Germany vs. the USA - the Maternity Ward Edition

The main difference is the screaming. There's more of it in Germany.

Let me explain. My first daughter was born back in the good ol' US of A, while the second was born here in Deutschland, so I've gotten a front row seat to the birthing philosophies and practices of both medical systems.

In the United States, we pay good money for medical services, and for that reason, these medical services should be as painless as possible. This is, of course, the purpose of medical services, to painlessly prop up our bodies, regardless of condition, so that we can fulfil our purpose by getting back to work as soon as possible. Americans agree with classical economists with this purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love profit and work hard according to its service. For this reason, Americans put great trust in profitable technologies to solve all our problems. Take, for instance, genetically modified food. Americans understand, and have seen irrefutable scientific evidence, that the only way to feed the ever-growing world population is to invest heavily in genetically modified foods, because what's natural has no way of keeping up with our industrial ways. This philosophy is also applied to birth. My German wife wanted to have a natural birth (we'll contrast the key German philosophy later), which was a novelty for all the midwives in the hospital. ("midwives" themselves were a novelty - what will those hipsters think of next?) Sure, the midwives were trained in the advantages of doing things naturally, but to actually have a woman in a hospital in America who wanted to be natural (and wasn't forced due to a speedy labor in the taxi cab) was exciting! Now, our daughter would be born on New Year's Day, and the hospital was full, perhaps because a number of families wanted their children to be the first born in the New Year (we didn't win that competition). But, there wasn't the kind of screaming you see in the movies. All the other moms sat placidly in their beds with needles in their spines, awaiting the child emerge with minimal resistance. From the silence, you'd think they were all waiting in those transport capsules from Alien. The screams from our end of the maternity ward must have been disconcerting.

Of course, for all our technology, no one noticed that our daughter was "sunny-side-up", i.E. facing the wrong way, until she was almost out. Moreover, and this is serious, a huge hole in America's healthcare system is postpartum care for mothers. Sure, we have all the appropriate vaccines and follow-up visits for the baby, good on-sight training and support groups for those who have trouble breast feeding... But rebuilding the woman's body through support and exercise is foreign to our system, yet it's such a boon to a woman's health, family, and happiness. Postpartum exercises is nothing but yoga for the yuppies who can afford it. Changing this seems like a pro-woman, pro-family, pro-life kind of policy we could all agree on.

Superior mother-care aside, Germany still has its own quirks. In Germany, medical service is almost an embarrassing necessity, sort of a sell-out. We have friends who send their daughter in our local "forest" kindergarten, where the little tikes forage around in the freezing rain and all the crafts involve tying sticks and leaves together with twine, and this is much more natural and therefore better than doing anything in a building. I'm surprised that they don't have forest hospitals, where patients lay on piles of leaves and surgery is performed with sharpened sticks, because it's natürlich. The word natürlich has a deeper, richer meaning than the English word "natural." It harkens back to a nobler time where we weren't so reliant on tablets and mobiles and shots and clothes, and people weren't so obsessed with bourgeois notions like pain avoidance or morality rates. Natürlich is better. Take, for instance, genetically modified food. Germans understand, and have seen irrefutable scientific evidence, that the only way to feed the ever-growing world population is to stop any and all investment in genetically modified food and go back to doing food the natürliche way that has fed mankind through the ages. Nonetheless, Germans, like everyone else, want to live and be comfortable, so they begrudgingly accept medical technology to keep us alive and warm and comfortable (gemütlich, which is almost as an important natürlich over here - if you have a product that can manage to be gemütlich and natürlich, believe me, it'll sell well here - but many things in Germany seem to be a struggle between Natürlichkeit and Gemütlichkeit). As having a baby is a natural process, however, Natürlichkeit trumps Gemütlichkeit, as we could tell during our hospital visit when the midwives (standard-issue over here) bragged about their hospital's low rate of epidurals. They went on to cite statistics about the horrifyingly high rate of epidurals by those snaggle-tooth, hill-billy American women who, for some backwards reason (probably involving fast food and a general lack of discipine), are reluctant to embrace the immense, natürlich, pain Mother Nature has ordained for them. Hence the screams. When we were waiting for my wife's labor pains to get going (no drugs, of course, only the help of the cocktail, which was sehr natürlich), we heard the mom ahead of us screaming like she was going through an exorcism. Oh, but in Germany, my wife got a hot tub to sit in during the process, so I guess there was a little Gemütlichkeit after all.

After the birth, however, the advantages of Natürlichkeit are clear. Our basic insurance covered standard midwife visits and, as I write this, my wife is at her postpartum gymnastics class, rebuilding and restrengthening her body with peer and professional support. Both systems, of course, helped bring a beautiful little girl each into the world and so for them, through all the quirks, I give thanks.

Notes on the Second - VII. Horrible, Horrible Thoughts

In the background of our hospital stay, you can think of parenting as a sequence of horrible thoughts. We all have horrible thoughts about the things we care about, like the way my fellow students and I are having exam-time nightmares about impossible questions and train delays. Parents' horrible thoughts are not here for a season, though; they stay background like the colors of your walls. We have (and I think I can speak of "we" here) horrible thoughts, because horrible things happen to people, and when these things happen to babies, to any children, then this new, common, transcendent, and entangling love that I've described elsewhere is ripped out of the chests of parents and communities, irreplaceable.

In my own experience, baby's complete dependence and vulnerability make the horrible thoughts so pressing, because in many cases, I'm the one responsible. What if I slip and fall down the stairs while I'm holding her? What if I nod off on the couch and she slides off my lap? What if she's not swaddled properly and she pulls the blanket over her head? What if the bedroom temperature isn't precisely 18 degrees Celsius, which we read somewhere is the least dangerous temperature for babies to sleep in? What if I touch her after eating peanut butter only to discover an acute peanut allergy? What if I left the coffee machine on because I was in a hurry not to be late for an exam and the house burns down with the three most important people in my life inside it?

Such questions circle my brain like dancing devils, and though anxiety is health-reducing bit devilment, I've surprisingly found these horrible, horrible thoughts to work towards something else entirely. A horrible thought ambushes me when I'm minding my own business, and then I cringe and I say, "Oh, God," not as a swear, but as a prayer. My child is at the mercy of everything from my own powers of concentration to diseases in nature still unrecorded, and so I plead to God for mercy. The babies under my roof have increased my prayers in frequency and intensity, the entangling love for them entangling our very beings into his sovereignty. This is not a get-out-of-trouble card, and I'm under no illusions that these things can't or won't happen to us. Nor is this an excuse for fatalism, and our prayers have the opposite effect, promoting a careful and engaging sort of love between parent and child. Rather, this is a sober kind of hope, not always comforting but always providing a an unanswerable form of joy, that neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

A few days ago, I was walking home, lost in thoughts about my university exams when I was almost killed. I was crossing the street, legally, when a car made a hasty and illegal turn. Had I not been awakened and jumped out of the way, I would have been hit. The car screeched to a halt a good thirty feet to late then pulled over. The driver didn't get out, but I can assume she was as shocked as I was. This experience is not uncommon - it happened to my wife back in the U.S. But it served as a reminder that however adult and in control we are, our situation is precarious.

