Obama Crosses a Line

In the previous debates between Obama & McCain, I sense a strange trend. Obama takes careful aim at his shoe; then McCain sacrifices his body to stop the carnage. Just once, I'd like to see what would happen if Obama were allowed to actually follow through. So when Obama volunteered to go all Trotsky on us and "spread around the wealth", I expected McCain to try to save him. And whaddaya know, McCain finally stayed out of his way.

When people told me that Obama is a socialist, I thought they were just over-reacting to his being a leftist Democrat. I disagree with the so-called conservatives who say everybody should be allowed to either sink or swim. Indeed, we should take care of people who cannot take care of themselves. This has the stain of socialism, but it doesn’t bother me at all.

Then the whole Congress went kind of soft-core socialist in this bail-out stuff. Though both Obama and McCain supported the bail-out, McCain is the one who should have known better. In McCain's defense, at least he tried to act like there was a real crisis - he kind of shut down his campaign, and did go to some meetings in Washington. Obama said that making some phone calls is what you should do when the whole economic system is crashing down around you. And this executive compensation law is just another indication that Congress isn't taking the economic situation seriously. Now I appreciate that folks get mad when somebody is paid much more than he or she is worth; but that really has nothing to do with the problems our economy is having.

But when Obama says he wants to take from one group of people and redistribute the money to another group, that’s when I say he has crossed the line into hard-core socialism.

McCain finally said the right thing. He said that we should work to improve the whole economy and make everybody better off. And I say that when we redistribute wealth, we take away incentives for people to work; the poor get a temporary boost, but then everybody gets poorer because fewer people want to work. When we improve the economy, anybody willing to work is raised to a higher level. I really don’t care if rich people become even richer; it wouldn’t make me any happier to be rich.

It’s not too late for Obama to apologize and repent from socialism. But he’s going to have to convince me that he really believes that America is a land of opportunity and not just a socialist wannabe. But I suspect that the newspapers and other media outlets are going to spend a lot of effort in saying that Obama was fooled into speaking outside his script by a Republican shill. Maybe he was set up. Just don’t go whining to me, newsguys; especially after the bogus news-wonk questions that Palin was asked. Entrapment is no defense in politics.

Holy Communion for People Learning about Christianity

Holy Communion is a way that Christians commemorate the night before Jesus was crucified, when Jesus gave final instructions to his closest followers. We call this the Last Supper because it was the last time that Jesus ate a meal with these followers. After supper, Jesus (again) shared bread and wine with his followers, and commanded that all Christians celebrate this moment in the same way. We follow these instructions by ritually eating bread and drinking wine while recalling the story of the Last Supper.

We call this ritual the Eucharist or Holy Communion. The word Eucharist relates to the gratitude we feel toward God for the gift of Jesus. The word Communion refers to how celebrating the Last Supper brings us into the presence of God and other Christians. These words are pretty much interchangeable, and I’ll use Communion to mean either one. There is much more in celebrating the Last Supper that unites than divides Christians. But the two words hint at the rifts Christians sometimes have.

Most of us don’t think that differences in church communion practices have any deep theological meanings. But we do follow Jesus’ teachings in many ways. Some churches only allow their own members to take communion; others open it to anybody who believes in God. Some churches think that bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus; others think that bread and wine are symbols of God. Many churches serve little thin bread tablets (sometimes called “fish food” because they often have a picture of a fish on them) and some tear off chunks of baked bread. Some people drink wine while others drink unfermented grape juice. Most churches feel that a specially trained priest is the only person who can lead the ceremony, but a few think that everybody is empowered to celebrate this act of worship. But it’s all pretty much the same thing, no matter what rules you use.

There are two different stories of the Last Supper in the Holy Bible. These stories can be found * in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and in the first letter of Saint Paul to the church in Corinth. According to Matthew and Mark, Jesus describes how his body is made up of the bread and wine of earth. Jesus commanded that his followers remember him when we eat and drink of the goodness of God’s creation.

