Repost: Desiderata

Every so often, I come back to this poem. I think it summarizes important life lessons in a very concise way. Very good, thoughtful wisdom.

From the Old St. Paul's Church, Baltimore, Maryland:

Desiderata

Go placidly among the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with other persons, you may become vain and bitter, for there will always be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity it is perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the council of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
Be careful.
Strive to be happy.

It's Just Like Facebook, Only, You Know...Real.

Mark Schaefer, the United Methodist chaplain at my university is becoming known for his creative sermon series'. Last semester, he did a series entitled "The Seven Words You Can't Say In Church" (a la George Carlin). These words included "Evolution", "Sex", "(Christian) Intolerance", "Death", and "She". The new series for this semester is based on the advertising campaign that we've been doing around the university, in which the core sign says, "Community. It's just like Facebook. Only, you know...real." The entire series is based around certain aspects of the Facebook community and how they relate to the Christian life. Tonight's sermon was the first in the series, and I have to say that it's one of the best sermons I've heard in a long time. It was entitled, "Jesus Added You As A Friend." The sermon discusses how different our definitions of friendship have become from what the original definition was, and how people today can take a lesson from the Christian definition of friendship, which can be truly transformative in our relationships with the people around us.

Inaugural Poem

The following is a transcript of the inaugural poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander, as provided by CQ transcriptions.

"Praise Song for the Day"

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Inauguration Update

Yesterday was a tremendously historic day for the United States. The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States marked the 56th time a democratically elected leader was sworn into leadership in the United States, and the first time said leader was an African-American. The crowds that swarmed DC to witness this event broke long-held records. In celebration, two days before the inauguration, a massive concert was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial containing enough star power to solve the energy crisis. It was an amazing weekend, and while I didn't participate in everything, I was lucky enough to be in DC for the entirety of it.
The We Are One concert was held on Sunday January 18th on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. President-elect Obama and Vice-President-elect Biden both attended with their families. Actors and prominent public figures did readings, including Tom Hanks, George Lopez, Denzel Washington, Martin Luther King III, Jack Black, and Jaimie Foxx. Musical performances included Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Stevie Wonder, U2, Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, and Josh Groban. Around 750,000 people attended...I was not one of them. I did, however, watch the concert on TV from my dorm, twice-- the initial broadcast and the re-broadcast. It was an incredible demonstration of musical talent and patriotism. If you missed it, I urge you to watch for clips on YouTube and for the DVD version that I suspect HBO will be releasing at some point.
On the Monday night before the Inauguration, I went downtown with a group of my friends. We took the Metro to the center of town and walked to the White House to look at the building and the parade route, including the presidential reviewing stand. It was weird being able to walk down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, where the next day the president would be walking. Then my friends and I walked the 25 or so blocks to Georgetown for dinner, then walked around the historic district and university of Georgetown before taking the bus back to campus around 11:30-midnight.
Four and a half hours of extremely interrupted sleep later, I was awake and getting ready to go downtown for the inauguration with my friends Stephen, Nick, and Bharat. I've always been a firm believer in layers, and today was no exception: underarmor shirt and pants, two pairs of socks, long-sleeved cotton shirt, t-shirt, sweatshirt, jeans, jacket, scarf, thick gloves, hat, hood. Despite all this, it was still cold enough that I was wishing for boots, a blanket, and an extra scarf to wrap around my face.
We took the Metro downtown, then walked about 12 blocks to the nearest security checkpoint to get onto the Mall (with a quick stop at McDonald's for some food). We stood at this checkpoint for two hours waiting to get through the gates, but after we had only moved about 100 feet in that amount of time, we opted to get out of line and go further down the Mall to where you didn't have to go through a checkpoint. As a result, we wound up near the base of the Washington Monument to watch the ceremony. We had line of sight to the Capitol, though we couldn't tell what was going on except on the many jumbotrons and speakers set up all along the Mall.
I was struck by the sense that so many people seemed to recognize the significance of the moment. Emotions were high along the Mall by people who were ecstatic that the US had reached this point in its history. Everyone was excited and largely in a good mood, despite the bone-numbing cold and lack of sleep. I enjoyed every part of the ceremony, from Rick Warren's invocation to Itzak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma's music...but an extra chill, unrelated to the weather, went down my spine when Barack Obama took the oath of office as President of the United States. The peaceful transition of power is remarkable in this country. After a presidency as controversial as George W. Bush's, after a campaign as bitter as the one between Hillary Clinton and Obama, then McCain/Palin and Obama, each person I just mentioned was able to stand on the platform and honor the democratic will of the American people as they watched Barack Obama be sworn in. That said, however, I was rather disgusted by the booing that went up along the Mall as Bush walked onto the platform. Whether or not you agree with the man, he was President of the United States, and if nothing else the office deserves a degree of respect.
My friends and I opted to start leaving as soon as Obama's (in my opinion excellent) inaugural speech was done--given the crowds, this proved to be a good idea. We left around 12:30-12:40, and walked to Foggy Bottom to the Metro station at George Washington University to catch the train back to AU. It took us three hours to get back to campus, for a commute that on a normal day might take half an hour. I spent the rest of the day on the couch in the lounge in front of the TV trying to thaw out, napping and watching the parade and news coverage of Ted Kennedy's collapse at the Senate luncheon and later on the inaugural balls.
The consensus among my friends seems to have been that while the experience was well worth what we went through (lack of sleep, little food, freezing temperatures, huge crowds, etc), for all those reasons it still kind of sucked! Still, it was a historic day, and I was honored to have been able to be able to watch what was going on, even from such a distance.
I've been rambling about this for far too long now, and I appreciate your bearing with me. I posted a number of photos on Facebook, which can be viewed at by clicking here. There are also a couple of videos below. Enjoy!