This precariousness makes love all the more costly, and this is acted out in family and community as we do things to make each other happy, better, and alive. Drinks with friends, jokes among my co-students, an episode of Dr. Who while feeling my wife's warmth against my thigh, playing Frozen with my daughter - all of these things shine through the precariousness like the sun on a summer morning. It deepens the joy of holding my own baby daughter, ten pounds of helpless, human warmth, in my arms. Horrible thoughts are drowned out by the knowledge that this moment with the Second is an unmatchable gift.

This is the seventh and final chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - VI. The First

When the first came, our new family was an insulated little bubble of three people, one of them new. Sure, we had enormous help from family and friends - especially the heroic grandmothers and fabulous meals from our D.C. church friends. But while they were constantly coming in and out of our little bubble, our little family strengthened like a three-fold cord.

Now, the first is five years old, and because of her, if our bubble isn't porous, it doesn't exist. She's blossomed into the richness of life that five years has to offer, the delights of learning and play and discovering things like characters and stories and science. Then, there are the challenges of discipline, disease, and the normal, everyday hassle of getting her ready for kindergarten.

Her new little sister has been thrust upon all of these things, and there's a strange paradox here. On one hand, she's old enough to be aware of what's going on, to know how to behave around her (gentle! quiet!), while avoiding the jealousies of younger older siblings. On the other hand, she's too young to really adjust her own life and habits for the change. She needs help and attention every morning, she needs and wants to play with her parents, she has moods, gets sick, gets excited, and, for the first time in her life, has become a picky eater. This of course, damages the sense of "mama-and-papa-against-the-world" was there for the first week of the First's life, and the Papa's supporting role is something like....

DoSomethingDoAnythingToDistractOrEntertainHerSoThatHerLittleSisterCanFinallyLearnToBreastfeedProperlyInPeaceExceptNotAnotherEpisodeOfSeanTheSheepBecauseShe'sSomehowInABadMoodAfterWatchingSeanTheSheepEvenThoughSheLovesItAndIKnowIt'sMuchTooColdToGoOutsideSoHelpHerPutOnHerPrincessDressAndColorButPleaseDon'tMakeTooMuchNoise!!!!!

Then, sickness entered the picture. The First came home from kindergarten (that oversized petri dish) with a nasty fever and a stiff neck. It got worse, and on Sunday, we took her to the hospital. By the grace of God, our own paediatrician was on hospital duty there, and the stiff neck signalled meningitis to him. The next day, my oldest daughter and I checked into the hospital, where we would stay for the next few days. My wife and youngest daughter stayed at home, still learning to feed and drink. It was a sad, sad situation - separation, hospital food, nightmares darkening our thoughts. There was, though, a warmth strengthening my bones at the time, and I think it was the knowledge that by simply being there I was where I ought to be and what I ought to be, and this confidence is foreign to me. A father and husband, present, within fear and sickness and suffering, standing against the effects of the Fall like a palm tree in a thunderstorm.

I wasn't alone of course - friendly and competent medical staff, my in-laws were heroes, and my wife was able to visit the hospital, and when we brought home a nasty intestinal disease from the hospital, everyone suffered but the baby, protected beautifully by my wife's milk. The antibiotics worked their magic on my oldest daughter, and we still don't know if it was actually meningitis, even though several doctors worked like Dr. House throughout the week to find out. Now, we're healthy, even if rumours of other diseases here in our neighbourhood tempt us to barricade our house 'til spring, and when we actually stop to think about it (and stopping to think is challenging when you have small kids), we're deeply thankful. My mother-in-law is convinced that our prayers helped my older daughter as much as the antibiotics. One doesn't exclude the other, and we did indeed pray.

There's another thought that helps, one that my wife brought home from the midwife that led her birthing classes. Whatever new amount of stress a little baby brings to her older sister, we've given them both an incredible gift. The love of a sister (or a brother) is not something you can easily replicate. And of course, every little girl's favorite film right now is about sisterly love, and from my daughter's Elsa dress to the way she kisses her little sister (gentle! quiet!), we get some nice reminders. As the midwife said, the sibling relationship is often the longest relationship someone can have.

This is the sixth chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - V. Chunk

Five years ago, after the first was born, I chunked up. A lot of dads do. If you don't believe me, go to Facebook and look at pictures of your new-father friends. Then watch from the day of birth until about three months as the papa's cheeks swell, love handles pour over the side of his skinny jeans, and all his shirts start to develop little mouths between the buttons as if screaming for help. The new mom shrinks, the new baby grows, the new dad expands. I never got really fat, but it's enough chunk for me to get a little queasy-cringy every time someone breaks out the photo album. Moving to Germany and regular exercise, among other thing, has kept me reasonably fit sense, and I want to keep it that way. This time around I'm determined to avoid the chunk.

Papa-chunking is hard to avoid though, and there are two reasons. One is a new kind of tiredness; the other is a vague sense of karma. First the tiredness. During stressful seasons at work or study, I'm tired, but I need exercise. There comes a point when my brain can't take it anymore until I put my running shoes on and burn five kilometers like I'm Lola. New baby tiredness is different. It comes from staying up late with a baby intent on exercising her new lungs just to give'em a spin. When she's finally swaddled and asleep, I'm exhausted. Keep in mind, I've done very little physical activity except catch her every time she does those scary little newborn trust falls from my chest. Additionally, I've paced around and sang to her and watched terrible early-morning television that I'd have been better off not knowing about in the first placed. After she's finally quiet, swaddled, and sleeping, I'm not ready to hit the running trail, the weight machine, the basketball court, or however else we men keep our college boy figures. I'm ready to pass out on the hallway floor or ready to eat, and this is where the vague sense of karma comes in.

The vague sense of karma is the big reason for papa-chunking. After all, holding and comforting a tiny little human being for three and a quarter hours while she cries her little heart out is a GOOD. EFFEN. DEED. And because it's a good deed, I deserve seven cookies, three pieces of that good cheese we were saving for New Years, four spoonfuls of peanut butter (plus a couple of illicit swipes with the index finger), a hunk of that good peppery salami, a Magnum bar, and a bottle of beer to wash it all down. And my vague sense of karma tells me that if there is any sense of sovereign justice in the world, this three-and-a-half minute snack will have zero effect on my waste line.

So this time round, I haven't shunned the jogging trail, even though part of me wishes I could stay on our couch until my funeral. And, even though it's the Christmas season, I like to think I've held the binge-eating in check. Stay away, papa-chunk. You're not welcome here.

(At this point, the blogger takes a break to throw away the wrappers from the three chocolate Santas Clauses he took to write this post)

This is the fifth chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - III. Woman

Awe is the appropriate response a thoughtful man has to the woman he married. Awe usually requires a certain thoughtfulness. Being thoughtful means using your thoughts to poke through the stress and distractions and day-to-day muddle that makes everything too urgent for awe. When we can't do this, events come along to bring it out. My sense of awe, neglected like I neglect this blog, focused and compounded upon itself while watching my wife give birth. Most dads would agree with me here.