Luke and St. Paul wrote that Jesus said certain blessed bread and wine are the same as his body and blood. That may be a bit of a stretch from the actual words, but that’s what many Christians read the words to mean. Other Christians soften this a bit by saying Jesus was using bread as a symbol of his flesh and wine as a metaphor for his life. Either way, it gives a preview to the horror of Jesus’ impending death; breaking bread is the same as the broken body of Jesus on the cross and wine is the same as Jesus’ life blood poured out. According to this interpretation of the scriptures, anyone who believes that Jesus was human is getting Jesus’ invitation to cannibalism.

There is a wonderful science fiction short story about radiation-poisoned survivors of a nuclear war who flee to an untouched island. The natives treat the survivors as gods because they arrive in gleaming metal boxes from the sky. Their awe is doubled that night when they see an aura of nuclear glow around the survivors. The natives want the power to travel across the sky and to glow in the dark, so they butcher and eat the survivors. They gain no flying powers, but soon they do begin to emit a faint glow.

This story is a rough analogy of the Communion story in Luke and Corinthians. Some of us so much want to have the powers of God that we believe God wants us to eat him.

Sympathetic magic runs rampant through the heart of ancient and modern societies. A long time ago, names were considered to be store-houses of power. You could gain power over your enemy by learning his name. Many Jews consider it as hubris (attempting to take the power of God) to speak the name of God or even to write it on paper. Many Christians believe that we gain power by saying the name of Jesus; we sing songs about
• take the name of Jesus with you,
• there’s something about that name, and
• all hail the power of Jesus’ name.
It’s not hard to see why there’s a little belief in the sympathetic magic of cannibalism left in the world today.

I’ve heard explanations that God is trying to shock Christians with cannibalism – we won’t take Holy Communion lightly if we are a little horrified at what we are doing. I’m not so sure about this. At the time of the Last Supper, Jesus was less than a day away from dieing miserably from asphyxiation and torture. The meeting with the followers was the last good time they would spend with Jesus, and Jesus was trying hard not to spoil the meal with too many premonitions of his impending death.

Let’s return to the Last Supper accounts as recorded in Matthew and Mark. Remember that in a way these stories are almost the opposite of Luke and Paul, who claim that the bread and wine is Jesus. Matthew and Mark state that Jesus’ body is like bread and his blood is like wine. As with us, Jesus was the product of the things he ate and drank; he was totally human and really from earth. So when he says to eat the bread, he commands us to be like him. God never intended for people to eat the actual flesh of Jesus. But Jesus did say that his sacrificed blood is the source of a new covenant that God forms with mankind. Through Jesus’ sacrifice, God breaks through to us.

Matthew and Mark contain the Bible stories that make most sense to me. As I think about the meaning of Communion with God and with all Christians, it seems that eating God is an act of extreme hubris, yet eating the same foods that Jesus ate is an act of humility. I won’t try to say that Luke and Paul were wrong, because there is such a subtle shade of difference between all these stories. It’s probably we Christians who read wrong things into Luke and Paul; maybe these writers only want to point out that bread and wine become Jesus because Jesus ate and digested them. Anyway, with Matthew and Mark there is less room for interpretation – to me these scriptures succinctly explain the love of God.

There’s one other thing. Some Christians believe that Jesus was telling us to remember him every time we eat and drink. This makes a certain amount of sense because every bite reminds us that Jesus was much like us. Many Christians therefore pray to God at every meal time. But we reserve an extra special time of Holy Communion to remember that God uses Jesus’ humanity to show us that God is like the spiritual side of Jesus.

To summarize Matthew and Mark:
• Jesus says that he eats the same food as all humans,
• Therefore Jesus is human (as far as we can tell),
• God uses the brokenness of Jesus’ body to rescue humans from sin,
• We celebrate God’s gift through Holy Communion,
• Holy Communion helps us draw close to God and to other Christians.
_______________________________________________

* Matthew chapter 26, verses 26 through 29
Mark chapter 14, verses 22 through 25
Luke chapter 22, verses 19 and 20
First Corinthians chapter 11, verses 23 through 27

Is God Playing Favorites?

A friend told me that you don't choose to follow God, God chooses you to be a follower. He says the song "I have Decided to Follow Jesus" particularly irks him because the song makes it look like it's your choice, not God's. I'm saying he's right about God choosing us first, but wrong to think there is anyone God does not choose.

