A question that I've been pondering: is the distinction made between clergy and laity in the Christian church a caste system?

Thursday was marked by a downpour that I (accurately or inaccurately)
thought of as the first major rainfall of the season. The following day
was sunny, though I carried my umbrella out of fear of getting wet. The
variability in the weather is exhilarating. Having grown up in northern
Ontario, I still find it hard to believe that December has arrived just
from looking outside. But the last month of the year is here. It is a
busy, busy, busy time.

When people ask me how I've been, I reflexively respond "Oh, busy".
Now, I'm beyond busy. There's just so much to do in the two weeks
before Laura and I travel east to visit family. So why am I sitting in
our living room wrestling with words rather than the Ikea furniture
that needs to be assembled? Although thinking is often procrastination
for me, I suspect that my running around -- as productive as it has
been -- is for the moment a hinderance to internal work of disciplined
thought, prayer, and quiet that I've been avoiding. Writing is hard
work. Prayer is often hard work. The results often seem so meager given
the effort. Yet I need to do that work.

Writing the previous two paragraphs has centered me so that I can tell
you more about the things that we've been up to and things that still
need to get done. I wish I could string together a coherent
supper-narrative that weaves all of what I want to say into a neat
package. Instead, I give you a list of vignettes:

On Friday night, Laura and I had a late-night dinner at Daimo, my
curent favorite local purveyor of Cantonese food. We ran into Victor, a
former neighbor of mine who is also a Ph.D. student in chemistry. He
told me that he had recently purchased some chemistry texts that I had
donated to the Berkeley Public Library-Friends of the Library. I was delighted. I've written previously about how I desired to give away my books to someone who can make use of them but then turned to selling books on half.com.
I had to find a way to pare down my book collection in a hurry. The
Berkeley Public Library takes books in good condition en masse. I've
donated 8 boxes of books with three more on the way. I was concerned
that donating advanced science texts to the BPL bookstore would not get
my books to the right people. Last night's news was a little answer to
prayer.

Last week, Laura and I bought a Toyota 2006 Corolla to replace our
stolen car. We're still getting used to it. Even though it is Toyota's
entry level car (with some options added), it is certainly more car
than either has ever had. We learned to negotiate a price that we were
happy with and have enjoyed dealing with our seller, Hanlees Hilltop
Toyota in Richmond, CA.. What we did: we signed up for Consumer Reports Ratings and recommendations available at ConsumerReports.org
for a month, paid for a price report for the Toyota Corolla to get a
breakdown of the wholesale prices, followed the advice on the Consumer
Reports site, called around to get some quotes, decided beforehand what
we we were willing to pay and when we would walk away, and stuck to our
guns. It's also useful to have two people involved in the negotiation.
Although I did most of the talking, Laura picked up on important points
that I missed.

In response to my post on PRISONER OF NARNIA, two friends wrote by email. They have given me permission to quote their email here.

Sharon Gallagher, editor of Radix Magazine, wrote:

I just read the Gopnik article this week and was
unhappy with it. I'm not surprised that Gopnik likes the A.N. Wilson
biography. He takes Wilson's interpretations of Lewis's faith and
sexuality and presents them as fact. Other biographers came to
different conclusions. He also adopts Wilson's condescending attitude
toward faith.

In my Radix (31:3) interview with Norman Stone, the director of the first Shadowlands,
Norman is quite clear that Lewis's faith sustained him during Joy's
illness and death. (Norman had talked with people who knew Lewis at the
time.)

I wish that The New Yorker had given this assignment
to either John Updike or Malcolm Gladwell--two of their superstars who
would have handled the material with more understanding. (I've been a
big fan of Gopnik's other writing and even bought his book about Living in Paris.)

Ginny Hearn wrote:

The quote in your blog from Adam Gopnik (11/20) ended like this, in his discussion of CSL's A Grief Observed: "Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain personal faith that seems to the unbeliever comfortingly like doubt."