The cocktail worked so quickly that we had no time for drugs or anything else. The birth was going to be all natural, with the help from a midwife, a doctor, and a hot tub. It's hard for a man not to feel so unessential to the process, even as I brought her water and gave her a shoulder to lean on. We walked back and forth, we tried different positions and "labor massages," and in the end, pretty much anything we planned didn't really work, other than to say: "full steam ahead!" The midwife was a hero, making a little moan every time my wife yelled in agony, which apparently helped, and spoke words of comfort through the torturous fear between labor pains.

The screams came from every part of her body and soul. They contained fear, pain, determination, and love, somehow shameless and proud at the same time. In labor, there's a sense of irrational urgency, and yet a wise, determined patience. In all of these paradoxes, the culmination of the 9-month process of giving life, the woman in labor is more animal, more angel, and more human than a man could ever be.

During the final pushes, she grabbed my shoulder as the doctor and midwife directed traffic. "Grabbed" - no. She crushed my shoulder between her fingers. It hurt for a week, though that'll elicit no sympathy from a birthing woman.

At the end of it all, my daughter emerged from my wife. They let me cut the cord, and they sat her on my wife's broken body for her first meal. There were tears and greetings and pictures and weighings. We had a new person to get to know, but my wife was nine months ahead of me.

This is the third chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second - II. The Cocktail

We have friends who lovingly refer to one of their sons as their "margarita baby." You laugh, because you know. Your decision to get pregnant may have been lubricated by a cocktail (or three). Well, in Germany (and perhaps other back-to-nature oriented northern European countries), there's a cocktail for the end of the pregnancy. No, it's not Mommy's little Jägermeister to ease the her into a stupor so she can forget the experience. It's the labor-inducing cocktail, and it works. (In fact, don't go googling it and making it for yourself at home, which may be tempting with 9-months and nothing moving. We've heard of mothers going for the home cocktail, resulting in some unwanted, unsafe, home births.)

It works, but it's not delicious, according my wife. The back story: My wife's water broke the morning of my daughter's birth, so we packed what was still left to pack, sent our first daughter with her grandmother, and moseyed on over to the hospital, hoping the labor pains would come soon. Well, the pains were there, but they were too wimpy to take on woman. By the afternoon, the midwife, for no extra tip, poured the cocktail. My wife sipped it down over the next hour - it's mostly nut oils, which isn't exactly "great taste, less filling." But I repeat: it works. Not only does it work, but from what I understand, the labor pains it induces are less painful than those from the medical procedure we were familiar with from having our first daughter in the States. But Labor pains they were, and my wife suddenly became capable of balling up steel beams with her fingers.

This is the second chapter of a longer post about getting to know our second child. You can read the post in its entirety here. 

Notes on the Second

I. The Waiting

Our second child was late. Ok, late is a stupid term. Every doctor, nurse, and midwife we talked to reminded us that the "due date" was really just the middle of a range, and real earliness or lateness can involve a lot of unpleasantness. She came eight days after the due date, which isn't late. It's right on time, like a wizard.

But it felt late, especially when the doctor told my wife, eight days before the due date that "THE BABY IS LOW! GET READY! IT'LL COME AT ANY MOMENT!!!" We spent the following to weeks like Olympic sprinters waiting for the gun, head down, bottoms up, cleats sharp. This stressed us, especially as we invited everyone around us to get in sprint position - my in-laws, who were to pitch in with our first child during the labor adventures, my co-students, who were ready to pitch in with my projects and take copious notes should I suddenly get called to the hospital.

From then on, every conversation began with a look of expectation. "Is the baby there?" My daughter's kindergarten, university, church, street. Texts and Facebook, Email (remember Email?). It could get tedious. "No, not yet. My wife is uncomfortable, but she and the child are healthy. She's due the 13th, but it could be up to ten days after it." Every time. Tedious, but part of me loved it and not just the part of me that craves your approval. I loved it, because it's much better than the alternative. Those around us saw my family - my unborn child, my wife, my daughter, me - as something worth caring about. That old question, "how are you doing?" honestly asked, means something.

II. The Cocktail

We have friends who lovingly refer to one of their sons as their "margarita baby." You laugh, because you know. Your decision to get pregnant may have been lubricated by a cocktail (or three). Well, in Germany (and perhaps other back-to-nature oriented northern European countries), there's a cocktail for the end of the pregnancy. No, it's not Mommy's little Jägermeister to ease the her into a stupor so she can forget the experience. It's the labor-inducing cocktail, and it works. (In fact, don't go googling it and making it for yourself at home, which may be tempting with 9-months and nothing moving. We've heard of mothers going for the home cocktail, resulting in some unwanted, and unsafe, home births.)

It works, but it's not delicious, according my wife. The back story: My wife's water broke the morning of my daughter's birth, so we packed what was still left to pack, sent our first daughter with her grandmother, and moseyed on over to the hospital, hoping the labor pains would come soon. Well, the pains were there, but they were too wimpy to take on woman. By the afternoon, the midwife, for no extra tip, poured the cocktail. My wife sipped it down over the next hour - it's mostly nut oils, which isn't exactly "great taste, less filling." But I repeat: it works. Not only does it work, but from what I understand, the labor pains it induces are less painful than those from the medical procedure we were familiar with from having our first daughter in the States. But Labor pains they were, and my wife suddenly became capable of balling up steel beams with her fingers.

III. Woman

Awe is the appropriate response a thoughtful man has to the woman he married. Awe usually requires a certain thoughtfulness. Being thoughtful means using your thoughts to poke through the stress and distractions and day-to-day muddle that makes everything too urgent for awe. When we can't do this,  events come along to bring it out. My sense of awe, neglected like I neglect this blog, focused and compounded upon itself while watching my wife give birth. Most dads would agree with me here.

The cocktail worked so quickly that we had no time for drugs or anything else. The birth was going to be all natural, with the help from a midwife, a doctor, and a hot tub. It's hard for a man not to feel so unessential to the process, even as I brought her water and gave her a shoulder to lean on. We walked back and forth, we tried different positions and "labor massages," and in the end, pretty much anything we planned didn't really work, other than to say: "full steam ahead!" The midwife was a hero, making a little moan every time my wife yelled in agony, which apparently helped, and spoke words of comfort through the torturous fear between labor pains.

The screams came from every part of her body and soul. They contained fear, pain, determination, and love, somehow shameless and proud at the same time. In labor, there's a sense of irrational urgency, and yet a wise, determined patience. In all of these paradoxes, the culmination of the 9-month process of giving life, the woman in labor is more animal, more angel, and more human than a man could ever be.

During the final pushes, she grabbed my shoulder as the doctor and midwife directed traffic. "Grabbed" - no. She crushed my shoulder between her fingers. It hurt for a week, though that'll elicit no sympathy from a birthing woman.