First, the party line argument. God chooses everybody. He chose people who had a Pauline conversion experience and people who felt their heart strangely warmed. He chooses the people who claim to know him and he chooses those who seem to work against him. God even chooses the people who we good Christians think couldn't possibly know him. And God is waiting for us to get the word out to everybody else. God got first choice, and he chose all of us.

It doesn't matter whether you accept that argument or not. Blind adherence to dogma is a way to avoid thinking. Dogma simply means that someone has already thought through the ramifications of a particular position. The risk in dogma is that you may be encountering a situation that doesn't apply.

As for choosing to follow God, evangelism suffers when you ignore any person because you think God is ignoring him or her. Even the die-hard predestination (preordination) people admit that it is foolishness to second guess God - you can't pretend to know who God has elected for his grace. You've got to evangelize everyone.

A lot of us read "many are called" to mean that all are called; and "few are chosen" to mean that only some people will ultimately accept God's grace. If people are led to believe that God isn't choosing them, their eventual acceptance of God's grace is unlikely. That's it. Let's not mess them up by pretending they don't matter to God.

How about the apostle Paul? Was he so important to God that God was willing to go around the normal evangelism channels and directly recruit Paul? I'm sure that Paul didn't intend this, but he makes me feel like a second class Christian. Surely if God loved me as much as Paul, wouldn't he have blinded me on the road to Branson?

Some think their conversion experience to be more valid than mine. They want to put into practice the elitism that Paul hinted at. Don't go there, people. Paul was just a man; an extremely hard working, dedicated and influential man, but only a man. God invites us into his fellowship in different ways; each way is an affirmation and not a rejection. Let's think through our beliefs and try to find the ones that harmonize with God's lead.

Religious Conservatism

A United Methodist pastor of my recent acquaintance told me that he is religiously conservative. I couldn’t figure out what he meant. Surely the desire to love God and our fellow humans is not a left or a right issue. So I responded with my puzzlement, and said that I believe God calls every last one of us to follow him. I don’t know whether the belief that God favors certain people is liberal, conservative, or just calvinist.

The pastor somewhat straightened me out by saying he totally accepts the Bible. I still didn’t really understand how that makes someone conservative. Then he went on to say that evangelicalism is a conservative approach to life.

So just what is conservative? The word often means a belief in proven tenets. Or the desire to conserve those tenets. I accept that evangelicalism is conservative because it seems very close to the attitudes of the first followers of Jesus. It conserves the spirit of reaching out to all people.

The question becomes – which tenets are worth conserving? I think the Bible was written to show us the processes that other people have gone through in searching for God; not as a guidebook to the streets of heaven. This position conserves the spirit of Jesus’ teachings (IMO). But others would say it is liberal because it pays heed to some parts of the Bible more than others. I’m still confused. So forget that nonsense. Conservative is just a label. I feel like a conservative; but if the tenets I try to preserve warrant it, then please do consider me a fellow liberal. I’ll be proud to wear either label.

My First Democratic Party Email

What do the Republicans do right that the Democrats are getting wrong? The Republicans don't send me stupid emails, the Democrats do.

A friend suggested I would learn lots of good stuff about Barack Obama if I would go to his web site. Well, I went. But before I could get any information, it demanded my email address. Enough of that nonsense, thought I, as the mouse clicked the Back button – Obama’s price for campaign hucksterism is too high.

Now I'm getting email from the Democrats in Missouri. I dutifully read their stuff before consigning it to the virtual round file cabinet. Bad move - not for yours truly but for the Democrats. Why would they want to send a good independent voter like me such a bunch of trash talking ennui? Sure, I’m disgusted at President Bush for being a social luddite and an economic big-spender; but the constant harping and name calling of the emails gives me sympathy for the poor guy. Lessening the Bush irritation factor is bad news for every Democrat on the ballot.

I have been supporting the Democratic candidate for governor (Jay Nixon) over the Republican (Kenny Hulshoff), mostly because I detest ear-marks. Hulshoff is the Missouri king of ear-marks. My support for Nixon might be strengthened if the Democrats tell me what the candidate does right. It is diminished by blaming Hulshoff for things beyond his control. Really now, surely he did something wrong in the eyes of the Democrats. Blaming him for automotive job losses is grasping at straws. All I can figure is that they think Hushoff’s ear-marks were inadequate to save the automotive jobs. If there is something different, I wish they would mention it.

