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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Letter L=LAST SERMON POST (Also CS Lewis)

This sermon blog is moving to the Colonial Church website. You will be able to find it here.

However, Daniel Harrell will continue to post here on occasion and at www.danielharrell.com

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: CS Lewis
Matthew 2:1-10
by Daniel Harrell

This morning concludes this year’s installment of my alphabetical Church Fathers sermon series, this summer starting with the Letter L. You’ll remember that to be a Church Father technically means you lived during the first five centuries of Christianity, but clearly I overstep that boundary. My rationale (and annual running joke) for doing so has been that, for American Protestants at least, our sense of church history only stretches back as far as CS Lewis anyway. How apropos, therefore, that arriving at Letter L we finally arrive at Lewis, on the heels of Pope Leo the Great and Martin Luther. Most contemporary Christians have enjoyed a CS Lewis encounter—he crosses all denominations. Perhaps it was a fascination with the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, an engagement with the apologetics of Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain during college, maybe the sci-fi fantasy of his Space Trilogy, the cleverness of The Screwtape Letters, or his insights into mythology and renaissance literature expressed in essays, letters or Lewis’ own favorite work, Til We Have Faces. Despite having enjoyed little critical acclaim—especially when compared to his good friend JRR Tolkien—the popularity of Lewis continues unabated.

Lewis is so popular in fact, that some regard his authority as almost on par with Scripture itself. For instance, many believers disturbed over author Rob Bell’s recent musings over heaven and hell were quickly assuaged once they discovered Bell got a lot of his ideas from CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. My personal favorite is A Grief Observed which Lewis wrote following the heartbreaking death of his wife, American Joy Gresham, to whom he had been married just a few years before cancer took her. The book has helped me through the tragedies of my own life. Asking after the presence of God, as people often do in the aftermath of catastrophic loss, Lewis wrote “I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.” Lewis initially published this book under a pseudonym. Caring friends, unaware of this, gave it to him to guide him through his own grief.

Born in Belfast in 1898, Clive Stapes Lewis was known throughout his life as Jack—a name he insisted he be called at age four in memory of his dog Jacksie. Lewis possessed a rich childhood imagination, which he carried into adulthood, insisting that without it, you can’t fully understand the world. For Lewis, meaning is conveyed most powerfully through story—through the great and not-so-great narratives of history retold over and over again. Our almost four-year-old daughter Violet is currently in a phase where everyday is a recreated, detailed story involving her, our cat Briscoe and her toy bunny. They live atop hedges, scale mountains, fly airplanes and eat magic ice cream that transforms them into the color of the flavor they choose, all of which helps Violet make sense of her world. (Either that or her parents are so boring she has to jazz things up a little.) Lewis wrote, “A child is always thinking about those details in a story which a grown-up regards as indifferent. If when you first told the tale your hero was warned by three little men appearing on the left of the road, and when you tell it again you introduce one little man on the right of the road, the child protests. And the child is right. You think it makes no difference because you are not living in the story at all. If you were, you would know better.”

Lewis won a college scholarship to Oxford, which took him to England in 1916. The culture shock he experienced there was significant. “The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons,” he said. Lewis fought and was wounded in World War I, and in the trenches made a pact with a fellow soldier to care for the other’s family should either be killed. Lewis alone survived and kept his promise. He’d given up on church at an early age—“very angry at God for not existing” he said—but once he returned to Oxford as a professor, he befriended the devoutly Catholic JRR Tolkien. Tolkien eventually coaxed Lewis back to belief, though not as far as to his own Roman Catholicism. Lewis stuck with the Church of England instead, despite his misgivings about the English. In time he became the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, from whence he subsequently professed that there was no such thing as an English Renaissance.

Lewis had a lot to say about almost everything, his prolificacy was the fruit of his bounteous imagination and his many fascinations: from anthropomorphic animals to the stars in the sky. Lewis was a keen amateur astronomer who kept a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom. According to Michael Ward, a Cambridge University Chaplain and author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, Lewis’ favorite object in the night sky was the planet Jupiter. According to medieval cosmology, Jupiter was the ‘best planet,’ Fortuna Major. Lewis used to tell his university lecture audiences, “Those born under Jupiter are apt to be loud-voiced and red-faced.” He would then pause before adding, “It is obvious under which planet I was born.”

Lewis lectured on medieval cosmology because he thought that familiarity with the pre-Copernican cosmos was essential to a proper understanding of medieval and renaissance literature: he repeatedly encouraged his students and readers to take a stroll under the sky at night. Looking up at the heavens for moderns, he argued, is a very different experience from what it was in the Middle Ages. These days we sense that we are looking out into a trackless emptiness, a pitch-black and dead-cold space—which is what we call it: space. In the Middle Ages, we would have felt as if we were looking into a vast, lighted concavity, a dome of wondrous luminosity and even love.

“We are inveterate poets,” Lewis wrote. “When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality—the Sublime… Men of sensibility look up to on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal’s own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulae is, almost literally, to be frightened by our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian, I do not say we are wrong to tremble at the shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. But if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overthrow our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualized by human imagination which does so.”

Our text for this morning is the familiar Christmas story about the star of Bethlehem. We read the passage every Christmas, but rarely go out in the winter night to look for traces of that star. Granted, the cold might have something to do with that, but not so for C.S. Lewis. To a friend he once confided how beautiful it was “on two or three successive nights about the Holy Time, to see Venus and Jupiter blazing at one another, once with the Moon right between them: Majesty and Love linked by Virginity—what could be more appropriate?”

Michael Ward goes on to note how Lewis’ delight in this old picture of the heavens (as opposed to space) was not confined to his professional life as a literary historian; he had a much more personal investment in it too. In The Turn of the Tide, a meditation upon the cosmic significance of Christ's Nativity, Lewis wrote how the entire universe waits in breathless expectancy about the coming event in Bethlehem—from the lowly cattle all the way up to Saturn in the outermost planetary sphere. When Christ is finally born:
Saturn laughed and lost his latter age’s frost,
His beard, Niagara-like, unfroze;
Monsters in the Sun rejoiced; the Inconstant One,
The unwedded Moon, forgot her woes.
A shiver of re-birth and deliverance on the Earth
went gliding. Her bonds were released…
So death lay in arrest. But at Bethlehem the bless'd
Nothing greater could be heard
Than a dry wind in the thorn, the cry of the One new-born,
And cattle in stall as they stirred.

Since the Copernican revolution, with earth no longer the center of things, the heavenly bodies had been steadily evacuated of spiritual significance until they were regarded as no more than large aggregations of rock or gas. Narnia readers may recall an exchange in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader during which Eustace is rebuked by Ramandu for claiming that “In our world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy largely to rehabilitate (imaginatively, not scientifically, that is) this traditional view. For what purpose? For the purpose of meaning. Lewis considered the cosmos to be more than merely material. For him the pre-Copernican model was, in a sense, more Christian than the Newtonian or Einsteinian versions which succeeded it because it provided a spiritual reading of materiality.

Historically, religious faith, particularly Christianity, was the loom onto which the discoveries of science were woven. It was within a Christian theological framework that scientific disclosure found its transcendent meaning. Ironically, Copernicus and Newton were devout believers and saw their work not as replacements for faith, but as extensions of it. Even Einstein gave credence to some sort of divine will at work. The idea was that the best of science and the best of theology concerted to give human beings deeper insight into the character of the universe and, subsequently, into the divine character himself. Scientific discovery was received with gratitude to the Almighty for the wonder of his creation. Scientists, alongside the psalmist, would proclaim, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”

This former balance between faith and science (or reason) was struck in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas, who building on Augustine, established a delicate equilibrium between theology (reasoning down from faith) and philosophy, or science (reasoning up from sensory data). Aquinas, unlike the Reformers who followed, taught that human senses and rational faculties, created by God, were competent for understanding reality, albeit from a limited viewpoint. The limits were filled in by theology. Aquinas asserted that God acted through “secondary causes,” creating the world according to his laws and then giving nature room to unfold within.

However, if God operated mostly behind the scenes as the prime cause, then it wasn’t long before thinkers started wondering whether he was there at all. In time, reliance upon divine revelation gave way to human reason in its Enlightenment form, and soon after the supernatural was rendered superfluous. Nature, reduced down to its material properties, became disenchanted. Ward writes that “The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and antipathies, finally of her colors, smells, and tastes. Man with his new scientific powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.” This process, slowly working, siphoned away the old imaginations, much to Lewis’ dismay.

To him, modern scientists were too naturalistic in their worldview, and thus liable to the error of removing their own minds and predilections from the big picture for the sake of a presumed objectivity. They failed to realize that imagination is required in order for the world be fully known. They needed was not only larger and better telescopes, but minds increasingly aware of their own creativity. Failure of imagination de-spiritualizes the universe, Lewis believed; a fallacy of first order because the rational mind is itself spiritual and dependent upon that animating energy that saturates the entire universe—an energy which, in turn, depends upon God himself. Lewis described a universe perceived within a solely naturalistic framework to be “all fact and no meaning.”