At the end of it all, my daughter emerged from my wife. They let me cut the cord, and they sat her on my wife's broken body for her first meal. There were tears and greetings and pictures and weighings. We had a new person to get to know, but my wife was nine months ahead of me.

IV. She's so Friendly

Part of the purpose of this post is to "treasure these things in our hearts", which sleeplessness, stress, and an unfortunate bout of disease have made difficult this week. The sleeplessness, at least, serves a purpose. The times when I am awake with her are little treasures in and of themselves, the first father-daughter moments where I have her all to myself. Whenever I first look into her wakeful eyes, the first word that comes to mind is "friendly." I never thought an infant could have any sort of friendly disposition, but she does. It's as if she says, "I'm content to let you be who you are, and I want to get to know that part of you better." The sentiment reveals itself in the way she looks, even in the way she coos and grunts when she's hungry. She cries a lot as a colicky little thing, but crying for her seems to be a last resort. She's a friendly person who would rather communicate through less intrusive means. I'll play the little baby games; I stick my tongue out, and she mimics me. I experiment with different voices to see how she reacts. I show her different patterns. And of course, I sing.

Babies aren't carry ons or blocks of wood. They're little people with little personalities, and it's the privilege of a parent to treasure these things so early.

V. Chunk

Five years ago, after the first was born, I chunked up. A lot of dads do. If you don't believe me, go to Facebook and look at pictures of your new-father friends. Then watch from the day of birth until about three months as the papa's cheeks swell, love handles pour over the side of his skinny jeans, and all his shirts start to develop little mouths between the buttons as if screaming for help. The new mom shrinks, the new baby grows, the new dad expands. I never got really fat, but it's enough chunk for me to get a little queasy-cringy every time someone breaks out the photo album. Moving to Germany and regular exercise, among other thing, has kept me reasonably fit sense, and I want to keep it that way. This time around I'm determined to avoid the chunk.

Papa-chunking is hard to avoid though, and there are two reasons. One is a new kind of tiredness; the other is a vague sense of karma. First the tiredness. During stressful seasons at work or study, I'm tired, but I need exercise. There comes a point when my brain can't take it anymore until I put my running shoes on and burn five kilometers like I'm Lola. New baby tiredness is different. It comes from staying up late with a baby intent on exercising her new lungs just to give'em a spin. When she's finally swaddled and asleep, I'm exhausted. Keep in mind, I've done very little physical activity except catch her every time she does those scary little newborn trust falls from my chest. Additionally, I've paced around and sang to her and watched terrible early-morning television that I'd have been better off not knowing about in the first placed. After she's finally quiet, swaddled, and sleeping, I'm not ready to hit the running trail, the weight machine, the basketball court, or however else we men keep our college boy figures. I'm ready to pass out on the hallway floor or ready to eat, and this is where the vague sense of karma comes in.

The vague sense of karma is the big reason for papa-chunking. After all, holding and comforting a tiny little human being for three and a quarter hours while she cries her little heart out is a GOOD. EFFEN. DEED. And because it's a good deed, I deserve seven cookies, three pieces of that good cheese we were saving for New Years, four spoonfuls of peanut butter (plus a couple of illicit swipes with the index finger), a hunk of that good peppery salami, a Magnum bar, and a bottle of beer to wash it all down. And my vague sense of karma tells me that if there is any sense of sovereign justice in the world, this three-and-a-half minute snack will have zero effect on my waste line.

So this time round, I haven't shunned the jogging trail, even though part of me wishes I could stay on our couch until my funeral. And, even though it's the Christmas season, I like to think I've held the binge-eating in check. Stay away, papa-chunk. You're not welcome here.

(At this point, the blogger takes a break to throw away the wrappers from the three chocolate Santas Clauses he took to write this post)

VI. The First

When the first came, our new family was an insulated little bubble of three people, one of them new. Sure, we had enormous help from family and friends - especially the heroic grandmothers and fabulous meals from our D.C. church friends. But while they were constantly coming in and out of our little bubble, our little family strengthened like a three-fold cord.

Now, the first is five years old, and because of her, if our bubble isn't porous, it doesn't exist. She's blossomed into the richness of life that five years has to offer, the delights of learning and play and discovering things like characters and stories and science. Then, there are the challenges of discipline, disease, and the normal, everyday hassle of getting her ready for kindergarten.

Her new little sister has been thrust upon all of these things, and there's a strange paradox here. On one hand, she's old enough to be aware of what's going on, to know how to behave around her (gentle! quiet!), while avoiding the jealousies of younger older siblings. On the other hand, she's too young to really adjust her own life and habits for the change. She needs help and attention every morning, she needs and wants to play with her parents, she has moods, gets sick, gets excited, and, for the first time in her life, has become a picky eater. This of course, damages the sense of "mama-and-papa-against-the-world" was there for the first week of the First's life, and the Papa's supporting role is something like....

DoSomethingDoAnythingToDistractOrEntertainHerSoThatHerLittleSisterCanFinallyLearnToBreastfeedProperlyInPeaceExceptNotAnotherEpisodeOfSeanTheSheepBecauseShe'sSomehowInABadMoodAfterWatchingSeanTheSheepEvenThoughSheLovesItAndIKnowIt'sMuchTooColdToGoOutsideSoHelpHerPutOnHerPrincessDressAndColorButPleaseDon'tMakeTooMuchNoise!!!!!

Then, sickness entered the picture. The First came home from kindergarten (that oversized petri dish) with a nasty fever and a stiff neck. It got worse, and on Sunday, we took her to the hospital. By the grace of God, our own paediatrician was on hospital duty there, and the stiff neck signalled meningitis to him. The next day, my oldest daughter and I checked into the hospital, where we would stay for the next few days. My wife and youngest daughter stayed at home, still learning to feed and drink. It was a sad, sad situation - separation, hospital food, nightmares darkening our thoughts. There was, though, a warmth strengthening my bones at the time, and I think it was the knowledge that by simply being there I was where I ought to be and what I ought to be, and this confidence is foreign to me. A father and husband, present, within fear and sickness and suffering, standing against the effects of the Fall like a palm tree in a thunderstorm.

I wasn't alone of course - friendly and competent medical staff, my in-laws were heroes, and my wife was able to visit the hospital, and when we brought home a nasty intestinal disease from the hospital, everyone suffered but the baby, protected beautifully by my wife's milk. The antibiotics worked their magic on my oldest daughter, and we still don't know if it was actually meningitis, even though several doctors worked like Dr. House throughout the week to find out. Now, we're healthy, even if rumours of other diseases here in our neighbourhood tempt us to barricade our house 'til spring, and when we actually stop to think about it (and stopping to think is challenging when you have small kids), we're deeply thankful. My mother-in-law is convinced that our prayers helped my older daughter as much as the antibiotics. One doesn't exclude the other, and we did indeed pray.