So, Democrats, send your vitriol at your own risk. Republicans, too. The party that irritates me least will get my vote.

John McCain's Veep Pick – Political Wife or Daughter?

Chris Matthews has been trying to make the argument that John McCain is establishing Sarah Palin as a political wife. Supposedly, the Republican ticket is trying to compete in the Bill & Hillary Clinton style of two presidents for the price of one. Well Matthews is close, but not quite on target. Instead of Palin being the political wife, she is John McCain’s political daughter.

Nurturing daughters in the ways of the business world started several years ago. The “take our daughters to work” day was one of the first visible signs. Though the feminist establishment may have intended that mothers take their girls to work, it really succeeded with men. A lot of guys brought them to the office. Men seemed to want to pass on a legacy of work outside the home to our maturing daughters.

We soccer dads feel the same way. Our daughters deserve top notch support from schools, government and families. We coach their teams, cheer at their games and lobby government at all levels for strong emphasis on women’s sports.

Now comes John McCain and Sarah Palin. He's a generation (or two) older. He's the candidate for president – the person who will take on the responsibilities of the highest office in America and lead the strongest military on the face of the earth. He’s the one who walks onto stage first and speaks last. The one with gravitas. But he steps to the side and listens carefully when Palin speaks. And he positively beams when she succeeds in making telling points. This isn’t the action of a husband; just watch Bill Clinton in the background of one of his wife’s speeches, mugging for the camera and trying to compete with her for attention. It’s more like Donald Trump inviting Ivanka Trump onto his television show. McCain looks for all the world like the proud father of a political prodigy.

Antidisenstablishmentlibertarianism

The parsing of the title term is left to you, dear reader. If it makes a certain amount of sense, that is purely accidental. It was coined in an attempt to describe the fallacy of terms. The following rant was a response to my daughter who envisions herself as a twenty-first century libertarian (no link yet, but maybe soon).

I think it’s time for some examination of the word libertarian. There are ever so many political dichotomies: Republican/Democrat; liberal/conservative; free market/socialism; and collectivist/individualist. (Geezer alert: my saw is that there are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people and them what don’t.) A libertarian is a person who comes down way on the side of individualist. Individualist means that each person should totally provide for themselves and leave other people the hell alone. We haven’t really seen true individualists since the days of the mountain (ahem) man. Even then, the mountain man needed the fellowship and economic support of other people. Today we are a totally enmeshed society. We can’t even use a word like niggardly without looking over our shoulders to see who is being offended. A pure individualist is extremely unlikely, and anyone who claims libertarianism looks mostly like a pure kook.

So then, how can a person communicate that she favors personal responsibility? And how can we tell the government to keep out of our pants? Like most folks, we use the term libertarian without bothering to distinguish our libertarian goals from the ideals of the extremist libertarian moonbats. I’d like an alternate term. Social-libertarian would explain that we have libertarian longings while still wanting to coexist with other people; but the word social may be too easily confused with socialism. I used to like Republican-libertarian, but the Republican party for the past ten years has been competing with the Democrats to see who can least support individualism. So too the word conservative used to mean that you are in favor of balanced budgets and less spending, but now it means that you want the government to regulate your reproductive organs; thus conservative-libertarian is a total oxymoron.

Certain Christians make great examples of the problems of trying to explain stuff using terms. If you ask them, they are totally in favor of providing for themselves and not taking government charity. Yet at the same time, they are generous to a fault of making others dependent on their generosity. I know of no term that can adequately describe this.

A true libertarian could never seek to persuade others of the rightness of her beliefs. Therefore, my treasured daughter cannot be a true libertarian, QED. (I'm merely being droll, esteemed logicians.)

Anyway, my point is that claiming to be a libertarian twenty-something may conceal more than reveal. Sometimes we throw around the word libertarian so the demolicans and republicrats will leave us alone. That advantage aside, maybe we should simply use the word independent.

Great Fence of China

The Chinese are up to their old tricks. I mean their really old tricks. Their big ol' walls (as they refer to the structures we call the Great Wall of China) weren't lesson enough. Foreigners went through the walls as if they were water. Now they want to stop the water itself. This time, a thirty mile long sea fence to keep out algae.