In recent years my own interest in the interplay between science and faith has allowed me the privilege to rub shoulders with some prominent scientists for whom faith has filled out their own comprehension of reality. Francis Collins, the imminent geneticist and now Director of the NIH, attributes CS Lewis with converting his own atheism into belief, convincing Collins that the microscopic world of organic life is not random and meaningless, but infused with significance and divine beauty. At the other end of the spectrum, astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, Chief of the ExoPlanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA (and on tap to be our next Guelich Lecturer in 2013), argues for cosmological discovery as an instrument of worship. In the spirit of Lewis, she asserts that understanding the stars grants us a profoundly expanded view of Jesus Christ as Lord; that he is Lord of all space and time—over billions of galaxies and billions of years.

For CS Lewis, mere data could not be the determinant of the real world because the real world was a matter of data and imagination, a matter of matter and meaning—and analogically, matter and spirit. The spirit is the logos, the word who is Christ, in whom Scripture teaches “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

However, Lewis’ goal was not to lead an observer from the cosmos to Christ. His goal was first to get them from the cosmos back into their own heads. He wrote, “The discrepancy between a movement of atoms in an astronomer’s cortex and his understanding that there must be a still unobserved planet beyond Uranus, is already so immense that the Incarnation of God Himself is, in one sense, scarcely more startling.” For Lewis, the link between mind and matter forged by human reasoning reflects the link forged between God and Man in Jesus; a link brought to light under the Star of Bethlehem, a star which was a huge ball of flaming gas—but so much more besides.

Lewis died at age 64, having refused to give the devil enough time to do as his senior demon Screwtape (likely English) instructed his apprentice Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters. Advocating for long life, Screwtape said: “seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unraveling human souls from Heaven and building up firm attachment to earth.” Lewis died firmly unattached to earth—and so he remains. “It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God,” he said, “because only the pure in heart want to.”

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: Martin Luther

Galatians 2:16-21
by Daniel Harrell

This morning’s look at the momentous life of Martin Luther marks the second in my annual summer sermon series on the Church Fathers (and Mothers). For fourteen summers I’ve alphabetically surveyed personalities throughout Church history who have shaped the faith as we’ve come to believe it. Now to be a genuine Church Father technically means you had to have lived during the first five centuries of Christianity. Last week I offered a brief glimpse at the fifth century’s Leo the Great, one of the most significant Popes of Christendom, which is why he’s called the Great. Almost single-handedly, Leo settled the mystery of the two natures of Jesus—his full humanity alongside his full divinity—by emphasizing Jesus’ uniqueness in this regard. Unfortunately, Leo’s success amassed considerable ecclesial and political power for the papacy in the waning days of the Roman Empire, boding badly for the years to come. Medieval Christendom during what we know as the Dark Ages was rife with papal abuses of power. Granted, had the Dark Ages not been so dark, we wouldn’t be here today talking about Martin Luther. While not technically a Church Father, living as he did in the sixteenth century, no other person had a greater impact on modern Christianity—Protestant and Catholic—than this mercurial German monk.

Minnesotans know this all too well. Lutherans comprise almost 35% of the state’s population, with Lutheran influence stretching way beyond that. An unavoidable authority on Lutheran life, Garrison Keillor, writes: “Here in the Midwest, we all have long memories of suffering and pain, because, for one thing, winter is so long, and when finally it gets warm and beautiful as it is now, we try to relieve these painful memories of cold, of neglect, of suspicion, darkness, anger, Bologna sandwiches, stupidity, and butterscotch pudding with mindless pleasure in the sun while wearing as few clothes as possible. But we were not brought up to experience pleasure. It doesn’t register on us. It’s like trying to write on glass with a pencil. We get into as few clothes as possible and the sight of ourselves depresses us. Sunlight makes us gloomy. We are not Mediterranean people. We are Lutheran people. Even the Catholics up here are Lutheran. And I don’t like to generalize about Lutherans, but one thing that’s true of every single last one of them without a single exception is that the low point of their year is their summer vacation.” (Wow, so glad we moved here!)

If this indeed is a portrait of Lutherans it’s a portrait of Luther too. Revered for his courageous confrontation of medieval church power, his standing up in the face of accusations of heresy, his establishing the authority of Scripture and then making it accessible by translating it into German, his writing some of the church’s best loved hymns—adaptations, perhaps, of the secular music in his day just like contemporary Christian music does in our own—his igniting a reformation that still burns brightly; Luther did all of this despite being a man tormented by depression, debilitating self-doubt and an almost paranoid fear of God.

It started early. Trained as a lawyer and excelling as a philosopher, Luther gave it all up at age 21. Making his way home one night through a tremendous thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning struck the ground near his path. He screamed, “Help me St. Anne I will become a monk!” And he did. Possessing what one biographer describes as “a high pressure fire hose” personality of shattering intensity, Luther plunged into monastic life—praying, fasting, going without sleep, enduring winter without blankets, flagellating himself and who knows, maybe eating mounds of butterscotch pudding: “If anyone could have earned heaven by the life of a monk,” he wrote, “It was I.”

And yet none of this diminished his paranoid fear of God’s judgment. He hated opening his Bible, and having to constantly read about God’s righteousness and realizing over and over again how he could never measure up. Ironically assigned to teach Bible at Wittenberg University, Luther gradually discovered a way through his dilemma. “At last, meditating day and night, by the mercy of God, I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that the righteous [are justified] by faith. Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through the gates that had been flung open.”

You’re likely familiar with the rest of the story—especially if you’ve seen the movie. Granted, Luther was no nearly so good looking (as the above photo shows), yet his legacy is enormous. Every Protestant stream, including our own Congregationalist one, flows from Luther’s reservoir.

Of course, Luther did not come up with justification by faith on his own. That’s always been in the Bible. It goes all the way back to Abraham. Yet just as the medieval church of Luther’s day controlled Biblical interpretation, so a group known as Judaizers tried to control things in New Testament Greece. In our text from Galatians this morning, these Judaizers—milking ancient Jewish prejudice against Gentiles—insisted that Gentile converts to Christianity be circumcised as Jews first. Though the apostle Peter (a Jew) knew better, he apparently backed out of dinner with a group of Gentile Christians so not to offend Jews who still considered eating with Gentiles to be some sort of contagion. The apostle Paul (also a Jew) was livid. He considered Peter’s actions a direct assault on the integrity of the gospel. Paul gave it to Peter in front of everyone, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? We Jews have put our faith in Christ Jesus just like the Gentiles that we too may be justified by faith in Christ and not by doing the works of the law, just like the Gentiles.”

“This is not to say that the Law is bad,” Luther explained. “Only that it is not able to justify us. … We must understand that we are merely beneficiaries and recipients of the treasures of Christ. Now, if I could perform any work acceptable to God and deserving of grace, … why should I stand in need of the grace of God and the suffering and death of Christ? Christ would be of no benefit to me. Christ’s mercy would be of no use to me. This shows how little insight the pope and the whole of his religious coterie have into spiritual matters, and how little they concern themselves with the spiritual health of their forlorn flocks. … God never yet gave to any person grace and everlasting life as a reward for merit. The opinions of the papists are the intellectual pipe-dreams of idle pates, that serve no other purpose but to draw men away from the true worship of God. The papacy is founded upon hallucinations.

“The true way of salvation is this. First, a person must realize that he is a sinner, the kind of a sinner who is congenitally unable to do any good thing. “Whatsoever is not of faith, is sin.” Those who seek to earn the grace of God by their own efforts are trying to please God with sins. They mock God, and provoke His anger. They must repent. The second part is this. God sent His only-begotten Son into the world that we may live through His merit. He was crucified and killed for us. By sacrificing His Son for us God revealed Himself to us as a merciful Father who donates remission of sins, righteousness, and life everlasting for Christ’s sake. God hands out His gifts freely unto all men. That is the praise and glory of His mercy.”

For all his fervency regarding God’s grace, Luther remained burdened by his own unworthiness of it. Despite all the assurance about which he wrote and preached, he struggled to ever feel any assurance himself. How could he? He firmly believed that grace justified the sinner, but he also believed it did nothing to change one’s sinful nature. Back and forth it went. As biographer Martin Marty writes, Luther’s life makes sense chiefly as one who wrestled obsessively with God: God present and God absent, God too near and God too far, the God of wrath and the God of love, God weak and God almighty, God real and God as illusion, God hidden and God revealed. Luther was often paralyzed by what he called Anfechtungen, an untranslatable word often defined as those spiritual assaults that keep people from finding certainty in a loving God—attacks of doubt and near-despair sent not from the devil but, quite possibly, from God himself.

I didn’t read much about Luther until I got to seminary—Congregationalists tend toward Calvin and Zwingli as our reformers of choice (though Luther had choice words for Calvin and Zwingli too). Once in seminary, given Luther’s stature, I figured I needed to read more about him. Besides, it was a class assignment. But being something of a non-conformist (which everyone considers themselves to be in seminary—don’t ask me why), I picked up a biography of Luther by a contemporary historian that was not on the recommended reading list. It was a fascinating retelling of Luther’s life, and inspiring as well as the author wrote in soaring prose of the power and brilliance of Luther’s theology. Everything was there: justification by grace through faith; the “joyful exchange” of identities with Christ; the forgiveness of sins; the authority of the Word; and the human as “sinner and at the same time justified.” But then, at the end, came a chapter on Luther’s later years and his vicious anti-Semitism. Granted, Luther was an equal-opportunity denouncer of Jews, papists, Turks, Calvinists, Anabaptists and even other Lutherans. Moreover, his anti-Semitism was not racial as much as it was religious; he welcomed Jewish converts to Christianity. But Luther believed with the world ending soon and with so many denying Christ, Jews were basically doomed.