There's another thought that helps, one that my wife brought home from the midwife that led her birthing classes. Whatever new amount of stress a little baby brings to her older sister, we've given them both an incredible gift. The love of a sister (or a brother) is not something you can easily replicate. And of course, every little girl's favorite film right now is about sisterly love, and from my daughter's Elsa dress to the way she kisses her little sister (gentle! quiet!), we get some nice reminders. As the midwife said, the sibling relationship is often the longest relationship someone can have.

VII. Horrible, Horrible Thoughts

In the background of our hospital stay, you can think of parenting as a sequence of horrible thoughts. We all have horrible thoughts about the things we care about, like the way my fellow students and I are having exam-time nightmares about impossible questions and train delays. Parents' horrible thoughts are not here for a season, though; they stay background like the colors of your walls. We have (and I think I can speak of "we" here) horrible thoughts, because horrible things happen to people, and when these things happen to babies, to any children, then this new, common, transcendent, and entangling love that I've described elsewhere is ripped out of the chests of parents and communities, irreplaceable.

In my own experience, baby's complete dependence and vulnerability make the horrible thoughts so pressing, because in many cases, I'm the one responsible. What if I slip and fall down the stairs while I'm holding her? What if I nod off on the couch and she slides off my lap? What if she's not swaddled properly and she pulls the blanket over her head? What if the bedroom temperature isn't precisely 18 degrees Celsius, which we read somewhere is the least dangerous temperature for babies to sleep in? What if I touch her after eating peanut butter only to discover an acute peanut allergy? What if I left the coffee machine on because I was in a hurry not to be late for an exam and the house burns down with the three most important people in my life inside it?

Such questions circle my brain like dancing devils, and though anxiety is health-reducing bit devilment, I've surprisingly found these horrible, horrible thoughts to work towards something else entirely. A horrible thought ambushes me when I'm minding my own business, and then I cringe and I say, "Oh, God," not as a swear, but as a prayer. My child is at the mercy of everything from my own powers of concentration to diseases in nature still unrecorded, and so I plead to God for mercy. The babies under my roof have increased my prayers in frequency and intensity, the entangling love for them entangling our very beings into his sovereignty. This is not a get-out-of-trouble card, and I'm under no illusions that these things can't or won't happen to us. Nor is this an excuse for fatalism, and our prayers have the opposite effect, promoting a careful and engaging sort of love between parent and child. Rather, this is a sober kind of hope, not always comforting but always providing a an unanswerable form of joy, that neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

A few days ago, I was walking home, lost in thoughts about my university exams when I was almost killed. I was crossing the street, legally, when a car made a hasty and illegal turn. Had I not been awakened and jumped out of the way, I would have been hit. The car screeched to a halt a good thirty feet to late then pulled over. The driver didn't get out, but I can assume she was as shocked as I was. This experience is not uncommon - it happened to my wife back in the U.S. But it served as a reminder that however adult and in control we are, our situation is precarious.

This precariousness makes love all the more costly, and this is acted out in family and community as we do things to make each other happy, better, and alive. Drinks with friends, jokes among my co-students, an episode of Dr. Who while feeling my wife's warmth against my thigh, playing Frozen with my daughter - all of these things shine through the precariousness like the sun on a summer morning. It deepens the joy of holding my own baby daughter, ten pounds of helpless, human warmth, in my arms. Horrible thoughts are drowned out by the knowledge that this moment with the Second is an unmatchable gift.

Parenting and Entangling Love

Part of having a child, a wife, bills, and interesting things to look at is that I don't write as often as I would like. By way of saying, I wanted to respond from my little corner of the web to an interesting online writing kerfluffle about the challenges and joys of parenting, but I'm a little late thanks to the challenges and joys of parenting (I'm writing these words with one of those Disney sing-a-long films running in the background). Here in Germany, a couple of journalists complained that modern demands of parenting and career simply can't work, but shrug and say they might as well try to make it work anyway. Then, Ruth Graham's protest against all the negative, "honest" parent-complaining drew a lot of attention (at least in my social networking sphere), including Rachel Lu's beautiful, thoughtful response. Lu wrote one of those "I-wish-I-had-written-that" essays clarifying my jumble of thoughts and feelings about parenting-angst with a lovely description of joy and love in parenting. The whole thing's worth a slow read, and I wanted to highlight a couple points she makes towards the end:

Finally, I should address the most critical question: Is it worth it? If so, why? Certainly, there are cultural changes that could make the plunge into parenthood less daunting. It would be possible, too, for parents to feel less stressed and more affirmed. Still, child-rearing will always be miserable and magical, for more or less the same reasons. It’s a “happy pig or unhappy Socrates” sort of conundrum. Parenthood makes life harder, but also richer. It’s less pleasant but more meaningful. That’s because love fundamentally changes us as human beings. Like the dissatisfied Socrates, we can look on the unburdened (including our own former selves) with a certain amount of wistful envy, but it isn’t in our nature to want to stuff love back into its Pandora’s box.

She ends with: 

An employer could never get away with drawing up a contract like the one you implicitly have with your kids. So yes, it’s reasonable to be a little bit terrified. It’s no small thing to let another person become the main star of your life. It’s even harder when you realize that one day they’ll just walk right out the door again, leaving you twenty years older but no longer able to sleep in on a Saturday morning.

Still, if the opportunity beckons, you should do it. Because if you don’t, you’ll be the person who chose the happy pig over Socrates. You don’t want to go to your grave knowing that one of your most important life decisions was to run away from love.

These thoughts are seconded by Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. In her interview on Fresh Air, she documents the "no fun" part then gets to the joy, and like Lu, she knows what we all know, that the joy is worth it, even if it can't be numerically verified:

And, you know, the studies don't focus on (the joy) so much. I have to sort of go to philosophy and novels in order to discuss the joy. The problem with these studies is that if you're feeling good about something, you know, you rank it a five. So that moment that I was describing with my baby looking at me and cooing at me - which was, like, just like this transcendent moment in my life - would rate the same if I'm doing everything on a scale of one to five, as, like, a dinner with a friend, if I had a really great time at that dinner. In the same way that, like, you know, on Amazon, you know, a John Grisham novel and, you know, and Charles Dickens like kind of get fives, you know, but they're not necessarily the same experience, you know. 

And also, I can't remember who said this to me - I think it was George Vaillant, a psychiatrist who is kind of a poet-philosopher, too - he pointed out that, like, it's kind of like using a number to describe a taste. You know, how do you do that? So I think that social science misses a lot of the joy.

And, you know, one of the remarkable things about joy is that it is sort of predicated on this idea of being very connected to somebody. I think Christopher Hitchens described, you know, having kids as, you know, your heart running around in somebody else's body. And that feeling is so powerful, it's almost scary, because there's almost, like, an implied sense of loss about it.

It's, like, you love somebody so much, that you are almost automatically afraid of losing them, like, that this connection is so deep, that you can't think of that connection without thinking of that connection being broken. So joy, in some ways, is almost a harder feeling to tolerate than sadness, in some ways, because it's so powerful and makes us so vulnerable. But it's why it is also so profoundly special and what makes parenting, to so many of us, so huge and incomparable.

