The word “cure” means an illness is over for good.  At this point in time, cancer is never really over.  The passage of time simply reduces the chance of recurrence, but it never completely eliminates it.  Nor does it preclude a person from contracting a different type of cancer.   Nonetheless we are breathing easier now [that the tests are positive].

[To which I replied.]
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
Period.

[And then added a note and hope.]

Footnote   It’s strange, really, how the language around cancer in our society is all about battling, eradicating, killing, and the like. In the first person, prostate cancer, at least, is just a number on a scale or an anomalous lump in an exam, followed by some course of treatment or another that usually keeps the overzealous, chaotic cells at bay. Living with cancer can be like peaceful coexistence. (I’ve been incredibly lucky to be properly treated, well cared for, and free from pain or debilitating side effects from the PC that lives in me. I too breath easier—16 years post-surgery—always aware of my role as observer and manager of an armistice that requires due diligence and defensive living.)

Prayer   Friends, I pray for the strength of spirit and selfhood that is clear-eyed and open-hearted about all three: contingency, gratitude, and grace.

David

David Dunn
740 S Alton Way 9B
Denver, CO 80247
–
dmdunn1@gmail.com
720-221-4661

Steve Jobs at WWDC 2008

Steve Jobs died today at 56. A whole lot of people in the world will recognize the name of the man who invented the personal computer and all of the iThis- and iThat-Wonders that have followed in the last decade or so. I want to offer an appreciation and a thank you to a man and a company that changed my life.

I choose to use an unusual word to describe Steve Jobs from the perspective of his meaning in my life: saint. I don’t mean saint in the traditional religious sense. Nor do I mean to imply that Steve Jobs was a holy man, a superman, or any sort of spiritual teacher. So I have to unpack the word saint to dump the baggage and uncover its pristine meaning. The saints I know are all ordinary saints. They weren’t super human, but they were powerfully human. Steve Jobs was powerfully human in four ways that touched my life.

People use the word iconic to refer to Steve Jobs. He was Apple Computer. He was its visionary spokesperson and evangelist. He was passionate to a fault about his life mission. Steve embodied a mission larger than his own life.

Steve’s mission was to change the world by empowering people. He assembled a team of geniuses and workaholics, and was notorious as a perfectionist and a tyrant. Steve had an immense capacity to inspire other people.

Steve was a perpetual inventor. He could imagine things the rest of us hadn’t even dreamed of. He had a sense of the long-term trajectory of people, society, and technology. Steve looked beyond what his eyes could see.

Steve was playful. He spoke often about his love of music. He used failures as doorways to the unexpected. He founded Pixar and made great animated films. The iPad sprang into history years after the Newton. Steve was radical creativity.

If the stories I’ve heard are to be believed, Steve challenged and stretched and sometimes infuriated a lot of people. He and his company challenged and stretched me. In 1985, I was ready to graduate from a borrowed Kaypro to my own AT&T PC 7300. A friend warned me, “Don’t buy that thing until you’ve looked at the Apple Macintosh.” I’d missed the Apple II and admired the Lisa, but fell head over heals in love with the Mac Plus…and Aldus Pagemaker.

The visual, intuitive, common sense, works-as-you’d-expect experience led from itinerant activist, to desktop publisher, to creative services, to writer and editor. I never dreamed that I’d edit manuals, make bookmarks, publish books, make web pages, and take on learning ePublishing. A large measure of my own creative passion over the last twenty years was awakened and empowered by riding the wave with Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Macintosh.

Steve died today and I’m experiencing a world of grief. I never got closer to him than his Keynote Addresses streaming live from Cupertino. But some of the way Steve was a human being has rubbed off on me. He influenced how I live in the world of steep learning curves, software glitches, long distance clients, and friends who go “Wow!”

This man  was a funky, cranky, inspiring ordinary saint and I am very grateful.

I’ve been attuning my ear to contemporary sensibility ever since high school–over 50 years ago (yikes!)–and the words assumption, blessed, and virgin just don’t come up much in daily life. Because I was steeped in a Christian heritage and educated in a denominational seminary, I’m inclined to expect their significance even when their meaning in my life eludes me. This is one of the hazards of going to church these days: There are a lot of old religious words whose familiarity is assumed but whose meaning is uncertain. I suspect that many people experience such words as anachronisms at best and gobbledygook at worst. Who has time for that sort of thing these days? I’m inclined to be attentive to our fathers and mothers in the faith, but I’m bound by deep conviction to rummage around for the truth in terms I can understand.