“I write against the Jews,” Luther said, “for a Jew or a Jewish heart is a wooden, stone devil heart that can be moved by nothing.” That was Luther being kind. Most of the language he used is unspeakable in polite company. In fact, the last sermon Luther preached, three days before he died in February 1546, was an attack against Jews. He never seemed to contemplate how contradictory it might seem to see the sufferings of Christians as a sign of God’s blessing toward those God loved, while the suffering of Jews was a testimony of God’s wrath toward those he hated. Luther’s virulent railing against the Jews reflected his times to be sure; but they were still bad enough to leave a legacy of hateful consequences in Germany for centuries.

As for the contemporary biographer recording these things, Luther’s viciousness cancelled out for him all the good Luther accomplished. In the final chapter of his polemical biography, the author summarily rejected the Christian gospel and God’s grace all because of Martin Luther. As a young seminarian, I was dumbstruck by how anybody could so clearly and beautifully articulate the gospel of Jesus to which I had staked my own soul, only to then entirely dismiss it due to the words and acts of one person—and a sixteenth century person at that. If Martin Luther could cause somebody to reject the gospel and lose their faith, how many people were going to lose their faith because of me? I descended into my own bout of Anfechtungen which led me to schedule a weeklong personal retreat (at a Catholic monastery no less) where I dutifully read the biography of Luther that was on the approved reading list.

So many years since, I’ve thankfully come to realize the real question is how anyone could have expected Luther to be other than the sinful man he was. This goes for all of us. And it goes for Jesus too; inasmuch as he bore our sins on the cross. Luther argued that to truly know Christ is not to know him in the sublime, dreamed-up idealized ways we so often conceive of Him, (and wrongly imagine ourselves as able to emulate); but rather in the lowly, weak and dying ways Jesus reveals himself on the cross, where he takes on humanity in all of its sin and shame. In this Christ we see ourselves.

Through the cross, Luther wrote, God “calls humans by their real names and not by images of their attractive appearance. He does not name them as they would wish, but as they are accepted by the boundless suffering love of God. This has far-reaching consequences: religious desire for praise and might and self-affirmation are blind to suffering—their own and that of others—because they are in love with achievement and success. Their love is love for the beautiful, which is to make the one who loves beautiful himself. But in the cross and passion of Christ, faith experiences a quite different love of God, a love which loves what is quite different. God loves what is sinful, bad, foolish, weak and hateful, in order to make it beautiful and good and wise and righteous. Sinners are beautiful because they are loved by God; they are not loved because they are beautiful.”

Though too often sinful, bad, foolish, weak and hateful ourselves; God still loves us relentlessly. He makes us beautiful and good and wise and righteous by the hard edge of grace. It is all Jesus’ doing. As the apostle Paul put it here in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live.” Whatever is beautiful or good or wise or right about me is not me, “but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” And you and Martin Luther too.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: Leo the Great

Matthew 5:1-12
by Daniel Harrell

If you happen to know anything about the fifth century’s Pope Leo the Great (this morning’s Church Father Starting with the Letter L) then you may know about he single-handedly faced down the notorious barbarian Attila the Hun and saved the city of Rome from destruction (at least until a few years later). Labeled “the scourge of God” by the Romans, Attila and his savage army ransacked the rest of Italy and had their sights set on the eternal city. But Leo roared onto the battlefield and repelled the Huns—reportedly with the help of a few angels though I’m guessing some gold was probably involved too. The renaissance painter Raphael had this take on it. It hangs in the Vatican and was commissioned by Pope Julius II who chose to sit as the model for Leo.

Leo’s bravery in the face of danger was in part what earned him the designation as “great,” only one of three Popes in church history to enjoy such acclamation. Thinking of Leo for this morning, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a similar act of bravery I witnessed during our recent family vacation. We traveled out to Yellowstone and while in Montana (courtesy of Jim and Sue Eaton’s lovely cabin there) my wife Dawn, daughter Violet and I decided to go for a short hike on Dawn’s birthday: A hike because Dawn loves to hike, and short because Violet is three. I dropped by the Visitors Center for trail suggestions, of which there were plenty, including a relatively easy one just off the highway.

Having made our choice, we were curious about the bold-typed warning printed at the bottom of the trail map: THIS IS BEAR COUNTRY. TAKE YOUR SPRAY. Take your spray? They make bear spray? Turns out they do. I asked the Visitor’s Center staff whether this was truly necessary for such a short hike so near to the highway, and they recounted how just last week a teenager was mauled by a local grizzly, albeit in the backcountry of Yellowstone. Nevertheless, they said, best to carry spray in case. And by the way, they had some on sale. Only fifty bucks a can.  it turned out, they sold Bear Spray. It cost fifty bucks a can. (Luckily, I hadn’t bought Dawn a birthday present yet. And it did come with a cool holster to carry it in.) So off we went, locked and loaded, and we made it just up to the first ridge line when hark, we heard an unfamiliar snarl. Just down in the vale we spied our own barbearian. Obviously our first impulse was to take a picture. But once the barbaric beast sensed our presence and turned toward us, action was required. Being a mama bear in her own right, my brave wife stepped up with her spray and the threat was no more. I now refer to my wife as Dawn the Great.

Fourteen years ago in Boston I began an annual sermon series during the summer on the Church Fathers, those personalities from church history who fashioned our faith and codified what we have come to embrace as orthodox Christianity. It’s managed to garner a bit of acclaim. Go to the popular religious website patheos.com, and you’ll find my weekly column “Church Father ABCs.” The ABC part is because I chose to tackle these noteworthy fathers (and mothers) a letter at a time. Of course if you know your ABCs, you’re probably wondering why 14 years only has me at the letter L. The problem was that with so many patristic heroes clustered around letter A—Ambrose, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas for instance—it took me a while to get out of there. My rationale for taking an annual peek at these people comes from my own conviction that our faith derives in no small part from the faithful personalities who’ve lived it and wrestled with it through crucial moments in church history. While we Protestants may not venerate these important people as saints, we cannot separate their contributions from our own doctrines and practice. We may hold to the Bible alone as our sola source of authority, but interpreting and obeying the Bible necessarily stands on the interpretive and obedient shoulders of past believers.

Last year was my first foray into the Fathers here at Colonial—of great interest to some, a good reason to go to the cabin for others. Having come to Letter K, we looked at the mystic Thomas a’ Kempis and existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Now patristic scholars in the house rightly note that to include a Kempis and Kierkegaard exceedingly stretches the definition of “church father.” Technically, to be a Church Father, you had to live in the first five centuries AD. But we’re American Protestants, we get to make our own rules. I do begin this year’s installment with a bona fide Father, but something of an abomination to most Protestants inasmuch as Leo the Great set the stage for centuries of abusive power exerted by medieval pontiffs. Granted, this abuse did pave the way for the Great Protestant Church Father if there ever was one: Martin Luther himself, the patron saint of all things Minnesotan. We’ll wrap up this year’s series with the patron saint of everything Narnian, CS Lewis.

As for Leo the Great, facing down Attila the Hun earned him some serious street cred. Born of aristocratic Tuscan stock, Leo ascended to the papacy in 440 AD. Now a hero and savior to the empire as well as the church, he easily expanded his pontifical influence. His greatest theological contribution was what we know as The Tome of Leo. It’s significance was its role in helping the hotly contested theological debate of that day; namely, the dual natures of Jesus Christ.

How was it possible for a human being to be fully God? On the one hand, Jesus was clearly a flesh and blood person, just like you and me. A historical figure, he was born and walked and talked and ate and did most everything else we humans do. On the other hand, Jesus was God incarnate, and thus he did things no human ever did—talked to demons, walked on water, fed multitudes, changed the weather and raised the dead. If a man is God, is he really a man? God’s not a man. And God doesn’t sin. But what man doesn’t sin? God doesn’t die. But Jesus died. How can Jesus be God?
Early Christians offered all sorts of options for making this work, from Jesus having a split personality to his being a human body with a divine soul and even one where Jesus’ presence on earth was more like a mirage. Predictably, the debate mostly involved the various sides labeling the other heretics. The Emperor convened a congressional committee to attempt a solution—you know, with representatives from the humanity side and representatives from the divinity side—to see if they couldn’t cobble together a compromise. But the committee only perpetuated the divide. It took the Emperor falling off his horse and dying—some would say providentially—before a new committee could be formed, one which history remembers as The Council of Chalcedon. Leo asserted his judgment at this Council through his Tome which stressed the importance of Jesus’ uniqueness as the one and only person ever with two natures. It may sound strange, but no stranger than the Doctrine of Trinity that understands God as three persons with one nature. Chalcedon affirmed Leo’s Tome, and Christians have tried to believe ever since; that “our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, complete in Godhead and humanity, truly God and truly man… without confusion, without change, without separation or division.”