So, a hearty amen to both from this papa across the pond. Both women (with an assist from Maria Popova) reminded me of C.S. Lewis' famous reflection in The Four Loves: "To love is to be vulnerable. To love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it in tact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it up carefully with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of heaven outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the dangers and perturbations of love is hell."

Choosing lasting, difficult joy over immediate happiness is an ancient problem, and the fact that children are more of an economic burden than necessity thrusts today's (Western) family into the center of this choice. I've no special insight into this, but I'm encouraged: the fact that we're talking about it means this joy is not dead, and I wonder if paradoxically, we comfortable westerners are taking the joys of entangled love more seriously. This reminded me of something I noticed in that other great love entanglement: marriage. When I first came to Germany, I was told that Germans, consistent with the trends of most of Western Europe, were marrying later than Americans. I assumed that this meant they no longer took marriage seriously, that in a post-religious age they had deconstructed a ritual of religion and state enough to render it meaningless, or at least with much less meaning. Maybe at some point they'll muddle through the ritual and smile for the camera like distracted teenagers in a confirmation class, but more important is a fuzzy concept of love independent of the things our ancients had passed down.

It didn't take long to realize my assumption was wrong, at least among the students, young academics, and young professionals I interacted with. Sure, I'd hear people deconstruct marriage to justify premarital sex, but at the end of the day, marriage was a damn serious thing for most people, particularly for those in relationships. I found those living together didn't see their lifestyles as an alternative to marriage, but they saw marital commitment as something they couldn't lightly go into without a lot of practice and growth together. They were avoiding a complete entanglement, taking tentative steps into the rosebush, keeping the exit available, because they weren't about to make a commitment they didn't think they could keep. From this position, marriage was wonderful but overwhelming. They wanted it as much as the Bible-belt American standing before them, but with a deliberate slowness. I can imagine approaching child-rearing the same way, and it looks like more and more westerners are following in this path. The general seriousness about the topic impressed me, and it still does.

I sympathize. I had always wanted to be married, and yet the act of getting married cost me more courage than I could carry myself. Then our daughter came along, and she flooded our lives with love and joy but also with so many worldly worries that without the help of some god-fearing friends and family members, well, who knows how far we would have sunk. And still, both steps are the steps in my life where I can most clearly look at them and pronounce them good. I say this from a position of privilege - both my wife and I come from great families where martial promises were honored and children were viewed as gifts from the Lord. Not everyone grew up in such luxury, and I can understand how those without it might find the promises of love and joy of children much less believable, and all the "honest" parenting blogs could be a stumbling block for anybody. Entangling yourself in love is more and more a heroic, deeply serious step, the risks are no longer hidden behind smiles, closed doors, and rigorous cultural standards. It's serious stuff, and it's good we're all still talking about it.

Honest talking and writing doesn't hide the mess, the failures, or the heartbreak, but neither does it stay there, and I'm glad Lu and Senior reminded us how to write about the sort of things that don't fit on clever charts or Buzzfeed lists, but fit into philosophy, novels, poetry, and prose. The seriousness with which we're taking the commitments that irreversibly entangle our hearts to others mean that there's a hunger for it. And those of us who are presumptuous enough to tape our thoughts to the Internet should remember that writing about love and joy are worth the effort.

These Jets Are Lagged

"I used to be better at jet lag." I've been saying this to anyone who asks about my Christmas holiday in Florida. I've rocked back and forth between the US and Germany since university, and it's true. I could handle it. I could handle it better than most of my peers. I remember how on one summer trip to Germany, so many of my pitiful cohorts slouched like war refugees on Deutsche Bahn while I stoically willed wakefulness and sleep at their proper time upon my compliant body. Several days later, I was chipper as a springtime squirrel while others were still falling asleep before dessert.

Not anymore. I can will nothing. Instead my hands, feet, and head are tethered to a timezone six hours away, watching football, avoiding public transportation, and eating large, fatty meals just before bed. The sun, wintery and distant as it is now, has no effect on me. It sits on the horizon, I sit in my living room, and we ignore each other like bored roommates. I sleep at my body's command. This could be mid-sentence in a conversation with my mother-in-law, or while chewing a piece of toast, or while typing something up so that my head hits the keyboard like this: 8iuy65rfd

What changed? Well, two things.

First, my body is aging. Now, whenever I say this, anyone older than me points out that I ain't seen nothin' yet. And that's true. I'm not old; I'm not even middle aged. I will be some day, Lord willing, but not yet. Nonetheless, I'm no longer that cock-sure traveling college student. There are things I could do a decade ago that my aging body just won't play anymore:

Me: "I'm going to sleep in."
Aging body: "This is your 7:00 wake-up call!"
Me: "That chili-cheese dog looks delicious! I'm going to eat it."
Aging body: "Of course you are, you contemptuous glutton. And for the next few days, you're going to feel as if someone poured cement in your intestines."
Me: "I'm going to run ten kilometers!"
Aging body: "And your joints are going to HATE you."
Me: "I'll put some ice on it. It'll be fine!"
Aging body: "...in about three weeks."
Me: "Jet lag doesn't phase this traveler! I'm not going to fall asleep!
Aging body: "Zzzzzzzzz"

I hear it's only downhill from here.

But age isn't the only reason I'm suddenly a jet lag failure. After all, my dad beat jet lag well into middle age with the right combination of tablets, wine, and airline pasta (WARNING: Do not attempt without first consulting your physician - especially the airline pasta part). The other reason is, of course, a small child.

Yes, for the past four years I've been traveling with a carry-on that I can't stow in the overhead compartment. No traveling parents, no airplane sleep for you. You are there to feed, change, walk, and entertain the passenger capable of throwing herself into a temper tantrum somewhere over the Atlantic. And when you land, your schedule will not abide by actual sunshine, but by your little sunshine. And when you say, "we should go to sleep," she'll say "neither of us can sleep, so let's play princess ponies," and you will smile and neigh like playing princess ponies is what you've wanted to do every since you bought your plane tickets.

So, for the parents of young children, jet lag is not something to be willed away, but to be endured like recovery from surgery, slowly, until a week later, you notice yourself rising with the sun again.

Ten Things To Say to Young Children That Guarantee Their Parents Will Never Ask You To Babysit Them Again

You know you've thought it. You watched the darling couple get married, settle down, blossom, and then, oh tears of happiness! the woman's belly turned into a baby bump, grew, and, before you can shake a pastel-pink rattle - pop - that plushy miniature human is resting and cooing in the arms of a glowing young Mother.

Twelve-thousand Facebook photos later (good luck analyzing those, NSA!), those two parents, all smug and smiling on the Internet, really need a break. I mean, they haven't seen a film since the first Ironman came out, and the wife always mutters "vodka cranberry" every time her bundle of joy comes running. So, they ask you, their very dear friend to babysit. Of course, they think you'd babysit! You've known them since college, were present at every significant event, you wept at their wedding (and overpaid for that tux/bridesmaids dress, mind you) and kept a social media vigil while their child was being born! I mean, of course!