Hmmmmm. It's been many years since I read AGO, but this statement is
apt to be read as "In his life, Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain
personal faith . . . ", which is not accurate. I recall that this book,
written in a journal-like fashion in the several months following the
death of Joy, expressed CSL's understandable, terrible anguish at her
loss after their brief marriage--but Lewis did NOT end up in the doubt
[or unbelief in Christianity] that this statement might imply to an
unbeliever looking for "comfort" in his or her doubt.

A poppy from the U of Toronto

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

I only found this poppy this morning while going through the backlog of personal mail. Too bad for the late discovery. I was looking for a poppy this year because I wanted to wear one on November 11, in remembrance of the war dead and also of my own roots in Canada, where poppies are traditionally worn on that day.

Ruth M. Siems, Inventor of Stuffing, Dies at 74 - New York Times:

Ruth M. Siems, a retired home economist whose
best-known innovation will make its appearance, welcome or otherwise,
in millions of homes tomorrow, died on Nov. 13 at her home in Newburgh,
Ind. Ms. Siems, an inventor of Stove Top stuffing, was 74.

I had never thought of stuffing as having been invented by a single
person, let alone someone who was still alive until this month.

As we gear up for Narnia-mania, I was not surprised to see in The New Yorker,
PRISONER OF NARNIA by ADAM GOPNIK (How C. S. Lewis escaped.). Here are some choice quotes:

It seemed like an odd kind of conversion to other people then, and it
still does. It is perfectly possible, after all, to have a rich
romantic and imaginative view of existence—to believe that the world is
not exhausted by our physical descriptions of it, that the stories we
make up about the world are an important part of the life of that
world—without becoming an Anglican. In fact, it seems much easier to
believe in the power of the Romantic numinous if you do not take a
controversial incident in Jewish religious history as the pivot point
of all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal
history as the pivot point of your daily practice. Converted to faith
as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why
this faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth
of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things
he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like
someone who is crazy, he must be right. (He liked this argument so much
that he repeats it in allegorical form in the Narnia books; either Lucy
is lying about Narnia, or mad, or she must have seen what she claimed
to see.) Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn’t one spiritual path
among others but the single cosmic truth that extends from the farthest
reach of the universe to the house next door. He is never troubled by
the funny coincidence that this one staggering cosmic truth also
happens to be the established religion of his own tribe, supported by
every institution of the state, and reinforced by the university he
works in, the “God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford,” as
Gladstone called it. But perhaps his leap from myth to Christian faith
wasn’t a leap at all, more of a standing hop in place. Many of the
elements that make Christianity numinous for Lewis are the pagan
mythological elements that it long ago absorbed from its pre-Christian
sources. His Christianity is local, English and Irish and Northern.
Even Roman Catholicism remained alien to him, a fact that Tolkien much
resented.

[....]

Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion
of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is,
specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the
Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had,
say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of
Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying
the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean
animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner
as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples
and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that
would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the
top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with
temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then
reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

[....]

It is tempting to say that Lewis, in the dramatic retellings of this
story, becomes hostage to another kind of cult, the American cult of
salvation through love and sex and the warmth of parenting. (She had
two kids for him to help take care of.) Yet this is exactly what seems
to have happened. Lewis, to the dismay of his friends, went from being
a private prig and common-room hearty to being a mensch—a C. of E.
mensch, but a mensch. When Joy died, of bone cancer, a few years later,
he was abject with sadness, and it produced “A Grief Portrayed,” one of
the finest books written about mourning. Lewis, without abandoning his
God, begins to treat him as something other than a dispenser of vacuous
bromides. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable?
Quite easily, I should think,” he wrote, and his faith becomes less
joblike and more Job-like: questioning, unsure—a dangerous quest rather
than a querulous dogma. Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain personal
faith that seems to the unbeliever comfortingly like doubt.

It's good to recycle your computers

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

We recycled a lot of our dead electronics at the Alameda County Computer Resource Center.

working feet

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

Someone working on the new fried chicken place coming into the El Cerrito Plaza.

I woke up this morning, tired but excited to be energetic enough to
program what I had plotted in my mind late the previous night. The
downside of this programming obsession is that so many other important
things fade into the background, seeming so unimportant. It's also
tough to stop!

Laura and I celebrate 6 months of wedded blissful happiness today!