What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in Breslau, Prussia (1906). He came from a family of Lutheran theologians. In 1930 he hopped a ship for New York City to study at the Union Theological Seminary. And when Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin he suddenly saw the anti-Semitism that had been brewing in his country with a new clarity. When Hitler took power in 1933 Bonhoeffer made a speech on the radio denouncing the Nazis. He became the head of an underground seminary and published his book The Cost of Discipleship (1937), which became one of the most influential works on the theology of social justice.

… the quieter my surroundings, the more vividly I sense my connection with you…

Though he’d previously been a pacifist, Bonhoeffer decided to join a plot to assassinate Hitler. The plot was a failure and Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.

Just before he was arrested he got engaged to a young woman named Maria von Wedemeyer. They began a correspondence while he was in prison and it was to her that he wrote many of his final thoughts about theology and life. The correspondence between him and Maria was collected in the book Love Letters From Cell 92 (1994).

In his final letter to her, Bonhoeffer wrote, “I have often found that the quieter my surroundings, the more vividly I sense my connection with you.” He was executed a few months later.

In our consumer driven lifestyle we are used to things telling us when they are done. The sour cream container has a clearly marked best before date, and no matter how tempting it is to use it after that date on the tasty burrito you just nuked, some things are just better left alone. You’ll be happier, your stomach will be happier, your spouse, offspring and immediate circle of friends will be happier. Throw out the more than sour, sour cream and nobody gets hurt.

…the uneasy queasy feeling…

Why can’t jobs be like this? Why can’t I interview for a job, accept it, and then get a letter from a detached, yet evil, Human Resource Gnome that says the conditions of my employment and then in small print at the bottom it read “best before 2007”.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work this way. Unfortunately it dawns on you well past the expiry date that the thing that you are doing is the wrong thing. It was while languishing into the wee hours of the morning waiting for the telco repair guys to splice together a line that had been taken out by a gravel truck that it became clear. The uneasy queasy feeling that no matter what you do, what you hope for, what anyone actually says, it is never going to get any better. It is always going to be a pain in the nether region, and it will always demand more time and attention from the things in our lives that really do matter.

When they write my epitaph, do I really want it to say “He was a team player”, or “He always managed to make the quotas.” I don’t think so…

It is the birthday of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia (1905). In 1917, she witnessed the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her balcony. She came to this country where she became a writer. Her first important novel was The Fountainhead (1943), about a brilliant architect named Howard Roark who blows up a housing project he built because his design was corrupted by the influence others. She went on to write Atlas Shrugged (1957).

There I was minding my own business, happily blogging away and then all of a suden, out of the blue of cyberspace, I get the tap on the shoulder. “Honey it’s late, put the laptop down and come to bed”.

“In a minute Dear, I’m just finishing up some stuff.”

“Stuff? What stuff? Just turn out the lights and come to bed!”

“But I’ve been tagged…”

“You are so geeky sometimes”

James Jordan, who has a exceptional photo blog Points of Light, has tagged me with a meme. Name five of life’s simple pleasures that you like most. In no specific order, here goes

• Baking Bread
• Talking to my kids
• Petting a dog
• Writing something good
• Going to bed with my wife

If you are reading this, consider yourself tagged by the meme monster too.

“I’ll be right there sweetheart!”