According to the International Herald Tribune (aka, New York Times), red tide is befouling the yellow sea. Olympic yachting events will be hard pressed to race through the muck left by the algal bloom. So true to a great tradition of fixing symptoms and ignoring problems, the Chinese are scooping out the existing algae and working to prevent any more from getting in.

I've got another great idea. A giant gas mask over Beijing would keep out air pollution.

Terror of the Confluence Catfish

This is a fairly true story. My grandpa told it to me when he was an old man. That was fifty years ago. People in those days told nothing but the truth (especially grandpas), so the basis of this story has got to be true. If any lies have worked themselves into my account, it’s only because I had to tone down the story a ways to make it more believable.

Just a quarter mile downstream from my family’s farm is a place where two rivers meet. The slow flowing Little Sac River intercepts the mad North Branch of the Dry Sac River in its pell-mell rush down the hills of the Ozarks. I’ll just call the latter river the Dry Sac, though there is a South Branch of the Dry Sac that also meets with Little Sac. If you guessed that all of these rivers are quite small, you’d be mostly correct – though the Little Sac can sometimes be a huge torrent of flood waters and the Dry Sac has never been known to be anything but wet all the way across. The Little Sac drains the land north of Springfield – it starts over near Strafford and slowly meanders its way across northern Greene County, swinging way off to the west before turning north and continuing to its meeting with the Big Sac. The Dry Sac drains a smaller area of southern Polk County and extreme northern Greene County. But oh, the place where these rivers meet is a sight to behold.

Early settlers into southern Missouri apparently ran out of names for rivers and streams, and so started borrowing the names of indigenous peoples (like the Sauk tribe). That’s not so hard to understand. These folks had walked all the way from the Atlantic Ocean, naming rivers as they traveled west. From Virginia through Tennessee, it took them several generations to reach southern Missouri, as they marched pretty much due west. Crossing the Mississippi River may have been a challenge as there were hundreds of miles of rivers and swamps. A little water never deterred these strong willed folk. But dry did. They got all the way across Missouri and discovered that Oklahoma was flat and arid. So in southern Missouri many stayed. Good thing, too, since all the good river names had been used up and Indian tribes were becoming scarce. Seemingly, the put the word Sac in every river they found. That suited the Sauk Indians just fine, though none of them had been in the Ozarks except maybe when just passing through.

The nature of these two branches of the greater Sac River is not revealed by the coincidence of their watersheds being so close together. The rivers are nothing alike. The Little Sac is a slow river with a deep and wide valley. It flows through some fertile prairie and carries some mighty fine dirt into the poor soil of the Ozarks Plateau. On the other hand, the Dry Sac is a fast moving, clear stream that runs almost exclusively through regions of poor soil. It picks up little dirt, but carries a goodly amount of gravel. So when the rivers meet, something monumental has got to happen.

Steep gradient rivers have rapid rises and falls of flood waters. Low gradient rivers rise slowly, but stay high longer. The Dry Sac picks up rain water and quickly thunders its floods downstream. When it runs into the Little Sac, it expends the water’s fury by scouring great holes in the river-bed of the Little Sac. Meanwhile, flood waters from the Little Sac tend to back up and wait for the Dry Sac flood to disperse. By waiting in one place, the waters drop a lot of their dirt and nutrients onto the farm lands upstream.

One of the results of big holes and nutrient rich waters is that you get an abundance of life in the river. In the case of the Little and Dry Sacs, the abundant life worked itself out into precisely one catfish of prodigious size. Normally, you’d expect billions of fish. But due to a combination of bizarre factors, great schools of fish are (even to this day) rarely found at this confluence. As I was explaining, the Dry Sac carries a lot of gravel. Most catfish are creatures of slow, warm, mud-banked rivers; they are not used to gravel swimming in flood water like it was so many shiner minnows. The unsuspecting fish tend to go for the rocks which look like easy pickins for a meal. Rocks are hard to digest and tend to stay in the fish’s gut, weighting them down and overall making them sluggish. So fish are often lost when they attempt to swim over the shallow parts of the river and get hung up on the shoals. For some unknown reason, one fish every few hundred years excels in eating gravel. The catfish of this story never learned his lesson about rocks, and ate so much that his ballast prevented him from escaping the confluence hole; so there he stayed, eating from the nutrients that flow to his wide open maw, and gaining an inordinate amount of weight from the limestone in his diet.