Leo wrote, “Lowliness is assured by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity. To pay the debt of our sinful state, a nature that is incapable of suffering was joined to one that could suffer. Thus, in keeping with the healing we needed, one and the same mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ, was able to die in one nature, and unable to die in the other. He who was true God was therefore born in the complete and perfect nature of a true human being, whole in his own nature, whole in ours. By our nature we mean what the Creator had fashioned in us from the beginning, and took to himself in order to restore it. For in the savior there was no trace of what the deceiver introduced, and we, being misled, allowed to enter. Jesus took our nature without the stain of sin, enlarging our humanity without diminishing his divinity…. One and the same person—this must be said over and over again—is truly the son of God and truly the son of man. He is God in virtue of the fact that ‘in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.’ He is human in virtue of the fact that the ‘the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’”

Leo’s triumph at Chalcedon further entrenched his papal authority—an authority he claimed descended from St Peter himself. At the conclusion of the Council of Chalcedon, the bishops attending agreed. They cried out in unison: “This is the faith of the fathers … Peter has spoken thus through Leo ...” Leo’s consolidation of authority led to the migration of Christianity’s center from Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) to Italy, away from its heavy Greek influence to the influence of Latin logic. As the Roman Empire waned, a power vacuum opened up for this mighty migration to fill, such that the Christian church assumed an imperial power itself that endured for the next thousand years—an era ironically known as the Dark Ages.

Nevertheless, the later abuses of ecclesial power were not Leo’s fault. He used his great personal influence for much good. He died in 461, leaving 96 sermons and numerous letters revealing his passion for Jesus and the gospel. His 95th sermon is based on this morning’s text from the Sermon on the Mount-twelve verses we call The Beatitudes. Jesus as the word made flesh came to earth after centuries of heavenly silence—there had been no word from the Lord in 400 years. Predictably, much of the preaching in the interim ended up emphasizing human wisdom rather than God’s action. When the Word finally returned in Christ, Leo wrote that “there were no thick clouds surrounding Him as of old, nor were the people frightened off from approaching the mountain by frightful sounds and lightning, but quietly and freely His discourse reached the ears of those who stood by: that the harshness of the law might give way before the gentleness of grace, and the spirit of adoption might dispel the terrors of bondage.”

However, having grown accustomed to relying on human wisdom, Jesus’ beatitudes generally have gotten interpreted as more of the same. The pure in heart get to see God? OK, be pure. The meek inherit the earth? Be humble then. Easy enough—to say that is, but not so easy to do—even when we want to do it. By contrast, Colonial’s own Robert Guelich, in his Sermon on the Mount commentary, argued that the Beatitudes should not be viewed as wisdom teachings stressing human responsibility, but rather prophetic teaching stressing divine deliverance. You’re not blessed because you mourn. You’re blessed because God comforts you. You’re not blessed because you’re hungry for righteousness and justice. You’re blessed because God fills you up. You’re not blessed because you’re persecuted. You’re blessed because God bestows his riches on persecuted people.

Leo preached that “The blessedness of seeing God is justly promised to the pure in heart. For the eye that is unclean would not be able to see the brightness of the true light, and what would be happiness to clear minds would be a torment to those that are defiled. Therefore, let the mists of worldly vanities be dispelled [by the Lord], and the inner eye be cleansed of all filth of wickedness, so that the soul’s gaze may feast serenely upon the great vision of God.” Leo employs the passive voice here to emphasize how the purity of heart is God’s doing. It is God who enables us to see Him.

And yet that God does this does not render us passive. On the contrary, God’s grace empowers us to live Christ-shaped lives. God’s Spirit in us shapes us and leads us to follow Jesus; to be devoted to the kingdom of God and to his righteousness.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled,” Jesus said. Leo preached, “This hunger is not for any bodily food, this thirst is not for any earthly drink: it is a longing to be blessed with righteousness, and, by penetrating the secret of all mysteries, to be filled with the Lord himself. Happy is the soul that longs for the food of righteousness and thirsts for this kind of drink; it would not seek such things if it had not already savored their delight. When the soul hears the voice of the Spirit saying it to the prophet: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good,’ it has already received a portion of God’s goodness, and is on fire with love, the love that gives joy of the utmost purity. It counts as nothing all that belongs to time, it is entirely consumed with desire to eat and drink the food of righteousness. The soul lays hold of the true meaning of the first and great commandment: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind and your whole strength,’ for to love God is nothing else than to love righteousness.”

Righteousness is a word that gets twisted up a bit in our individualistic culture. The tendency is to confuse righteousness with something I possess for myselfsomething that the Scriptures actually condemn as self-righteousness. Godly righteousness, as Leo intimates, is God’s possession. To be filled with righteousness is to belong to God—and not so much individually as collectively—as the people of God, the body of Christ, the holy catholic (little c) church. Righteousness is not a state of being, but a way of living modeled after Jesus. To do right by each other, to give and love and serve, is to demonstrate our own citizenship in God’s kingdom, and that indeed his Spirit does dwell in our midst.

Therefore, Leo preached, “Let believers examine their own state of mind and carefully scrutinize the sentiments of their heart. If they find some fruit of charity in their conscious self, let them have no doubt that God is in them. And that they may become more and more able to welcome so great a guest, let them persevere and grow in mercy which expresses itself in acts of love. If God is love, charity ought not to know any limits, for nothing that is limited can contain the fullness of the Spirit, who is God Himself.”


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Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Page: 1538

Mr ROBERT (5:07 PM) —I rise to lend support to the National Consumer Credit Protection Amendment Bill 2010. This bill seeks to amend the credit act that was passed in November 2009. I acknowledge the Minister for Financial Services, Superannuation and Corporate Law across the table and thank him for his generosity. The purpose of the bill is to refer powers or allow powers to be referred from the state to allow the bill to be enacted. The bill will seek to implement a uniform law for the regulation of consumer credit. It will implement phase 1 of the Council of Australian Government’s agreements from the beginning of 2008 to allow the responsibility to be assumed for the regulation of consumer credit.

The original bill that came to the House in November last year was intended, and I believe still intends, to be the final act to bring all of the consumer credit and financial matters from the state across to the Commonwealth. This will be the last move to ensure that all issues with respect to financial regulation regimes, consumer credit and the like will be governed and taken care of by one power set within the Commonwealth. This in itself is a good thing. One has to argue that it took the global financial crisis for the states to realise that the need for credit to be regulated by one body within one power was indeed a good and necessary thing. The credit act will commence on 1 July this year. However, it is noted that the government cannot enact a uniform regulatory framework in the absence of referral of powers from the Senate. Section 51 of the Constitution requires a move for those powers to be referred. The states—

Mr Bowen interjecting

Mr ROBERT —We have moved on? Well, the states have referred their powers and that is a good thing!

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October 27, 2015

ParrotMD Instructions

To Record: Press the small red button with a pen or pin and hold. Once the device beeps continue to hold the red button and record your message. When you are finished recording a message release the button.

To Play: Press the large and easily accessible button.

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As simple as that.


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Send a Message

Upon completing and submitting this form the short message below will automatically be sent to your recipients with your contact information attached. Please complete the form below completely and make your voice heard.

ACTION ALERT: Protect America's Health Care

The Affordable Care Act, passed in the last Congress and signed into law by President Obama, was a major step forward in health care for all. It has already made a difference by improving health care access and coverage for millions of Americans. The House of Representatives took a step in the wrong direction by repealing the law that has already brought positive changes in the lives of Americans: children are no longer denied coverage for pre-exisiting conditions, insurers can no longer impose lifetime limits on coverage, adult children can stay on their parents' health plans up until age 26 and Medicare recipients can have a number of preventive and well-care services without being charged a deductible, co-pay, or coinsurance.

Tell your Senators to oppose repeal of the Affordable Care Act by entering your zip code in the box on the right hand side of this page.

This action is no longer active. To view the current list of our active campaigns click here

As provisions of the Affordable Care Act continue to be implemented, more and more Americans will have health care coverage while health care costs are reduced for individuals, businesses and communities.

1. Contact your Senators now by entering your zip code on the right hand side of this page. You can also call your Senators at 202-224-3121. Ask your Senators not to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to stand firm in support of this law which extends coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.

2. Send this alert to other concerned citizens - your grassroots network, your friends and coworkers. Encourage them to contact their elected leaders.


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R Space Events Venue

Ok, so you’ve finally decided when and what time you will be having your party. The next question will be, WHERE? Plan early so that you will be able to book your first choice of venue on the date you want it. Some venues requires 1 year reservation while for others, just months before the […]

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Who we are

Our History

This is not a story about a church that began as an event, program, or even as a result of a community survey; it's a story about a church that started with a dream: a dream of being a different kind of church.

The Bible teaches that when God wants to do a new work, He doesn't form a committee or take a survey; He prepares a leader.  And in 1999, God began to prepare the heart of Kirt Wiggins.

At that time, Kirt and Jennifer (his wife) were serving as missionaries with International Teams.  In this role Kirt had the opportunity to travel to over 35 countries around the world to see God change lives and transform communities.  Kirt and Jennifer would often pray, "Why isn't the church in America growing the way it is around the world?"

It was out of this prayer that God planted the desire in Kirt to start a missional church, one that would be radically committed to the mission of Jesus Christ - "Go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded" (Matthew 28:18-20).

In 1999 God led Kirt away from International Teams to Oak Community Church where he served on staff for five years in various roles - a training ground for what was ahead.  It was during these years that God gave both Kirt and Jennifer an even greater desire to start the kind of church that would reach those who didn't personally know Jesus Christ.  Not only did He increase their desire, He also showed them where He wanted them to act: in Elmhurst, Illinois - the town that had already become their home.