You have two options. You could tell them the truth: "I don't think your kids like me, besides, I can't be confined to your house when you don't even have HBO! I mean, hello, Game of Thrones!"

Nah, I didn't think so. The best approach is the passive-aggressive approach, because it keeps relational conflict below the surface - where it belongs. So option number two is to warp the minds of their kid(s) into such a twisted little pre-kindergarten knot that those mooching parents never ask you to babysit again. You'll have to sacrifice one night of freedom, of course. But to be free for the rest of your life, tell those lil' anklebiters any combination of the following:

1. "Interesting how your dad made you eat all that salad. Dinner at my house was always a snickers bar with a side of gummy bears. Healthy, and better tasting too."
2. "Baseball is an indoor sport. Extra points if you hit Mom's blender!"
3. "Why doesn't your mom still breast feed you? I guarantee you everyone else in preschool is still breast fed."
4. "Your bed is a dangerous place. If your parents loved you, they'd let you sleep in their room."
5. "Yeah, I smoked to impress people at school. It worked, too! Don't regret it one bit." 
6. "I brought over my favorite movie! It's about a little girl like you! It's called The Exorcist!"
7. "Baths are completely unnecessary. A waste of time, if you ask me." 
8. "Wiping your bottom is completely unnecessary. A waste of time, if you ask me." 
9. "Let's call your granny and ask her why Mommy always pays more attention to her iPad than to me." 
10. "Good night! Remember, I promise you can drink a Coke for breakfast." 

Oh, and if you try any of these with my daughter, I'll release a live badger your living room. 

The Picnic (Home Sick)

We didn't want to get sick, of course, and we tried everything. But sickness is part of life and winter and public education, and, on the night my daughter's fever set a personal record, our sainted pediatrician was open late treating a relentless line of sniffling kindergartners. That was Thursday, we got the medicine Friday morning. It's Saturday afternoon as a write this, and my daughter is restlessly watching one of the "BBC Earth" films. She wanted to see the one where "the shark eats the seal," which is the first one. This might sound like bragging, as in, "I-got-my-daughter-to-watch-something-educational-nanny-nanny-boo-boo," but really, this my penance for letting her watch a DVD of Disney Princess greatest hits earlier this morning.

Speaking of morning - this morning was very short. Blessedly short. For all the suffering and worrying about a sick child, there is one delicious mercy. We slept in. All of us, including teenie one. Normally, one parent sleeps in while the other does his or her Christian duty to wake up like it's a Tuesday to feed and clothe and entertain a tiny little person. This morning, for perhaps the first time in her life, she out-slept the both of us. I woke up to nothing but sunbeams and quiet. My wife had already gotten up to fix coffee. Our church had it's women's day, where all the ladies sang and ate and encouraged. So I think she's having a good time, even if she had to get up for it. The poor woman. She had a terrible night sleep anyway. My daughter has a fever, but I wasn't spared the sniffles, which means I snored like an eight-hour freight train. My wife informed me of this first thing when I emerged from the bedroom. Maybe she didn't sleep in after all. 

So after a leisury breakfast involving peanut butter and bananas (when you find peanut butter in Europe, you buy lots of it), I helped my sick little daughter up. She ate her light breakfast, slurped her antibiotics and played and toddled around. Not needing much attention, I left her to do some Internet reading (don't worry, my chair was about five feet away from where she was laying on the couch). 

I got lost reading a lovely essay, when, I felt a little tug on my jeans pocket. She's up. "It's time for a picnic, Papa!" I look outside. Snowflakes, lots of them, but too indecisive to stick to the ground. Not picnic weather. Nonplussed, she unrolled a piece of bubble wrap from a package we opened long ago and laid it out on the living room floor. She invited me to her feast, and Î sat down. "What are we eating?" I asked. 

"I have hambooger for you, papa!" 

"mmmm... hamburger. I love hamburgers." I wanted to ask if they were made with horse meat, but I don't think she's up enough on current events to get the joke.

Hamburger finished, she announced, "Î have spaghetti for you!" I'm normally not in the mood for a bowl of spaghetti after a burger, but I didn't wan to be impolite.

"Thank you. Mmmm... that's some good spaghetti!" 

Then we each took a few minutes to pop the bubbles in our picnic blanket. 

Real lunch was served later. I let her watch the Princesses (while wearing her official Cinderella dress) while I fried up some pressed sausage and boiled some potatoes. The Germans call pressed sausage "Fleischkäse," or "meat cheese." It's because it looks and tastes like meat but has the consistency of cheese. I realize this sounds like a form of cafeteria torture, but it's actually quite good, especially if you have onions and a bit of Bavarian sweet mustard. I managed to fry it up on the 2nd try - the first time I left it in the pan too long and the alarms went off. Delicious, even after hamburger and spaghetti. 

Surviving the German Winter Part IV: Temptation

This is part IV of an award-winning*, four-part series on surviving the German winter. You can read part I here, part II here, and part III here. 

Remember your New Years resolutions? New Year, new you and the rest of it? Remember how through the harmonious combination of diet and exercise, you were going to sculpt your body into something that, come summer, will cause traffic accidents outside your house as you flex in your living room with the window open? If you've managed to keep them until now, then let me say this: respect. So many of your comrades have fallen victim to Jack Frost. It's a sick irony that New Years' resolutions are made in the dead of winter. Winter is no season to avoid chocolate. Winter is no season to ride your bike three times a week. You'd be lucky if you can brave the cold enough to get from your office to a fitness studio.

Now don't get me wrong. I've managed to work out during the winter. For a few moments when I step out into sub-zero temperatures to go jogging, I feel like a superhero. I don't feel like a superhero, because I move with superhero strength (nope). I feel like a superhero because winter running tights are the closest I get to wearing a superhero costume in public. If I could find them in patriotic blue with red briefs, I'd be even closer. Mercifully, they're black. The idea is that while running, no one has to see me in them for more than a few moments. Besides, all the Germans wear exercise tights while exercising. Anything less form fitting would be unnatürlich.

***
A brief aside on exercise fashion. When we were back in the States for Christmas, I couldn't help notice how many women wore exercise tights for non-exercise purposes. In the grocery store or around town, the uniform was as follows: exercise tights and tennis shoes (both perfectly clean with no trace of sweat) with a stylish, semi-professional shirt and perfectly placed hair and make up. It was puzzling for these ever-europeanizing eyes. The look suggested, 10K on the bottom, business casual in the middle, job-interview on the top.

***
Ok, winter exercise. Things were going well until one frosty day, I sought to prove I wasn't a Warmdüscher and went running on one of the few forrest paths that wasn't salted. There was only one minor fall, but the awkward running on hard, hard ice was enough to give me a slight tear in the achilles and a week's limp. The doctor gave me some of that magical Chinese tape that all the soccer players are wearing, but the incident was still demotivating. Superheroes don't get small tears thanks to ice and bad form.