Forty-some years ago, a number of well-read and able teachers pointed out to me that the Twentieth Century was notable for an explosion of work by Christian scholars troubled by the dilemma of old words that have lost their ability to touch our lives. Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Niebuhr spring to mind, but there were dozens of others. I’m an interested observer from a certain distance, but one insight of their work is crystal clear: The old religious words came from an era when people of faith had a vastly different world view. The people who wrote the Christian letters and gospels, just like the Hebrew writers who preceded them and the Muslim writers who followed them, viewed the world as a multilayered creation. Heaven, heavenly beings, and the ultimate truth are above us. When people die, they leave the earth and go to either heaven or some sort of nether world below us, depending on the moral quality of their lives. In between heaven above and the shadowy underworld below, we humans live our lives, for better or worse, in anticipation of going elsewhere in the end. We know from history that this world view can have a powerful impact on peoples’ lives, for good and ill. Neither crusades nor jihads exemplify humanity at its best. I know from my own experience that the old world view just doesn’t make sense in my life, except as a way of describing the way people viewed the world when many of the major religions of the world were born.

Scientists, philosophers, and other observant thinkers have known for many centuries that we live and die in a single, vast uni-verse. The universe we see has nothing above it and there’s no place below it. This is it, it’s really big, and it’s getting bigger. Herein lays the dilemma of whether to pay attention to things like the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin or whether to ignore them as quaint relics of an age before Copernicus, Galileo, and telescopes.

As a 21^st century man, I approach questions as homo scientificus, a home-grown observer who–in principle–looks and listens first and writes second. In my role as self-assigned, chief investigator, I’ve taken on the lifelong experiment of seeing what happens when I approach matters of faith and belief from the perspective of a contemporary world view. Instead of the blinders of dogma or the sleep of credulity, I’ve chosen a devotion to discovering the life experiences that lie behind the words. In matters of religion and spirituality, as in politics and economics, it’s not the words that count, it’s what’s happening in real life.

Attending mass on the day of the “Assumption of the Blessed Virgin” raised more questions than fit conveniently into a single take-home bag. In fact, almost anything that has to do with spirituality and religion raises more questions than answers. But the right questions–those that have to do with the way life is–are far more satisfying than dogmatic answers that have little to do with living. Finding the important questions is itself a worthy lifelong quest.

But finding the important questions is only part of the challenge of being fully and deeply human in the modern world. My particular quest is for the right words–words that resonate with a 21^st century sensibility and shed light on life experiences that anybody can recognize. This quest leads inevitably into some mighty swampy territory. I’m looking for hummocks of solid ground so I won’t bog down and get so lost in the swamp of language, meaning, and life that I never make it out of the dark. It’s hard to go to work, care for a family, be a good neighbor, and live as a citizen of the world when we’re in the dark about the way life really works. For me the really important question will always be: When we discover something that lights up our own life, what do we do to share that light in the world around us?

In a world where truth and perception pretty much always dance awkwardly together, maybe we should ask, “Which came first, the iPad or the Car?”  The Denver Post (7/31/10) landed on our doormat this morning with an advertising sleeve. The word Pad in huge letters appeared above the fold and the Honda logo and pitch below. I wondered, is the dealer trying to sell a tepid car on the sizzle of an iPad? Is the buzz about the iPad more wish for a revolution than a bona fide revolution? Is the real revolution a shift in our internal expectation from the PC-as-tool to the iPad-as-experience? of connection? of freedom? of power? An iPad as spokes-technology for Honda—no “Spokes-potato” here—is an amazing juxtaposition of the first of something new and the last of something old.

Above the fold…

The Full Monty

My bottom line question: What are Apple and Honda doing to help us make the transition from the unsustainable age of petroleum to a sustainable age of living in harmony with a vulnerable planet. Which technology contributes more to awareness of human limitations and possibilities: the Apple iPad or the Honda Hybrid?

Harvesting the Archive

Why would anyone root around a dusty basement for old documents? The allure of wine cellars and the necessity of furnaces notwithstanding, basements have a bad rep.
And yet a dozen of us systematically gathered town meeting documents from a basement storeroom at the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) in Chicago. Though long in the tooth and mostly arthritic, these 170 cabinets practically tick with the background radiation of history and creativity.

Town Meeting 76 Logo

The story begins a couple of decades earlier, but we’re diving into the stream in the mid-’70s. The gist: “Little-known church renewal group helps Americans celebrate Bicentennial. Volunteers lead town meetings in every U.S. county.” We’re making sure that we don’t lose any of that 35-year-old documentation.
America’s 200th birthday came at a time of growing political cynicism. Representational democracy in the U.S. was already in disrepair. Citizen participation mostly meant allowing the extraverts and the annoyed to comment. 5,000 town meetings that engaged mayors, doctors, teachers and janitors on an equal footing for several hours at a time gave people a taste of real participation.