At first, this didn't make sense: "Why Elmhurst?"  But as Kirt and Jennifer prayed and got to know their community better, they discovered that over half of Elmhurst residents did not attend any church regularly.  Additionally, they noticed teenagers and college students were strikingly absent from the church - a fact that struck close to home as their oldest child was nearing his teenage years at the time.

Believing that God was calling them not just to identify the problem but also to be part of the solution, Kirt and Jennifer stepped out in faith in the summer of 2005.  During this time, God raised up a team of 40 people who shared a common vision for a different kind of church in Elmhurst.

From its inception, Pathway has depended on relationships with other church fellowships.  Kirt's home church, Oak Community Church, together with Midwest Church Planting and Harvest Bible Fellowship, partnered together to support and resource this new church.  As a result, on October 5, 2005, Pathway had its first worship gathering in the York Theatre in downtown Elmhurst - there began the journey of pursuing true life together.

This journey continues as God has enlarged our vision to include the western suburbs contained within the trapezoidal area made up of IL routes 355 to the west, 88 to the south, 294 to the east, and 290 to the north.  Our desire is to reach  every person in these local communities with the good news of Jesus Christ, to redeem these communities in practical ways, and to reproduce more churches, campuses, and disciples for the glory of God.


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Pbur's Adventures

The life and times of Patrick Burleson

Growing up fast

Posted on by Patrick

I got this idea of posting beginning of school year and end of school year photos from Linda Sharps (who is hilarious on Twitter). It really shows how much the kids change over a relatively short time and yet we don’t notice it because it’s happening so gradually.

First, Brenden:

Brenden 1st Grade Start Brenden 1st Grade End
First day of 1st Grade (August 27, 2012) Last day of 1st Grade (June 6, 2013)

And then Emily:

3's pre-school start 4's pre-school start
First day of 3-year-old pre-school (September 5, 2012) First day of 4-year-old pre-school (September 4, 2013)

I had to cheat for Emily because in all the events of May, I lost the picture I took of her on her last day of 3-year-old pre-school. So that’s almost exactly one year of growth.

(I’ve been meaning to post this for quite a while, but I wanted to get the post about my dad done first before moving on to happier things.)

One Response to Growing up fast

Carol said on 10/29/2013 at 2:42 pm

You are a good dad, just ask them and they will tell you!

Leave a Reply

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(616) 340-8411 - Pat Vredevoogd Combs

East Grand Rapids.

As one of West Michigan´s premier residential communities, East Grand Rapids has much to offer its community of diverse residents. Located just ten minuets from downtown Grand Rapids, East Grand Rapids is a tight residential community with a beautiful lake, cool downtown district and a world class hospital facility within its borders.

The centerpiece of East Grand Rapids is beautiful Reeds Lake, offering residents and visitors many different recreational opportunities. The lake is great for fishing, boating and picnicking along its shores. Reeds Lake also has a wonderful running/biking trail which wraps around the lake making it a perfect venue for the annual Reeds Lake Run and the Reeds Lake Triathlon.

Located along the side of Reeds Lake is the East Grand Rapids downtown commercial district known as Gas Light Village. This little village has dining opportunities, unique shopping boutiques, lodging and living quarters.

Just down the street from Gas Light Village is Spectrum Health´s East Campus. This 400 bed Hospital provides world class care for adults and children, along with providing the community with ample job opportunities.

One thing you will notice when driving through the East Grand Rapids area is the neatness of all of the residential and commercial properties. This sets East Grand Rapids apart from other communities in the West Michigan. You will also notice that the speed limit throughout the entire city is posted and patrolled at 25 MPH, which keeps the noise down on the many tree and garden lined streets.

With the quiet atmosphere, beautiful residential surroundings and accessibility to the city of Grand Rapids, East Grand Rapids is a perfect place to call home. Look on this website for listings of homes, apartments and condos in this area.

PatsPlace Grand Rapids Real Estate
Contact Pat
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Survey Savvy LLC – Appraising Internet Data

Where most survey companies are fiercely location-oriented, Survey Savvy LLC is one survey company with a difference – they cover and deal with world issues in their surveys. The size and the scope of their demographics are unique, with very precise results.

Another unique feature of the company is that anyone can be a respondent to any survey they will conduct – by being first a member of the company. For the record, Survey Savvy LLC has over 1.5 million members spread out in 190 countries all over the planet.

To be a member, one must be over 14 years old and must have access to an email account and an internet service. There might be some confirmation before some survey and these might be done over the phone.

Membership is filling up a member portrait (actually, your profile) where you will be asked of your age, gender, marital status, work, income and your computer type. The data here is used to pre-qualify you for the surveys.

Demographic Group
If you fit into a particular demographic, you will be asked as a member. In addition, you will still be asked to go through a qualification survey before you can take an actual survey.

Considered one of the world’s most reputable online survey companies, SurveySavvy pay their respondent-members well.  Depending on their grouping, members can sometimes be part of surveys 2 to 3 times a week. Some people, however, can get only around 2 to 3 surveys in a year’s time.

If the “work” is a bit scarce, you may do some tweaks in your portrait a little. Survey Savvy LLC pays well enough for people to want to work there.

Patty Bender

P.S. If you liked this post, share some love, and "re-tweet" it on the left...Thanks!

Note: If you’re looking for a legitimate way to earn income online and want to learn how to build a successful internet business, then I STRONGLY recommend you click here to discover the simple path to online income generation!

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Blah blah blah

I had a nerve block yesterday for my neck. I hope it works, but the jury is still out. There’s still some pain. I’ve been taking it very easy and following the instructions to the letter, to get the best possible results. The doc says it can take up to two weeks for complete results, so I guess we’ll see…

Our dishwasher is broken. God help us, we are so spoiled. Thankfully, it is covered under the warranty that came with our house. The repairman was here today. He said it’s the motor and it has to be ordered. So it will be several days, at least, depending on if they have a motor here in Memphis (sheesh).

Not a lot going on. I made a beautiful chicken pot pie today. Wish I’d taken a picture of it, because it really looked pretty. I made little cut-outs on the top crust and brushed it with egg wash, and even crimped the edges. I also made oatmeal raisin cookies – Steve and I both love those.

I’ve gotten hooked on “The Office” just recently. I just finished Season 2. It’s pretty addictive.

Okay, so that’s about it for my boring life these days. Hopefully, next time I post, it will actually be a little more interesting.

Here's a "blast from the past" picture of me, circa 1966:

More later --

  1. Hello Patty,
    It is nice to hear from you and to see you posted ! How cute you look on this photo ! One can see that you were a funny little girl.
    I hope your neck will be better in the coming days.
    I did not remember if I wished you a Happy New Year so do I : I wish you the best for the coming year : a good health in first, and joy and happiness in your life.
    Thank you for stopping by my blogs.
    See you around

  2. Hey Patty,

    Glad your back!!! I kept checking but no update love the photo of steve and the "kids" glad you had a great christmas and you look so adorable in your photo hope your neck is better and you have a better year this year
    take care

  3. Thanks, Michelle. It's so good to hear from you! Hope everything is going well for you and yours.

Please leave me a comment so I know you've been here! Tell me what you think -- I really want to know.


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Thursday, May 15, 2014

More sections sewn together

I made some progress last evening with getting a few more sections sewn together. This is what it looks like now.

Here is a close up so you can see the image.

I have several pieces of fabric that were given to me thru my brother by the lady who is the wardrobe lady for Jimmy Buffett. The fabric was designed and printed just for the shirts for JB's band. Many are border prints and this sea plane was in the sky part of one of the prints. I will have to take a picture of a couple of the prints and post tomorrow. They are interesting to look at and see all the imagery that was used like volcanos, palm trees, surf boards, grass shacks, and sharks.

We only got .54 inches of rain yesterday, but we are getting more today. This is what the radar looked like this morning.

I received a package from G yesterday containing a half yard of guitar fabric and a yard of the pianos the she got on sale at a shop going out of business. Thanks G! I will add this to my stash of music fabric.

Vicki W said...

I love the spliced image. That's really cool.

QuiltSwissy said...

you are so very welcome! I am just amazaed at that plane! What a great way to use it!


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Thursday, March 17, 2011

Play Dough Time

We made play dough!
I have been wanting to get Caleb some play dough for a while and then I decided it would be much more fun if we just made some.
Here is the recipe I used although I ended up adding a lot of flour and a little salt to make it not "gummy".  That's the great thing about this recipe just keep adding more flour or water until you have a good dough.

2 cups flour

2 cups warm water

1 cup salt

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon cream of tartar (optional for improved elasticity)

food coloring (liquid, powder, or unsweetened drink mix)- I used liquid to make brighter colors

We mixed all the ingredients together...adding more flour and salt here and there.  I had a good, ready and willing helper.

Step 4 takes the longest-adding the food coloring and kneading the dough reallly good to get the color a good solid color.

Next I stuck it in the fridge for about 20 minutes to let it get good and set...and then it's time to play!