The lone catfish totally owned the area where the rivers come together. Story has it that he lived in the hole for a hundred fifty years, gaining on average fifty pounds of fish flesh per year in his early life and even more later on. And that doesn’t count the weight from the tons of rocks he swallowed. You do the math. The guy was huge. The rocks in his belly led him to think that he was forever extremely hungry. That is, hungry enough to eat anything that got into his hole. Why, one time this guy from St Louis was vacationing down in the Ozarks, and wanted to try noodling for one of our prize catfish. Noodling is a term for hand-fishing – a guy sticks his hand underwater into a hole in the river bank in an attempt to grab any fish (or snake) lurking there. The old timers say that if you tickle a catfish in just the right places, you can put it to sleep and pull it out of the water before it even knows it has been caught. Even better, if you can stick your hand down the fish’s throat, you don’t get poisoned by the horns of the catfish. Anyway, this St Louis guy didn’t know anything about the lone catfish. He did manage to get a hand on it, then the fish got his lips on the guy. The last thing that anyone heard was the sound of the huge catfish sucking the poor guy down into the water.

Since then, they put up signs warning tourists of the dangers. One of the signs says to listen for the sounds of gravel. When that fish moved, folks all up and down the river bank could hear gravel shifting around in his bowels. If you are out canoeing on a clear Ozark’s stream, listen for the sound kind of like pulling a canoe onto a gravel bar. If you hear it, stay in the boat!

One day, a flock of the neighbor’s sheep walked down to the river for a drink. The catfish swallowed the whole herd in one mighty gulp. Now, a sheep is not ideal catfish food. If you go buy a sack of Purina Catfish Chow, you won’t see sheep on the list of ingredients. Wool is totally indigestible for catfish, and tends to gum up the fish’s guts. But in this particular case, things worked out better for the fish than for the sheep. The thick wool on the sheep was slowly scraped off their hides by the gravel in the digestive system of the fish. It was further processed into high-lanolin yarn as it passed through the small intestines of the fish. Those sheep were responsible for thousands of miles of the yarn of the finest quality. The ladies of the community pulled the wool from the water over the course of several years. For another fifty years, they would all get together on Saturday nights to knit blankets. To this day, nobody in that part of Polk County needs to be cold at night, for there are still thousands of blankets waiting to be given out to people in need. I used to have a fine woolen sweater made from the same source – the most incredible thing about it was that the watery habitat of the fish had imparted a total water-proofing to the wool, and it would repel any but the hardest rains.

It’s hard to point to any objective proof of the huge catfish. But there were several small indications.

- One time the skeleton of a half-ton steer came flying out of the water and landed right-side-up amongst the herd that had come to drink from the river.

- During the drought of 1954, many crops in the field were drying up and blowing away. One of the neighbors had the idea to put some pepper into the water. I’m telling you, that old fish sneezed so hard that his body came completely out of the river. When he landed back in the water, it was like a kid doing his best cannonball dive. The fish gave his tail a mighty flap, and the water was scattered up and down the river valley for miles. Several different farmers were able to survive the draught due to the irrigation provided by that one fish. Unfortunately, the ensuing waves drowned several families of beavers when their dam was destroyed.

- The Butterfield stage used to run from Tipton, Missouri to Sacramento, California. At one time it passed right by the confluence. Many were the teams of horses lost to this voracious appetite of this killer catfish. Eventually, the Butterfield Stage went out of business, due in no small part to the insticts of the catfish.

- During the Civil War, the Confederacy and the Union never met in battle in southern Polk County. Union General Zanoni had brought his troops near the confluence once. Something, probably in the water, bothered him so much that he never went back.