Whittier, CA Town Meeting

The concept was simple: mobilize volunteers, work through local leaders, gather citizens and provide a simple process. Elicit hopes and concerns. Help people create projects for moving forward. Have a few creatives conjure up a new community story, song and symbol. Listen to group reports, sing the community song and hand everyone a document on the way out the door.

Planet Earth

Why the interest in old town meeting documents? They sampled the sociological pulse of grassroots America in the 1970s. Identical questions were asked 5,000 times. What do you hope for? What stands in the way? What will you do about it? The questions gauge a peoples’ sense of their own power. The answers reveal whether people know how to create fulfillment in the here and now. They are the questions communities of faith should always be asking their neighbors—and themselves.
In a decade when people across our planet must act together, how could we help one another ask these questions 500,000 times?

I mention the challenge of seeing life clearly by way of introducing a short bit of history and setting a brief context for a critical question about whether or not it’s possible any more to “stand on the shoulders of those who came before.”

In 1968, a weekend seminar called “The 20th Century Theological Revolution” cracked open a great many minds and hearts that had previously been guarding the territory of emotion, introspection, self awarness and selfless service. Suddenly our view of the world came into focus. The landscape of human need and community care got a whole lot closer. It became screamingly clear that the injustice, suffering and misery in the world lay at the feet of anyone who had his or her eyes and heart closed. It was an eye-opening experience.

The refocusing came about, not by rubbing our noses in statistics about infant deaths or war or global poverty, but by pointing out that what we call G-o-d is a handle we give to our own, most personal experience of the way life is. We talked about how our illusions protect us from the full reality of life and how we are, nevertheless, always free to choose whether and how we will relate to the whole of things. We ended up talking about how there are always some people—in every crowd, every community, every organization—who take it all in and consciously choose to devote their lives to being of creative, self-giving service, for the good of everyone.

A number of remarkable things happened. A lot of people were fascinated with the notion that G-o-d has to do with the way life is. A lot of people were caught off guard by the image that we build illusions to fool ourselves and can empower ourselves by allowing our illusions to be broken. A lot of people were stunned by the assertion that every human being has the ability to choose life and necessity in every situation. A lot of people were so addressed that they wanted to sign up on the spot and join others who were giving their lives to creative, self-giving service for the good of the whole world. A lot of people were also scared out of their wits and went home mid-seminar in an ill humor.

But enough people did sign on that an international movement was born mid-20th century. In time it spread to several dozen countries and to this day comprises a wide range of strategies for service: grassroots, non-formal education and training; participatory decision making for organizational and community transformation; and spiritual development and vocational empowerment. It began as the Ecumenical Institute in the mid-’50s. By the early ’70s, it had given birth to the Institute of Cultural Affairs. Along the way, an intentional community blossomed that energized thousands of colleagues and mobilized untold resources. All over the world, villages and towns held community meetings, launched local human development projects, created preschools and founded micro-enterprises, and experienced the empowerment of being acknowledged as capable, significant global citizens.

Hundreds of communities in many nations came to be better places to live because a lot of people put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into being useful to people who were suffering. The really remarkable thing though, is that this movement was from the beginning and remains to day, a very diverse, grassroots movement. Originally, in the US, it was a movement of Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, United Methodists, college students of unknown affiliation, and a dozen interesting et ceteras. Overseas, it involved teams of nominally Christians and local Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or animists or whatever local melange of beliefs and practices held peoples’ lives together in any given place.

People made lots of notes about what works and what does not work when it comes to caring for human beings and mobilizing people to look after one another. A lot of files got filled up with all of the planning documents, reports to donors, concept papers, training constructs and the odd keepsakes that someone thought might be interesting some day and tucked away in storage boxes. The experience contained in all the file cabinets happened a long time ago—before the PC, before the Internet, before the World Wide Web, before global terrorism and before the articulation of String Theory.

Now come the questions. How can the experiences and insights of a former century—no matter how valuable they seemed at the time—be relevant to life at light speed in the 21st century? So what if we learned how to mobilize hundreds of community meetings on a single day—that was 1978. So what if we helped our neighbors in thousands of villages dig wells for safe drinking water? That was then; this is now.

But wait; there’s more. The questions get harder. The idea that the key to life is loving our neighbors predates Jesus and Mohammed by many centuries. How can we make sense out of these experiences recorded centuries before the invention of the telescope, when we live in the age of Hubble, mobile devices and triple bypass surgery? The question is something like how can we make good use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics without blinding ourselves to the particles splashed about by the Large Hadron Collider.