Caleb had a lot of fun...and for that matter, so did I!  I stuck the playdough in a tupperwear container when we were done and he can play with it over and over!  I am waiting for some lavender essential oil to show up in my mailbox so I can mix some of that in the dough...and then I will let Caleb play with it before bedtime in hopes of it relaxing him.....a mama can dream, right? ;-)

In other news, I found out yesterday that some of my etsy items were featured in a contest on!
Here is the link if you are interested in looking:
Scroll down under the photo of the kitchen and click on "See Vanessa's Picks for KellyAnn".
You will see my "EAT" letters, Black and White Peacock Teapot and Shabby Chic Platter.
I am still beside myself about it...very big news for this small town I am just waiting for the news that someone at hgtv made a huge mistake ;-)

Mary Catherine said...

congrats on the feature! It looks like the designer at HGTV really likes your art. After all, no other shop in that sequence got 3 items! :)

Michelle A'etonu said...

congrats for being on hgtv!!! awesome! i'll have to make the play dough when my daughter is old enough. you might have this already, but i left an award for you on my blog!

Mommy Head said...

How very fun! I am definitely pinning this post on the Family Fun Friday pinterest page! Congrats.

Love what you did with the pictures. BTW, I am putting together a holiday gift guide if you would like to participate. Check out for more info.

Thanks for linking up with Frontline Moms and Mommy Head Advenures for Family Fun Friday.


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Paul Fletcher MP

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Speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia

Portfolio Speeches Monday, 14 November 2016

I am very pleased to speak at this important CEDA event discussing infrastructure priorities for Western Sydney.

Can I acknowledge Blacktown Mayor and President of WESROC, Councillor Stephen Bali, Kevin Doherty and the other distinguished guests.

My particular focus today is on Western Sydney Airport – what it means for Western Sydney and for the nation, the economic growth it will catalyse, and the program of work we have underway towards the outcome of Western Sydney Airport opening by the mid twenty twenties.

I want to start by discussing the economic importance of airports. Next I want to talk about the rare opportunity we have with Western Sydney Airport.

Finally I want to explain the careful work being done by the Turnbull Government, in close co-operation with the Baird Government, to capitalise on that opportunity – and deliver a very significant economic boost for Western Sydney.

The Economic Importance of Airports

Let me turn firstly, then, to the proposition that airports are of great economic importance – to the national economy but also, crucially, to the particular geographic region in which they are located. That is why governments around the world devote considerable policy energy to airports.

Here for example is what the Davies Commission – appointed to consider the question of expanding aviation capacity for London – said in its 2015 report:

'Good aviation connectivity is vital for the UK economy. It promotes trade and inward investment, and is especially crucial for a global city like London. The service sector, whether the City, the media industry or universities, depends heavily on prompt face-to-face contact. There is strong evidence that good transport links, and especially aviation connectivity, make an important contribution to enhancing productivity...[1]'

Of course, a precondition to the decision to proceed with Western Sydney Airport was the findings of our own equivalent of the Davies Commission—the 2012 Joint Study on Aviation Capacity.[2]

This study found that Kingsford Smith Airport does not have enough capacity to meet rapidly growing demand for air travel to and from Sydney. By 2027 there will be no more slots available at Kingsford Smith; by the mid-2030s there will be no additional capacity.

I saw repeated evidence of the economic significance of airports in September this year when I visited Changi Airport in Singapore, Incheon in Korea, Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton in London, and Schiphol airport in the Netherlands.

Changi generates over 5 per cent of Singapore’s GDP. Heathrow provides 25 per cent of the jobs in the communities around the airport.

The Dutch have built up Schiphol Airport over many years: its share of traffic to and from Europe significantly exceeds the Netherlands’ share of Europe’s population.

Korea’s Government invested billions to build the massive new Incheon Airport, reclaiming land from the sea to create a 56 square kilometre site.

Importantly, there are economic benefits not just from a city’s first airport, but from other airports. I was particularly interested to visit Gatwick and Luton, two of the five airports serving London.

The management teams at both of these airports highlighted the importance of their catchment areas: Luton has an advantage for passengers to the north of London and Gatwick for passengers to the south.

Similarly, Western Sydney Airport will have a natural catchment area: for around two million people it will be closer than Kingsford Smith Airport.

The chief executive of one of our local low cost carriers pointed out to me that he has customers living in Western Sydney who are paying $69 for a flight from Sydney to Melbourne – but $180 in cab fares to get to and from Kingsford Smith. This is an insight into how Western Sydney Airport will stimulate additional traffic – as the total cost of an interstate trip will now be considerably lower for a lot of people.

At Gatwick and Luton they spoke of the number of people who work at the airport and live nearby. We can expect the same with Western Sydney Airport; by 2030 it is expected to generate about 9,000 jobs, with most to be held by locals.

It is easy to understand the direct economic impact of an airport, in the jobs and activity it generates on site, and in the trips it stimulates which might otherwise not occur.

What is sometimes less obvious is the capacity of an airport to attract complementary economic development in the regions surrounding it.

As well as building Incheon Airport, the Korean Government is building a brand new city across the bay, Song-do. This has six foreign universities as well as domestic ones, and significant manufacturing areas, for example for pharmaceutical products which are exported around the world.

At Changi they are planning a new runway and the massive new Terminal 5, on some 1000 hectares of land reclaimed from the sea. The plans include extensive commercial office facilities – targeted at businesses that will value an airport location.

Schiphol has substantial office and meeting facilities at the airport – for example French multinational Danone holds company meetings there because it is more convenient and better located than any of the French airports.

At Heathrow they cite the economic clusters located around the airport, in sectors like pharmaceuticals and technology.

Of course each of Incheon, Changi and Schiphol are airports with 50 million passengers a year or more, and they are the dominant airport for an entire country. Western Sydney Airport, at least in its early years, will be much smaller scale, starting at around 3-5 million passengers a year.

Nevertheless, a key lesson from these and other airports around the world is that maximising the economic impact of the airport requires not just planning for the airport itself but also planning for complementary land use around the airport.

There is an increasing trend for commercial business precincts to be developed adjacent to airports. Bordered by the Western Sydney Priority Growth Area and close to the existing Western Sydney Employment Area, the Western Sydney Airport site is well positioned to capitalise on this trend.

The New South Wales Government’s Greater Sydney Commission is doing a lot of work on these issues – considering how best to plan the lands around the airport site to maximise the economic benefit of the airport.

The jargon term ‘aerotropolis’ is sometimes used to describe the cluster of economic activity centred on an airport.

There has already been some excellent work done in highlighting some of the possibilities that Western Sydney Airport could offer. The Sydney Business Chamber has commissioned a very useful report, ‘A Western Sydney Aerotropolis: Maximising the Benefits of Badgerys Creek’.

The author, US academic Dr John Kasarda, argues that “driven by a robust WSA, Western Sydney possesses the fundamental ingredients to become a successful aerotropolis.”[3]

He also highlights some challenges which need to be overcome to achieve this vision – including, fundamentally, that WSA succeeds in attracting a sufficient share of air traffic. In other words, if the airport is to be the core of a new cluster of economic activity, it needs to be a successful airport, attracting and growing traffic.

There are a number of reasons to be confident of Western Sydney Airport’s prospects. Demand for air travel globally continues to rise steadily. Globally, international passenger traffic rose 6.5 per cent in 2015. This is well above the 10-year average annual growth rate of 5.5 per cent.[4]

In Australia, the continued growth in international scheduled passenger traffic reflects the international average – up 6.5 per cent in August 2016 on the previous year.

Currently 40 per cent of international passengers land in Sydney and international tourism demand in Australia is expected to grow by 4.5 per cent per annum.[5] Western Sydney Airport provides vital expansion capacity to meet that demand.

A related factor, as I have already mentioned, is the natural catchment area that Western Sydney Airport will enjoy. Underlying demand from the people of that catchment area – for both domestic and international travel – is expected to continue to grow.

A further important factor is the growing market share held by low cost carriers, for both domestic and international travel. Low cost carriers represented 18.4 per cent of international passenger traffic in Australia in August 2016 — up from 15.8 per cent year on year.

I am confident that low cost carriers will be attracted to Western Sydney Airport, offering travel to domestic cities and also selected regional destinations such as New Zealand and Bali from the outset. It is also likely that inbound international low cost carriers will see Western Sydney Airport as offering new opportunities to add routes to Australia.

I was struck on my visit to Luton Airport north of London by the level of activity at that airport, which largely serves low cost carriers such as Easyjet and Wizz. Luton had over 15 million passengers last year and is growing strongly.

London is a good example of how demand can be shared in a multi-airport city with secondary airports supporting the total aviation capacity, including the growing low-cost carrier market.

In the mid-2030s, Sydney is expected to exceed 84 million passengers, shared across Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport and proposed Western Sydney Airport.

Let me mention one other economic impact that we can expect from Western Sydney Airport: its capacity to generate a substantial number of jobs for residents of Western Sydney.

Certainly some of that will come during construction. During the construction period (of around 8 years) the airport is expected to generate 11,346 full-time equivalent jobs. [6]

But airports generate more jobs in operation than in construction.

Currently around a third of Western Sydney workers commute outside the region each day. This is unproductive time, away from work, from home and families.

So local employment opportunities are critical - and Western Sydney Airport will create jobs for thousands of workers both onsite and in the surrounding region.

Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport illustrates this point – with around 80 per cent of its workers living less than 30 minutes away.

The Western Sydney Aerotropolis paper I mentioned earlier makes that point that airports are generators of jobs at all levels of income and education:

'… the economic benefits of aerotropolis development are broadly inclusive. At least as many jobs are generated for those with lesser education as for those with higher education.[7]'

The Rare Opportunity we have with Western Sydney Airport

If airports are of such economic importance, then the opportunity to build a new one at Western Sydney is very valuable.