The Locksmith of the Cosmos

I am not a math or science buff. So it may come as a surprise to some that the next book on my reading list after One Christmas in Washington was a biography of the great physicist Albert Einstein. I picked up a copy of Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson at the National Book Festival in September, got it signed by Isaacson, and then put it aside because of the limited time I have to read while at school. When I picked it up a few days ago, however, I quickly became engrossed in it and remained so until I finished it. It's a highly engaging biography, focusing largely not on the theories themselves (although there is an appropriate amount of scientific mumbo-jumbo as Isaacson attempts to explain Einstein's theories of general and special relativity, unified field theory, and assorted pieces of information about quantum mechanics). Instead, Isaacson focuses predominantly on the development of Einstein's creativity and rebelliousness, and how those traits lead to his development of masterful theories of physics that changed our understanding of the universe. It also dealt with how Einstein's views on politics and religion related to his understanding of science and the world, and as such largely morphed throughout his life. All things told, a great read about a fascinating man.

"He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atoms and the universe."

ARCADIA

I didn't know what ARCADIA referred to until I read a book called One Christmas in Washington by David Bercuson and Holger Herwig. It's about the conference (code-named ARCADIA) between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill that took place from late December 1941 to early January 1942 in Washington, D.C. This was of course just after the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II, and so Churchill thought it was important to get right over to see FDR so that the two leaders could craft a joint strategy and consolidate their views. Bercuson and Herwig craft a portrait of two leaders of comparable levels of personal pride and national ambition, each trying to coax and coerce the other into ceding to their point of view. It appears that at this starting point, although Churchill and Roosevelt had a fair amount of personal rapport, their general staffs and top military advisors had to overcome a lot of animosity to reach the agreements that formed the foundation for the Allied coalition in the war. But overcome it they did-- the British got past their arrogance for the largely untested Americans and the Americans overcame their Anglophobia to eventually agree on a joint command structure and production and shipping strategy that formed the base for Allied success over the next three-four years. One Christmas in Washington was a well-written book about a little-known chapter in World War II history when politics and personal animosity were overcome in favor of a broader worldview that lead to their ultimate victory.

Hey, Bush Reads Too!

A few days ago, Karl Rove published a column in the Wall Street Journal about the reading competitions that he has been having with George Bush for the last three or four years. Countering the myth of Bush as a less than interested reader, apparently he has been quite a voracious reader of history and biography in particular. Then, weighing in, The Washington Post's Richard Cohen took a look at the books that Rove mentioned in his article and gave his own analysis of what they say about Bush's views and personality.

Reading

Predictably, reading and blogging both fell off the radar during the school year, evidenced by the sparseness of posts since August. Most of the reading I did was of the academic kind, for my classes, which were largely interesting in their own right but still, there's something to be said for having time to just sit down and read for your own interests. My friend Tom and I decided that we really just should quit school and catch up on our reading lists. Anyway, here's what I managed to get through during the first semester:

1. Love Is A Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield-- memoir by a Rolling Stone editor about the love of his life, his wife for an all-too-brief amount of time before she passed away from a brain trauma. Each chapter begins with a playlist of a mix that he made for her-- hence the name of the book. Speaks to the fact that music speaks to the deepest part of humanity, whether in love, in pain, in tragedy, in trial, in joy-- in everything.
2. Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller-- more or less picks up along the same lines as another of Miller's books, Blue Like Jazz. A series of essays exploring concepts about God, how both He and then universe He designed are infinitely complex and that the sooner we accept that, the happier we will be and the more secure in our faith we will be.
3. Emma by Jane Austen-- classic English literature. I've been working my way through all of Austen's books. Having read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, this was my next pick. Enjoyed the storyline, but hated most of the characters except for Mr. Knightley. He's pretty much the model gentleman, a sort of Mr. Darcy with less pride.