There did come a day when the people of the river valley were hungry. Crops had failed and cattle had mysteriously vanished. The people remembered the huge catfish and how he would make some really good eatings. So they disassembled a plow and bent back the shares until it looked like a huge treble hook. They attached a half rotted horse-hide to the hook and threw it all into the scour hole. The old catfish took about a second and a half to see the lure sitting in the water, and another second and a half to swallow the hide. As the tackle was dragged out of the water, folks noticed that the catfish was using the plow shares to clean his teeth (it’s a little known fact that really big catfish develop broad, flat molars that are constantly being congested by the algae of their habitat.)

One of the heroes of the early United States was Captain Noam Bradley, the skipper of a tall sailing ship – the good ship Nose About. It was a really super ship for its day, fast yet stable, and with a really shallow draft that allowed the captain to traverse many inland rivers. And the most amazing thing about the ship was the huge size of its anchor. Special foundries in France had been built to cast an anchor of that size. Iron and coal were imported to create a steel so hard that it was said nothing could bend it. That anchor got the Nose About through some of the most ferocious hurricanes of the late eighteenth century.

Early in the war of 1812, Captain Noam tied the Nose About to the wharves in New Orleans. When the English invaded Louisiana, Bradley sailed as far north up the Mississippi River as the draft of his ship would allow, hoping to be able to swoop back south and catch the British unaware. He anchored about where the Ohio River runs into the Mississippi (which is another fine catfish hole, though because of greater water flows, it has somewhat less success in producing monster catfish than the confluence of this story!) There was no way to know that the great New Madrid Earthquake was poised for release just a few miles downstream. As soon as that super temblor let loose, it built a wall of water over five hundred feet high. The surge began running upstream, leveling everything in its path. Folks say the river ran upstream for days. This tsunami caught the Nose About at the top of its crest and hurled it north; the mighty ship that day looked like a Hawaii surfer hanging on for dear life as a Kahuna wave bears down on shore. The enormous sea anchor served as a tiller to keep the ship straight in the water. Through Missouri toward St Louis the craft sped, with Captain Bradley doing his best to steer away from the St Francis Mountains and stay in the river channel. By this time, flood waters had turned St Louis into an island in a sea of what used to be good farm land. For some reason Bradley steered the ship into the Missouri River, perhaps he had seen his chance to sell merchandise in Kansas City (a port heretofore closed to ocean-going craft.) The tidal wave was much smaller by then, so Bradley pulled up his anchor. Unfortunately, the flooded condition of all the rivers made navigation problematic, and Bradley ended up surfing his way up the Missouri to the Osage River to the Big Sac, and thence clean up to the Little Sac. Bradley proclaimed that he had all along intended to sell goods to the people of the Sac River, so he dismantled the ship and used the wood to build a store. He salvaged almost everything that he could from the Nose About, and though no one saw the sense of a sea anchor on the Sac, Bradley lugged it to the store.

This brings us back to the catfish story. Having failed to catch the fish on a converted plow, the hungry guys started looking for bigger tackle. Remembering Captain Bradley’s sea anchor, the men sent for it. As luck would have it, one of those twenty mule team rigs was on its way back from making a borax run to the Mississippi. The drivers asked for nothing more in way of payment than some good catfish steaks, and so veered off to go get the sea anchor. Another neighbor found a stout logging chain that legend says Paul Bunyan had at one time used to tie up Babe (his blue ox) at night. Mr. Miller donated several buffalo carcasses from his rendering plant. With great difficulty, the men hefted that mighty sea anchor and three of the buffalo carcasses into the swirling eddies of the river confluence, and hitched the mule team to the logging chain and the sea anchor. Sure enough, that catfish took the bait and set the corners of the sea anchor firmly into his own jaw. He was fighting so hard that water was jetting a thousand feet high into the air. The mule team was plenty spooked, so instead of pulling strong and steady, they gave a single enormous tug on the logging chain. Well that fish roared in pain and shook so hard that a new tsunami started downstream. With the catfish’s pull equal to the twenty mule team, the barbs of that sea anchor were pulled out straight. Giving a mighty shake of its head, the catfish dislodged the sea anchor and launched it and the mule team into a low earth orbit (some say it returned to earth almost a century later, where it dredged Lake Tanguska in Siberia.)