In fact I want to take a few moments to reflect on just why this opportunity is so rare and special. There are several factors which have come together.

The first factor is that, over many decades, successive governments, Liberal and Labor, have taken far-sighted decisions which we can now capitalise on.

In the nineteen eighties the Hawke Labor Government chose the Badgerys Creek site.[9] It also began purchasing the land; with the result that there has been a 1700 hectare site available for Western Sydney Airport for some time.

Good decisions made by previous governments mean the airport site has been largely protected from encroaching development since the 1980s. Planning restrictions have protected the airport site from noise-sensitive developments; this means that Western Sydney Airport will be able to operate without a curfew.

The Turnbull Government has committed that during evening hours, a preferred mode of operation for Western Sydney Airport will be so called ‘head to head operations’ to the southwest, when safe to do so – which is expected to be more than eighty per cent of the time.

What this means is that aircraft will both land from, and take off to, the southwest, enabling them to fly over very lightly populated areas.

Let me quote from what the Shadow Minister, Anthony Albanese, said recently on this issue:

'And one of the benefits of Badgerys Creek that’s been shown by study after study, this is the third EIS that has been conducted into it, is that you can actually have flight paths that don’t impact at all in terms of during the night. That’s the position that we put forward earlier this year, has been adopted now by the government.[9]'

His characterisation of how this approach was developed is not quite right – in fact it was included in the draft environmental impact statement issued by the government last year – but the fundamental point is that we have this option available thanks to work done by previous governments over many years.

While he was Minister, Albanese also commissioned another important piece of work: the 2012 Joint Study on Aviation which concluded Badgerys Creek was still the most appropriate site.

Of course, it took a Coalition Government to make the decision, in 2014, to proceed with building Western Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek.

The second factor is that we have the chance to take decisions here for the long term. The opening date of mid twenty twenties gives a long enough lead time to ensure that we get this opportunity right.

Importantly, we are not just taking decisions for the opening phase of the airport. We are taking decisions which will have consequences for fifty or a hundred years.

That is why Western Sydney Airport is being planned with expansion capacity. It will open with one runway – albeit long enough, at 3,700 metres, to receive aircraft up to and including the A380 – and an initial terminal, scaled to support up to ten million passengers. It is likely to take until the early 2030s before this traffic level is reached.

Beyond that point, there will be terminal expansion, and by the late 2040s, a second runway will be built. By the 2060s, the airport could have 80 million passengers a year.

The third really important factor which contributes to the scale of the opportunity here is that Western Sydney Airport is being built on a greenfields site in an area which today is largely semi-rural – but where very strong population growth is expected. In the next twenty years an additional one million people are expected to live in Western Sydney.

We have a unique opportunity to plan for optimal land use around the airport. Part of that is ensuring that land uses are consistent with the safe operation of an airport, under what is known as the National Airports Safeguarding Framework (NASF.)

This covers issues like airspace protection; noise exposure controls; building-generated windshear and turbulence; wildlife strike risk; wind turbine risk to aircraft and pilot lighting distractions.

But the bigger part of this issue turns on optimising land use planning to maximise the economic benefits of the airport, as I spoke about earlier.

Our Program of Work on Western Sydney Airport

Let me turn, then, lastly, to the program of work the Turnbull Government has under way to deliver Western Sydney Airport.

Firstly, there is a comprehensive and thorough process to obtain the requisite environmental and planning approvals.

In 2015 we released a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and a draft Airport Plan.

Earlier this year, we released the final EIS, which then went to my colleague Josh Frydenberg, Minister for Environment and Energy, for consideration. The EIS is the culmination of more than 700 field investigations and 19 technical studies, with almost 5,000 submissions received from the community, industry and stakeholders.

Last Friday, Minister Frydenberg MP concluded his consideration and advised me of the environmental conditions to be placed on the proposed Western Sydney Airport.

These conditions will be included in the final Airport Plan and will bind any airport developer and operator to comply with them.

I will now take the necessary time to consider these conditions and appropriately reflect them in the Airport Plan.

This needs to happen before I can make a final determination of the Airport Plan, which would authorise the Stage 1 Development of the proposed Western Sydney Airport.

The Airport Plan will guide the Stage 1 development — that is a single runway airport and facilities capable of handling up to 10 million passengers a year — which will incorporate the latest technology and embed sustainability in design, construction and operation.

The second area of work we have underway is our program of consultation with Sydney Airport Corporation Limited, owners of Kingsford Smith Airport. This company has the benefit of a ‘right of first refusal’, as part of the terms on which it bought Kingsford Smith Airport from the government in 2002.

Under the right of first refusal, there are extensive conditions which apply to the consultation process. The process will culminate in the government issuing Sydney Airport with what is called a ‘Notice of Intention.’

This will be a complete set of contractual documents, setting out everything required to regulate the arrangements under which the airport is built and operated – including, for example, a deed governing the development of the airport, a lease of the airport land, and a range of other matters. The final contractual package is expected to be more than one thousand pages!

The idea of the consultation process is that by the time it gets formally issued, Sydney Airport knows exactly what is in it – in the legal language, that it is ‘substantially familiar’ with the terms. What then happens is that Sydney Airport has a four month period in which to consider the documents, and decide whether or not it wants to take up the right to develop Western Sydney Airport.

Accordingly, the issue of the notice of intention, and Sydney Airport’s response, is absolutely critical to the question of who will actually do the work of developing the airport.

The Government intends to issue the notice before the end of this year, following a lengthy consultation process. We have spent many, many days working with Sydney Airport – and we appreciate the time, energy and expertise they have brought to the process.

The third strand of activity is our close co-ordination with the NSW Government, to work to maximise the broader economic benefits of Western Sydney Airport.

Last Month, Prime Minister Turnbull and Premier Baird signed a memorandum of understanding that will pave the way for a City Deal in Western Sydney.

The Western Sydney City Deal will be a coordinated plan for growth that complements the Government’s significant infrastructure investment in Western Sydney and maximises the benefits from the airport precinct.

We are well advanced on the $3.6 billion Western Sydney Infrastructure Plan, which is jointly funded by the Commonwealth and NSW Governments.

Major road upgrades are underway, in a $3.6 billion programme over ten years - in partnership with the New South Wales government.

The Northern Road is to be upgraded to four lanes along its entire length. There will be a new M12 which will run from the M7 to connect to Western Sydney Airport, in time for the airport’s opening.

This investment in ground transport infrastructure is designed to ensure that workers, passengers and visitors can have easy access to the airport.

We are also working to make sure that the airport is rail ready. There will be a corridor across the airport site protected for rail – with provision for two track pairs – and the site planning includes a ‘station box’. This will be an excavated space close to the terminal location, into which a station can be built when ready.

As to when that time will be, that question is being examined by the Australian and NSW Governments’ Joint Scoping Study on Rail Needs for Western Sydney.

The study will identify rail service options, connections, travel speeds, and types of train services to connect the Western Sydney region and service a Western Sydney Airport. The study will consider whether rail could be operational when the airport opens – or if not, how soon afterwards.

There is certainly a lot of interest in these questions. Some 123 formal submissions have been received in response to the discussion paper issued earlier this year, and more than 900 people completed the online survey. [10]

The study team is now busy digesting this input, and developing its recommendations to the two governments. We expect to receive the final study in the first half of 2017.

Let me conclude, then, by reflecting on the scale of the opportunity which Western Sydney Airport offers – by drawing on the observations of some critical stakeholders.

Premier Baird has described “the Western Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek as perhaps the biggest development in Western Sydney’s history”[11].

Lucy Turnbull, Chief Commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission, sees the airport as the anchor to a new city, arguing that “Sydney must be reimagined as consisting of three great cities [Western, Central and Eastern] for its growth to be successful”[12].

I think this is both a timely and helpful contribution to the debate.

I want to close by returning to a point that was highlighted by Dr Kasarda in his report for the Sydney Business Chamber, and which was also very much reinforced to me on the visits I made to a number of global airports a couple of months ago.

Western Sydney Airport offers enormous potential economic benefit – but a necessary condition to realise that benefit is that the airport itself is a success. That means it needs to attract airlines and passengers and it needs to grow steadily over time.

In turn, it needs to have a clear market strategy – which needs to influence decisions about for example how the terminal is designed, how much airlines pay to use the airport and so on.

So there are a series of important decisions for us to get right. The design of the airport; the ground transport connectivity; land use planning around the airport; and the operational strategy of the airport management team once it opens.

If we do get these decisions right – and there is a huge amount of work going on across multiple fronts – the benefits for Western Sydney, for Sydney and the nation will be profound.

[1] Airports Commission:Final Report July 2015,, downloaded 12/11/16, p 4

[2] Joint Study on Aviation Capacity in the Sydney Region 2012

[3] P29, A Western Sydney Aerotropolis – Maximising the benefits of Badgerys Creek, Kasarda J., published by NSW business chamber, p 27

[4] International Air Transport Association:

[5] Up to 9.6 million passengers in 2023. Aviation: International airline activity statistical report, Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics, August 2016.

[6] Environmental Impact Statement – Volume 2a, Chapter 24, p. 529.