That's all I got to read for pleasure during first semester. Over Christmas break, I have been absorbing myself in reading, and at this point two weeks in I've read through more than double the books I did in the semester. These books are:

1. Murder at the National Cathedral by Margaret Truman-- Pres. Harry Truman's daughter found her calling in writing books, and some of her most successful were the Capital Crimes novels-- murder mysteries set at famous Washington, D.C. locations. This was the first one I've read, and I found it a quick, interesting, suspenseful, and fun read.
2. Presidential Courage by Michael Beschloss-- Beschloss, a well-regarded presidential historian, picked about eight presidents (some well-known, some not), and profiled incidents during their terms of office in which they showed courage that shaped the course of the country's history.
3. John Adams by David McCullough-- this book won McCullough a Pulitzer Prize and spun off a successful HBO miniseries starring Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti, and it's not hard to see why. It's an exceptionally well-written biography of the second US president, often underappreciated for the role he played in bringing the country into being and keeping it out of an unnecessary war that they would have almost certainly lost.
4. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin-- the well-known actor's bestselling autobiography details the years he spent doing stand-up comedy, showing both how he got into it and, most poignantly, why he got out and went into film instead.
5. The Last Jihad by Joel C. Rosenberg-- OK, I admit, this one is a reread, and a frequent reread at that. The politics that Rosenberg adheres to and demonstrates in his books are way too conservative for my usual taste, but I will give him this-- the man can write a great political thriller. And that's exactly what this is. Read it-- and follow up with the sequels: The Last Days, The Ezekiel Option, The Copper Scroll, and Dead Heat.
6. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama-- our new president's book, written back when he was a senator (really not so long ago, I suppose)...figured it was about time I picked it up and saw some of his articulation and early formulation of policy ideas. I was very impressed by the scope and fairness of his vision for the country as he laid it out, and it only reinforced my view that the US made a good choice this election cycle. Here's hoping we're all right.
7. Promises to Keep by Joe Biden-- continuing a trend, our new vice-president's autobiography, written while he was still a presidential candidate. It's pretty well-written, with the definitive Biden flair for storytelling. But his story is compelling, and his politics (especially his views on government's responsibility for security of its people, and on international responsibility) are solid, and so despite the highly political pitches at the end, it's worth a read. The title is of course from a Robert Frost poem, Stopping By Woods on A Snowy Evening: "For I have promises to keep/and miles to go before I sleep/and miles to go before I sleep."

Still got a couple of weeks left of vacation, and more books to read, so another post like this will probably be forthcoming...assuming I have time!

Really?

This is the last week of classes at my university. As such, there are papers and projects and assorted pieces of work due in many classes, and most of us students are staying up until ungodly hours working on said assignments. So naturally this WOULD be the time that the maintenance and administration people team up to hit us (at least, those of us who live on North Campus) with a computer network and power outage with less than 24 hours notice. Honestly, people. There are over a thousand students affected by this, way more if you include those who would be affected by the shutdown in the academic buildings and the student center. According to my sources, the library was packed with everyone and their grandmother last night.
For me personally, I was lucky-- I had little enough work to do that I could get it done early on and just go to bed when the power went out. But it is not fair to the students of the university to hit them with this at such a stressful time of the semester-- way to make it even MORE stressful, guys. Way to go.

(P.S. The editors of my school's student newspaper agree with me-- bet you couldn't see that one coming. Oh, and on a completely unrelated topic, Jim Wallis has a good piece on the God's Politics blog today.)

Funeral Dirges

No, not for people per say, as for the Wall Street investment banking community as a whole. Tom Friedman's Op-Ed on Thanksgiving Day, "All Fall Down," definitely had the ring of a funeral dirge on the downfall of Wall Street (most recently, Citigroup) and who was responsible. Which is something people will be discussing for years to come, no doubt. His source for the Op-Ed, from Portfolio.com, was an article by Michael Lewis called simply "The End." Lewis wrote a book back in 1989 called Liar's Poker, which some could say was the harbinger of the current crisis, chronicling the excesses of Wall Street and the not exactly truly financially savvy people who were dispensing investment advice to average citizens. Time proved him more or less right, clearly-- the Humpty Dumptys of investment banking fell off the Wall and now they're looking to all the president's horses and all the Congressmen to put them back together again.