly when there is nothing else to do."

It's not that we prefer television to human contact. The laugh track attests that most people don't really want to be alone in front of their TV sets. They want to be part of a larger community. Yet another study indicates that TV provides a sort of simulacrum of community because the relationship between the TV viewer and the people he or she watches on the screen competes with and even substitutes for physical encounters with real people. It is Facebook with hundreds of "friends" but without any actual contact with any of them, only the virtual contact of watching.

But what none of these theories of television has noticed is that TV has learned how to compensate for the increasing alienation it seems to induce. And it compensates not by letting us kill time with "friends" on screen but by providing us with those nonstop fantasies of friendship, which clearly give us a vicarious pleasure. Watch "Seinfeld" or "Friends" or "Sex and the City" or "Community" or "Men of a Certain Age" — the list is endless — and you'll see people who not only are never ever alone but people whose relationships are basically smooth, painless, uninhibited and deeply, deeply intimate — the kind of friendships we may have had in college but that most of us can only dream about now. How many adults do you know who manage to hang out with their friends every single day for hour after hour?

Or watch the incomparable "Modern Family" or "Brothers and Sisters" or "Parenthood" and you'll see big, happy family gatherings with lots of bonhomie and jokes and an outpouring of love. On the last there seems to be a huge extended family dinner every other night where most families would be lucky to have one such get-together each year at Thanksgiving. And don't forget those school assemblies, already mentioned, which everyone in the family takes off work to attend en masse or the weekend birthday parties where attendance is also compulsory.

One feels a little churlish pointing out how phony most of this intimacy is. After all, these shows, even one as observant as "Modern Family," aren't about realism. They aren't about the genuine emotional underpinnings of friendship or family, and they certainly aren't about the rough course that almost every relationship, be it with a friend or family member, takes — the inevitable squabbles, the sometimes long and even permanent ruptures, the obtuseness, the selfishness, the reprioritization, the expectations of reciprocity, the drifting apart, the agonizing sense of loneliness even within the flock. These shows are pure wish fulfillment. They offer us friends and family at one's beck and call but without any of the hassles. It is friendship as we want it to be.

For the fact is that we miss the friendships we no longer have, and we know that Facebook or e-mails cannot possibly compensate for the loss. So we sit in front of our television sets and enjoy the dream of friendship instead: a dream where we need never be alone, where there are a group of people who would do anything for us, and where everyone seems to understand us to our very core, just like Jerry and George, Chandler and Joey, Carrie and her girls, or the members of the McKinley High glee club. It is a powerful dream, and it is one that may now be the primary pleasure of television.

Autumn Leaves

The falling leaves

Drift by my window

The falling leaves

Of red and gold

Birthdays are a time for reflection, right? So here you go.

When one is my age, and the season of Autumn rolls around, one can begin to take the colorful messages of Fall a little personally. I mean, all around you there is sap drying up, leaves getting brittle, bursts of color preceeding the drop off, younger restless creatures rustling through the detritus of dying vegetation… jeepers, I get your point already! I can hardly wait for winter to set in metaphorically. :( I'll probably be downright offended at the themes January and February relate to me when I'm, oh... 72 or so!

A noontime stroll around the company grounds earlier in the week got me thinking about the different approaches trees have to the progress of the seasons, especially this Autumn one. First, there's the "let's get it all over with" approach.



There's the "quite bright, but losing it in stages" approach.




There's the "evergreen (I refuse to change at all)" approach.



Each has their merits, I suppose, but.. I don't know. I kind of favor this one: "Stand in full leaf for a long time, turning color slowly, easing into a pleasing blend of youth and age. Drop the last leaf just before Spring comes around."



:) Yeah. That's my aim. Kind of like the verse D gave me for my birthday, Psalm 92:12-14:

"The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree,

[...] They shall still bear fruit in old age;

They shall be fresh and flourishing"

Think I'll go get myself a Bonsai tree. While I still have time to teach it a little something. ;)

Voting as Social Liturgy

Liturgy: it's not just for church services anymore.

And I suppose you could say it never was. The handy little website etymonline.com tells me that it was originally a Greek concept centered on the idea of public service:

from L.L. liturgia "public service, public worship," from Gk. leitourgia, from leitourgos "one who performs a public ceremony or service, public servant," from leito- "public" + -ergos "that works,"

Only during the middle ages was it co-opted to refer specifically to Christian religious ritual. So since we have thought of it in those terms for 500+ years, it's needful to distinguish between religious and secular liturgy. And with today being voting day in America... what better day to talk about the social (public) use of liturgy?

Social liturgies come in many forms in this country. They can be as customized and intimate as birthday rituals (lighting & blowing out candles, having a red plate at dinner, being sung to), or as uniform and distant as saying the pledge of allegiance, or rising & facing the flag for the national anthem. They can be community-based, like the annual block party or the parish festival. They can be national in scope, and many are.

Some common, widely shared ones that come to mind are: 4th of July parades and fireworks, Memorial Day & Labor Day cookouts and events, blowing horns and sharing kisses at midnight on NYE, eating Thanksgiving dinner with family & friends. These are (mostly) secular versions of the kind of rituals performed on religious holidays like Yom Kippur, Christmas Eve, Ramadan, etc. We do roughly the same things as everyone else does (with some local variation), and do them at pretty much the same time, all over the country.

That is what Election Day is. It's a Mass for the body politic, a social liturgy. On this day we exercise our sacred (in a public sense) duty to cast our vote, freely and without coercion, in the privacy of an enclosed but portable booth, in a public location that all our neighbors share, aided by temple ministers & acolytes (poll workers). It's independent and communal, it's public and private, it's personal and national, all at once. And we all do it. On the same day.

Or... we should.

One of the things that concerns me about the relatively new practice of early voting is that it detracts from the communal nature of our shared voting liturgy. When you vote early, it's like you're receiving the Eucharist in private, or going bowling alone, or sticking a candle in a cupcake and singing Happy Birthday to yourself. What you're missing is not the ritual, but… everyone else!

Sure you participate, but - on your own time and in your own way, apart from the community norms. You're going to church on the internet. You're eating turkey, green bean casserole and pumpkin pie by yourself at Boston Market. You're wishing yourself Happy New Year, and kissing the mirror at midnight… it's just not the same.

So I've chosen to pass by the "early voting" table at the library the past few weeks. Today, I join my neighbors and fellow citizens of precinct 2 at City Hall just down the street from the HyVee grocery to exercise our civic duty together. We won't hold hands and sing Kumbayah, but I might say hi to someone, and smile - even as they cancel out my vote with their own. ;)

(although it might be pretty hard for them to do that, since I'm likely not opting for major party candidates this year - bunch 'a scoundrels!)