[7] P29, A Western Sydney Aerotropolis – Maximising the benefits of Badgerys Creek, Kasarda J., published by NSW business chamber.

[8] See .

[10] Western Sydney Rail Needs Study Discussion Paper -

[11] ‘A letter from the Premier of NSW’, p2 of Shaping Future Cities – Designing Western Sydney, Deloitte. December 2015

[12] Media Release 19 Oct 2016 – ‘Lucy Turnbull sets vision of three great cities at annual Bradfield Oration’ : . See also, news article at:

Authorised by Paul Fletcher MP, Level 2, 280 Pacific Highway Lindfield NSW 2070.

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Proton New Sedan

Proton has posted more information on it’s teaser page‘s FAQ section. They’ve revealed the exterior dimensions of the new sedan. Let’s compare it to the GEN2 and the Waja.

  New Sedan GEN2 Waja
Overall Length 4477mm 4310mm 4465mm
Overall Width 1725mm 1725mm 1740mm
Overall Height 1438mm 1435mm 1420mm
Fuel Capacity 50 L 50 L 60 L
Luggage Volume 430 L 415 L 415 L
Weight 1180 – 1210kg 1175 – 1195kg 1175 – 1205kg*

*Not sure about the Waja’s weight range

The teaser page also reveals the base-line model will have 15 inch steel wheels and wheel covers with 195/60/R15 tyres, central locking, 4 power windows, alarm with immobilizer, front disc and rear drum brakes, reverse sensors, fixed rear seats, and a normal CD player with 2 speakers.

Proton New Sedan 1.6 Base-line (M) AT – RM 48,800.00
Proton New Sedan 1.6 Base-line (M) MT – RM 45,800.00
Proton New Sedan 1.6 Base-line (S) AT – RM 48,350.00
Proton New Sedan 1.6 Base-line (S) MT – RM 45,350.00

The medium-line model is further enhanced with alloy sports rims and 195/60/R15 tyres, a driver seat airbag, a foldable split rear seat bench, steering wheel audio controls, an MP3-capable CD player with 4 speakers, electrically controlled door mirrors, and foglamps.

Proton New Sedan 1.6 Medium-line (M) AT – RM 52,800.00
Proton New Sedan 1.6 Medium-line (M) MT – RM 49,800.00

The top of the range high-line model gains additional features over the medium-line model – antilock brakes and electronic brakeforce distribution, disc brakes on all four wheels, both driver and passenger airbags, and remote trunk opening.

Proton New Sedan 1.6 High-line (M) AT – RM 55,800.00

This would be the first Proton sedan with a standard driver airbag on all models except for the baseline model for budget-conscious buyers!

In related news, Proton has reported 200 bookings for the Proton New Sedan in the first two days of the pre-launch booking period.


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Sunday, January 15, 2012

More from that Old Basket and Easter!

Good Morning!

Couple more finishes from that old basket of mine! And still more in it -- This is a Thimbleberries block from a BOM that I never finished ( imagine that!) So I had some coordinating fabric - so I added 2 borders and quilted it, it is 27 inches square a nice size table topper. And the best part is -- it is DONE!

This is also from a BOM that I never finished - I h ad 3 other blocks from it and I finished and sold those at last years craft shows, so I hope this is also going to sell fast this fall. But again - something Done!!

Also in my basket I had some Easter stuff -- This pattern was in there and I had pulled some fabric - and I have some towels I thought these would look cute on towels and maybe potholders, I am in the Potholder Pass 10 and I am in the the Spring group - my partner that I got likes green and blue-- so I was thinking of appliqueing on blue and bordering with green and then I have a green towel - so it might be a cute set. I will work on it and see. But this one I think is going to be appliqued on a placemat I got at the thrift shop - I got 4 blue and yellow placemats for $1.99 all in new condition -- so I thought a bunny in the corner might work. I will let you know where this little bunny ends up.

Well yesterday I did not get to sew much, Dear Hubby is removing the whirlpool tub from the basement -- the motor repair will cost almost as much as a new one, so I was downt here for 5 hours gutting the bathroom with him. Today he wants to watch football, so you guessed it, I will be sewing!
Hope your weekend is going great!
Happy Stitches!

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Monday, October 15, 2012

Catching up with you!

Good Morning!

How have you been??  Life has been crazy busy here!  I did a fantastic craft show the last Thursday in September, so prepping for that I was not able to blog much.  And October has been crazy busy so far too.  Last weekend I went to Craft Camp and left on Friday and returned late Sunday night so I could go back to work on Monday AM.   I did teach classes on Saturday -- I taught these 2 cute wool journals, I got the red wool fabric for $4 for 2 yards at a quilt show we had went to back in September.  This is the snowman journal - lucky I have the sample because I sold all my kits :)

 This is my flower journal -- great for garden notes - I sold half the kits for this one, but I think I might make up a  few more of the kits and give them as gifts to fellow gardeners.

 Then I taught a quick postcard class, this is one of the cards I made -- I also had a snowman, gingerbread boy and cardinal postcard -- it was a fun weekend.
This past week I was nominated for President of Garden Club -- I was the only one nominated so I "won" - it is a good group and it should be pretty stress free, it is a good group.

This past weekend it rained most of the weekend, we ran errands on Saturday and yesterday I got some household chores done, not much sewing :(  Hope to get to that tonight after work!

So what have you been up to??

Happy Stitches

Primitive Stars said...

Hi Dorothy....busy the bookcovers,so cute....Congrats on your win....just been doing a little rummaging here and there....Happy Crafting,Blessings Francine....P.S. never did recieve my Ditty bag swap package from you....darn mail....

Cherie said...

Glad to see you've been having fun! Such cute little goodies there =D

Kendra said...

For crying out loud Dorothy, if I didn't know better I would have thought you had fallen off the face of the earth!

Sorry I couldn't be secretary, maybe for your next term LOL!


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The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet - The Pajama Game

Classic 1950s nonsense here. A series of misunderstandings results in Dad, Ozzie Nelson, walking about town in his pajamas.
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Friday, July 18, 2008

Site Change

As I mentioned in the header above, this site will be primarily focused on the coming elections. While I've enjoyed rambling on about James Posey or the latest iPhone upgrade, I thought given the state of the nation and the huge opportunity for a monumental change of direction any small role I can play is important.

Al Gore lost Florida and the Presidency by less than 300 votes. What do you think that margin would be today?

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Seeing Cindy

by David Potorti,
August 12th, 2005

As a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, I¹ve been witnessing Cindy Sheehan¹s Crawford odyssey with a bittersweet mixture of pride, support and sadness. I felt the same way when Megan Bartlett, one of the first EMT workers to arrive at the World Trade Center site, founded Ground Zero For Peace/First Responders Against War; as military parents Nancy Lessin and Charley Richardson founded Military Families Speak Out; as the 9/11 widows known as the “Jersey Girls” dragged their government, kicking and screaming, into conducting an independent commission into the 9/11 attacks; and as Michael Hoffman, Kelly Dougherty, Jimmy Massey and others came together to create Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Ordinary Americans with first-hand knowledge of the results of terrorism, violence and war were bearing witness and asking to be heard.

I felt pride at their personal courage, support for their desire to spare others the horrors they had experienced, and sadness at the inevitable response they would draw from the government and its corporate media: Ignore them. They¹re small in number. They¹re not authentic. It¹s all about politics. They¹re funded by the Democrats. They¹re traitors. They¹re an invention of the media. They have a personal axe to grind. They don¹t know what they¹re talking about.

Every argument raised about Cindy Sheehan has been raised about us, and about the rest, each argument reflecting the same goal: to dehumanize us. Faced with the dissonant reality that 9/11 families might not support the bombing of Afghanistan, or military families might not support the war in Iraq, or that there¹s people with a few more questions for the 9/11 Commission, our reality‹our actual existence‹has to be denied. One radio pundit has claimed that we “aren¹t even 9/11 family members.”

Denial and dehumanization are required elements of terrorism, violence and war. The humanity of our families was invisible to the people who murdered them on September 11th. The humanity of Afghan civilians, already suffering, was invisible to the Americans who supported the bombing of their country. The humanity of Iraqi civilians, already suffering, was invisible to the Americans whipped into war on a series of calculated lies. The humanity of the troops and reservists doing hard time in Iraq is invisible to the people sending them there. And the humanity of those troops killed or maimed for the rest of their lives remains largely invisible to the American people.

To stand up in the midst of this denial and demand that our humanity, and the humanity of others, be recognized, is not just a patriotic act of a high order. It¹s a way of reclaiming the life that was taken away from us. To respond that our demands are inauthentic, insincere, an “invention” –in short, not real‹dehumanizes us in the same way that terrorism, violence and war dehumanizes us all.

Even after he has shared his “sympathy,” many continue to ask the President to see Cindy. The fact is, he doesn¹t have to see Cindy in Crawford. He can see Cindy in the brave numbers of Americans with first hand knowledge of the war on terror as they stand up to bear witness to what they, and we, have lost. He can see Cindy in the growing majority of Americans who see war for what it really is, and want the troops home. And he can see Cindy in the mutual humanity, sense of common purpose and worldwide desire for peace that revealed itself to the United States immediately after 9/11‹and remains, today, our best hope of survival.

Long after his Crawford vacation is over, we¹ll still be there—demanding to be seen.

Filed in: Voices of Peaceful Tomorrows

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