Meanwhile, the tsunami caused by the fish was picking up steam as it flowed down stream. It gathered up most of the detritus deposited by the earthquake’s original tsunami. It even grabbed the remnants of the Nose About along with Bradley’s store. That’s why you can find no evidence of the epic story of Bradley and his ship. Except, that is, you used to be able to see a gouge caused by the great sea anchor as it tore into the roots of the earth next to the Sac River; but then the Corp of Engineers built a huge dam and flooded the whole valley. So now it’s all gone, save for the stories told by a few brave narrators.

Never again was that huge fish seen; it turned shy and now forever contents its hunger pangs with the small things that drift downstream. But we don’t allow people to canoe that stretch of the river out of fear for what might happen if that fish forgets his aversion to metal. My worry is that the floods this spring raised the water level so high that the fish was able to leave the confluence. He could be anywhere by now, just silently waiting for an unsuspecting person to go for a swim. That great white shark known as Jaws would be like a rubber ducky beside the terror of the catfish from the confluence. If I were you, I wouldn’t go swimming anywhere that I couldn’t see the bottom. And if you hear the sound of gravel where the river banks are all mud – head as quick as you can for dry ground.

Thomas the Doubter

According to the Holy Bible, the Apostle Thomas (of Doubtful fame) had to experience the presence of the physical Jesus in order to believe the impossible – that Jesus had returned from the dead. We Christians are taught to be surprised at Thomas’ lack of faith. Even Jesus seems to rebuke Thomas’ desire for proof. But would any of us really have believed without questioning? This story has a lot more depth to it than the professional clergy and Bible experts lead us to think.

Many scholars excuse Thomas’ doubt by saying he just wasn’t too bright. Apparently a smarter man would be eager to accept what he was told. Preposterous. Belief without proof goes by another name – credulity. Thomas wanted to believe the account given by the disciples. But he understood human frailties, and knew that our hopes and beliefs can often override our discernment. Thomas was smart enough to want a little objective proof.

Society is forever on the cusp between the old and the new. Currently we call the old “modernity” and the new “post-modernity”. The place we put our faith is the main distinction between the two: modern people have faith in rules, post-moderns have faith in processes. Rules are static but can be clearly defined. Processes are dynamic but are open to interpretation. The modern trust in technology is a type of faith in rules – so long as we use our knowledge of physical laws to create new things, we believe they must be good and that we will forever solve every problem we face. The post-modern confidence in relationships indicates our faith in process – we tend to believe that there are no absolute truths and even a destructive relationship has positive benefits (and that we will forever solve every problem we face.)

Let’s put the dichotomy between laws and processes in more gracious terms:

- Modernity states that God is revealed through the rules of creation. Our understanding of God is limited to what we can make, though we can still appreciate that God will not be fully revealed to us until we have perfect knowledge of all creation. The Holy Bible is a set of written rules in which God can be found.

- Post-modernity tells us that the important things for us are the relations between God and people. God relations seem to follow certain patterns of change; even though these patterns may be too complex for us to comprehend. The Holy Bible is an account of people searching for God, and God revealing himself through the search process.

The scientific method holds the middle ground between rules and processes. At its best, science is a process by which we attempt to discern rules and describe relationships. Science struggles to offer proof for all things and leave nothing to faith. However, the very foundation of science is an assumption that there is order in the cosmos and that we are capable of discovering parts of that order.

Many of us, like Thomas, search for Jesus and for his truth. If any of us were fully modern or post-modern, we would search in different ways. A modern Thomas looks for examples of technology bringing life to a man on the third day of his death; finding none, he concludes that Jesus either did not die or did not return from the dead – or that there is a conspiracy to conceal resurrection technology. A post-modern Thomas who trusts Christians about other things, will probably believe that resurrection is the most likely explanation for Jesus appearing to his disciples.

Jesus tells Thomas that those who believe without seeing are blessed. This is not so much a criticism of Thomas as it is a lesson to the disciples. In the future Thomas and the others would need to witness to people with doubts, but who don’t have the opportunity to see Jesus’ physical body. If Thomas can convince them, they will indeed be blessed. I’m grateful that Thomas was ready to look for truth; his actions set us free to believe what he already found to be true. And that surely is blessing enough for Thomas and for all other doubters.

Thanks to Pastor Mark Mildren for bringing up this topic. He and I agree nine times out of ten, leaving the other ten percent for me to enjoy writing about.