Desperate for food

In the early 1990s famine took hold in North Korea. The inefficient collective farms had never been able to feed the population and changing conditions caused China and Russia to cut back on the aid they had been supplying the regime. North Korea is a tightly controlled society and though no official figures are available (the regime ordered hospitals and physicians not to record starvation as a cause of death), it is estimated that up to a tenth of the population perished. That would amount to somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million people.

It has been said that people raised in Communist countries cannot fend for themselves, because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. When the public-distribution system was cut off, people tapped their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in fields, and draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants.

Women exchanged recipe tips: When making cornmeal, don’t throw out the husks, cob, leaves, and stem of the corn—throw everything into the grinder. Even if it isn’t nutritious, it is filling. Boil noodles for at least an hour to make them appear bigger. Add a few leaves of grass to soup to make it look as if it contained vegetables. Women would strip the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour.

North Koreans picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the roof to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.

The gathering and production of food was the focus of all enterprise. You woke up early to find your breakfast, and as soon as it was finished you thought about what to find for dinner. You slept during lunchtime because you were exhausted.

For more information read “The Good Cook: A battle against famine in North Korea” by Barbara Demick in The New Yorker (November 2, 2009) pp. 58-64.

You can find a audio-slide overview of Demick’s article here.

More than just talk

What passes for conversation is often a predictable recitation of undeveloped thoughts and unexamined feelings, exchanged as the currency that buys rudimentary comfort and affirmation: “Know what I mean?” “Yeah.” This kind of two-stroke exchange, just a notch above grunting at each other—what a friend of mine wryly called “grooming behavior”—is hardly an evil in itself. Some of it may be necessary. But neither is it sufficient for sustaining intellectual vitality or fostering authentic intimacy. Conversation confined to such formulaic exchanges may simply serve as a narcotic to dull the hunger pangs of an undernourished spirit.

To “converse” originally meant to live among or together, or to act together, to foster community, to commune with. It was a large verb that implied public, cooperative, and deliberate action. When we converse, we act together toward a common end, and we act upon one another. Indeed, conversation is a form of activism—a political enterprise in the largest and oldest sense—a way of building and sustaining community. Consider, for instance, the large, long public conversations out of which have emerged the very structures and foundational documents that give shape to the social contracts we live by. A good conversationalist directs attention, inspires, corrects, affirms, and empowers others. It is a demanding vocation that involves attentiveness, skilled listening, awareness of one’s own interpretive frames, and a will to understand and discern what is true. It may be that we don’t often enough consider conversation as a form of social action, as a ministry, or as a spiritual discipline.

From: Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; 2009) pp. 88-90.

Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize

There has been an enormous amount of discussion about whether President Obama deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and what his winning implies about the Prize itself. Some of the discussion has been thoughtful, but most, sadly but not surprisingly, has been shrill, cynical, and partisan.

It is always difficult to see with a perspective that is wider than one’s own interests. It’s hard, for example, to try to see myself as my wife, friends, and neighbors see me, since my perspective seems so natural, so obvious that I can’t believe everyone doesn’t share it. The same goes for how we see our nation. We assume everyone should see the U.S. and President Obama as we see them, and are surprised to discover they don’t necessarily share our perspective.

This is part of the issue that has arisen over President Obama’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, as historian David Kaiser explains in a superb essay, “Why Obama Won the Prize,” which you can read here.

(I am grateful to my good friend Dr Paul Waibel, professor of history at Belhaven College, Jackson, MS for alerting me to Kaiser’s essay.)

Jazz for kids (and the rest of us)

My dear friend, Katie Bowser, lives in Nashville, YN, which is not the reason she is a musician. She is a musician because when God handed out gifts in songwriting and singing, he chose to skip a whole lot of otherwise nice people and pour an extra measure into Katie’s soul. That may seem unfair, and even be unfair by some measures, but then Katie chooses to generously share her gifts so it evens out.

For I’m not sure how long, Katie has been working on a way to introduce children to jazz, and now it’s ready for distribution. Coal Train Railroad is available here, and I urge you to buy a copy. Buy one for each child in your life. If there are no children in your life, get a new life.

The songs were written and performed by Katie, in collaboration with musical friends that love music as much as she does. It’s clever, and creative, and introduces children to a form of music that from its beginning sets hearts and imaginations free. “It’s music about kid stuff,” Katie writes, “juice, snuggling, naps, getting along, sharing—with music that we can all enjoy together.”

So click here and order. The children in your life will thank you, and you can thank me.

(They have a wonderful special on right now that is great for Christmas, but even if you miss that, Coal Train Railroad is worth getting.)

New word needed

OK, I need a new word.

Here's the definition: when one's inbox is so full that by the time an email is answered the sender has not only forgotten they ever sent it, they have moved on in their life enough as to be no longer interested in the topic.

Maybe I need more than one word.

One for that situation. Another for the email response that no longer connects with reality. Another for the sort of emailer I am.

One more thing: if I am the only person with this problem, kindly keep that information to yourself.

Movie Comment: Julie and Julia (2009)

I watched this film with my best friend and wife, Margie, and felt we were celebrating good things the entire time. Celebrating what Christians call God’s "common grace," the amazing goodness he richly spreads throughout creation for our enjoyment. Goodness experienced in relationships, sex, food and wine, and finding a sense of calling in the myriad diversions and distractions of life.

Directed by Nora Ephron from her own screenplay, Julie and Julia is an honest look at joy and disappointment in the ordinary ups and downs of life. Meryl Street plays Julia Child, the larger than life brashly endearing woman who single-handedly transformed how America cooked when she published Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. Her love of food and love for her husband, Paul Child, played wonderfully by Stanley Tucci is simply infectious. In 2002 a young woman, bored with her corporate cubicle, decided to cook through Child’s cookbook in a year (524 recipes in 365 days) and blog the experience. Julie Powell’s (played by Amy Adams) blog later was published as Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (2007).

I’ve always loved the opening to the Christian Story, where God not only calls the universe into existence in a riot of beauty, but then creates beings in his likeness to share his appreciation of all that is good. “The Lord God,” the Scriptures record, placed his newly formed creatures “in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Keeping it involved tenderly caring for it as the Lord’s, and therefore precious. Working it can be translated “cultivating it,” a term that is related to human culture. And so, as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, to this day we find fulfillment in cultivating the whole continuum of life and culture, whether land, relationships, or meals, finding in our obedience a whisper of the shalom God intended for us.

Julie and Julia is a celebration of this reality. Of the graciousness of grace, of how loving marriages (not perfect ones), a love of good food shared in meaningful community, and finding a sense of significance and calling all lead to glimpses of delight too good to be missed.

A prayer of confession

God, my Father.

You asked for my hands, that you might use them for your purpose. I gave them for a moment, then withdrew them, for the work was hard, inconvenient, and mundane. You asked for my mouth to speak out against injustice. I gave you a whisper that I might not be accused of being aligned with the wrong party or ideology. You asked for my eyes to see the pain of poverty. I closed them, for I did not want to see, choosing instead to believe the myth that all that really tried would be fine financially. You asked for my life, that you might work through me for your glory. I gave a small part that I might not get too involved, because I am busy.

Lord, forgive my calculated efforts to serve you—only when it is convenient for me to do so, only in those places where it is safe to do so, and only with those who make it easy to do so.

Father, forgive me, renew me, send me out as a useable instrument, that I might take seriously the meaning of the gospel.

For your Son Jesus’ sake, who withheld nothing.

Amen

Source: adapted from the Prayer of Confession in the liturgy of Trinity Presbyterian Church (Rochester, MN) on September 6, 2009.