It may boil down to this. When life and culture and history accelerate closer and closer to the “speed of light,” is it possible for the wisdom of the past to keep up with us? How do we keep what we learned in Sunday School, Sabbath School or the Madrasa from blinding us in one eye and leaving us with just enough sight to get a driver’s license but not enough to have any depth perception? How do we live with a wide-angle lens without losing depth of field?

I don’t have a ready answer, but I’d like to know what you think and I’m going to spend a lot of time thinking out loud about the answers.

David

Everyday there is something new to learn: a new version of Photoshop, shifting my domains from one registrar to another, launching a blog. And those are the easy ones. It gets tougher. How do I support an adult daughter who is learning how to coach a young adult son who is learning how to be a good partner to his girl friend, both of whom are in the sink or swim school of hard knocks for being good parents of a new baby-due-any-minute-now, all at the same time. That’s a learning curve! If you followed the family tree, you’ll note that I have to learn how to become a decent grandfather and great-grandfather all at the same time. I’m too young for that kind of challenge. It really is the end of the world as I know it.

In the ’80s, R.E.M. sang , “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

“…I feel fine.”

Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a votive, light a candle. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.

I listen to myself churn—especially on days when the news sounds like a tournament of lies, screaming for solutions and alternatives. There’s something inside of me that wants to rise to the occasion. I’d like to help end poverty, war, homelessness, divorce, sexism. I aspire to be someone who offers alternatives to despair, anger, opting out. Since I’m not a savior or a superman, I’ve got to choose or go crazy. Some days I make my choices and some days I decline. Some days it takes a long time to muster the courage to join the battle against the tournament of lies.

Those are the spiritual challenges: saying yes to what’s in front of me; sticking with a challenge; not letting the churning get me down. On really hard days, I resort to lighting a votive candle. Even though it won’t solve any of my problems, it’s a good symbol of taking a small step to shed some light on whatever darkness I’m battling at the moment. Every time the little flame catches, I wonder why I don’t like a candle more often.

The complete lyric
“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine”
(on R.E.M.’s album, The Best Of The I.R.S. Years 1982-1987)

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds,
snakes, an aeroplanes, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn – world
serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs. Feed
it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, Ladder
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
in a fire, representing seven games, a government
for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in
a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing! Fine, then. Uh oh,
overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do. Save
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
psyched.

[Chorus:]

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Six o’clock – TV hour. Don’t get caught in foreign
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a votive, light a candle. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.

[Chorus 2x]

The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right.
______

* I’m running Airfoil to stream from my Mac to the stereo over the Wi-Fi network via Airport Express. Beautiful!

Streaming music and YouTube videos are awesome. My new Wacom Bamboo Dock and mini-apps is pure magic. We’re bathed in the delight of world music, fusions of this and that, instant downloads and HD on demand, and still the celebrities go nuts and get divorced while the homeboys shoot ’em up and babies die. We live in this amazing age of global connection and universal possibility and still the powers that be are fiddling around with their hands in the till and their minds on the next election.

I think we mostly know better, but can’t quite figure out what to do with the messiness that comes along with all of the miracles. Everything is too big, too complex, too entrenched, too scary, too heavy to lift or too hot to handle. I tend to ping-pong back and forth just trying to keep my mind sorted out and my attitude up. But it eats at my heart to see society bog down and people stay forgotten. We’ve got work to do before we play and playing is too much fun to burden with a guilty conscience or a distracting to do list because we didn’t stick to our knitting—caring for our neighbors. So what’s a cultural creative with an itch to write to do?Write about culture and creativity. It may seem like a stretch to leap from culture and creativity to “grounded spirituality,” but I’m going to spend a lot of time and effort drawing the connection. I’d stake my life on the proposition that the work we have to do is mostly related to culture: how we think, what we believe, what we value, how we treat one another, how we organize ourselves, what we celebrate, how well we encourage innovation, how much time we spend reading books and listening to jazz, and yes, how carefully we dig into the riches of religion and spirituality, especially how fully we dive into the life of communities of faith.

If I had to jam a bright stake into the ground, around which I could circle on a fairly long leash, that stake would be “grounded spirituality and creating culture.” One way or the other, everything that appears here will have something to do with being consciously and deeply related to myself, to other people and to the universe—being passionately responsible for the future, our neighbors and our planet.

Writing a first blog post leans toward the vertigo a ski jumper must feel before leaping into the controlled fall that’s needed to go farther, quicker. But I know enough to take it step by step, one day at a time, and to ask for feedback. As I write forward, I’ll also fill in backward by adding stuff I’ve written over the last decade or so, just to check where I’ve come from.

Remember this is an informal, neighborhood salon. You’re invited. Come as you are and bring a folding chair or yoga pad. Don’t forget the chips and dip. And a cold one or two.