I am back to running - carefully - but temptation is much harder to avoid.

This is how it goes: I squeeze my body into my exercise tights and head for the front door when I hear something in the kitchen. It's a voice singing "Baby It's Cold Outside" the way Nora Jones sings it. What is it? Oh, don't play the curiosity card. I know dagum well what it is. It's that Swiss chocolate bar that I was supposedly saving for the moment my ambitions were realized. It's supposed to be my, my reward, for crying out loud! Well... some things deserve a reward. Something like thinking about going running in the sleet. (Big eyes. Pouty face) Just one. little. chocolaty. square. Where's the harm in one tiny little square? Besides, I'm an American! A free person, using my agency to maximize my utility! Why do I need to conform to puritan notions of nutrition? I can have a little taste - just a taste - if I want. Who's going to judge me? If I eat, say one row of squares, I mean, I could devour the whole chocolate bar, but what's the harm in one, harmless row of squares? I mean, baby it's cold outside, and I, frankly, could use a little comfort in trying times (like January or February). I deserve to be comforted, and I don't see why you should judge me!

But what's this? No... Some how, my chocolate bar has found a boy chocolate bar and multiplied. There's a good dozen Swiss chocolate bars that inexplicably found their way into the secret corners of our kitchen. Dark. Milk. White. Hazelnut. Minty. Oh, and Marzipan! No prejudice, just the entire variety of chocolate experience in one snack drawer. I mean, I have no choice but to try them all. It's my duty as a connoisseur to know, to understand all of the tastes! I could write a blog about it, too, and wasn't that another one of my New Year Resolutions? It won't be more than two or (in extreme circumstances) three squares each, and, yes, I know that will all add up to more than one chocolate bar, there will still be plenty left to share with my wife and daughter, provided they come home soon. Speaking of my daughter, I know the packet of gummy bears is her reward for successful potty training, but... she won't notice if a few are missing. You can't accuse me of taking candy from a baby - she's over three! Baby was so a year and a half ago. Oh, and what is that smell? Why, did the oven just give birth to cinnamon rolls? Two or three, while they're fresh. I shouldn't eat too much. After all, I intend to pop open a hard earned Hefeweizen at the end of the day, so I need to save room.

...yeah...

The worst thing you can do for your New Years Resolution is lock yourself in from the blizzard surrounded by candy and beer. Just don't do it. Instead, pack your winter stocks with tomato juice, herbal tea, mandarin oranges, walnuts and whole-grain bread. Also, don't go running when your belly is full of chocolate. And, don't run on the one path in Germany that isn't salted. Take it from me.

*I gave myself the award for best series published on the blog in February. 

Surviving the German Winter Part III: Don't Get Sick

This is part III of a four-part series on surviving the German winter. You can read part I here and part II here. 

The most important thing about the winter? Don't get sick. Ban disease from your presence. Avoid it like.... ok, I won't finish that sentence. Winter sickness is spawned in the floors and desks of kindergartens and elementary schools all over the world, where it's then carried to bus drivers, parents, grocery store workers, office drones and government employees. If you have kids, then, or if you know someone who has kids, or, if you're vaguely aware of the presence of children within a fifty-mile radius of your front stoop, then you need to take the appropriate defense measures.

First, flu shot. It's just a pinch, folks! Then, the teas. Here in Germany, flu shots are under-girded by liters upon liters of Gesundheitstee. Gesundheitstee comes from the German words, Gesundheit, which, you probably know from sneezing, means "health", and Tee, which is how I spelled the word "tea" in first grade (someone should probably point this out to the Germans and get back to them once they corrected their documents). Most of them taste like hot, piping vegetable liquid, which is to say they're delicious. Also, innovate Germans like my wife make tea using real ingredients. You know those tea bags full of ginger and honey flavoring you can get at the grocery store? Well, here's a breakthrough - for roughly the same time, cost and effort, you can make ginger-honey tea using... wait for it... actual ginger and honey, which is a heck of a lot healthier than whatever it is they put in those other teas. Ahh... warm hot tea is just what you need after a day of your daughter using your sleeves as a hankie. Put in a spoon full of honey and open a Charles Dickens book if you're really feeling wild. You can also bathe in the stuff, or try to breathe it to relieve your throbbing sinuses. Just remember, don't drink the tea you bathe in.

Then, vitamins. Vitamins, vitamins, vitamins. Germans have many vitamin-enhanced products, often things you fizz up in water or pills or vitamin-enhanced tea, with various combination for every situation or stage in life. Then, Der Spiegel told us that the Pharma industry was lying to us (the title of the piece translates: "The Vitamin Lie," but they should have taken a page from Dawkins to call it "The Vitamin Delusion," which would have been snappier) and that we could get all the vitamins we need from food. So now, I'm eating less vitamins, except the vitamins that I'm getting from food, which I'm told is plentiful.The way to do this is buy those tennis ball crates they use for practice and fill them with oranges. An orange a day keeps the sickness at bay. At least, until you get sick. I don't recommend using the tennis ball shooter though, at least if you want to use the oranges.

Then, of course, there's prayer. I can't say if prayer gives me some sort of psychological advantage in the face of disease, but that's not the point. I wish prayer worked like a magical incantation, where I get to use supernatural forces to bend the world to my whims. Otherwise, I would have waived my wand to straighten my teeth like Hermione Granger did instead of suffering through five years of braces. It works like this. I pray for my health, which could affect my family's health, or finances and much more, and I find myself trusting God with these issues. This introduces peace into my life. Then, I pray for the health of my wife and my daughter. My wife has been sick this winter, and my daughter could easily get sick and get us sick. But I trust God with this. Some more peace, usually, but even better, praying them leads to think of them more, realize my thankfulness for them, think of them more than I think of myself, and love them in ways even deeper then before. This happens as well when I pray for those in our community, especially for those who've gotten sick.

The problem starts when the prayers turn into actions. I had a roommate who hated prayer. He was from Mexico, and he believed the church there just prayed about problems instead of taking steps to solve them. That hasn't been my experience. The best pray-ers I've known, the ones who've really done it and stuck with it, have been the ones who were quickest to put love into actions. That's why a friend of mine got sick. While another friend and her husband suffered through the flu, my friend took care of their daughter and caught whatever bug they had. I think she's near recovered, but as I write this, my wife is watching her daughter while she's at the doctors office. With such actions, my wife's liable to find herself sick this winter. Which is no fun. I pray she doesn't get sick she's been fighting a cold already. But giving your body for love has a president in Christian history.

Surviving the German Winter Part II: Play in the Snow

This is part II of a four-part series on surviving the German winter. You can read part I here. 

Once the snow comes, the kids naturally want to play in it. My daughter has seen enough Christmas specials to know that as soon as the ground is white, all the neighborhood kids burst out the front doors, armed with sleds and cherry-red mittens. They make enormous snowmen with pipes and coal for eyes (I have never seen a three year old walking around with a pipe and and two lumps of coal, though I guess that's what they all did in the 50s when the Christmas specials were filmed) and toboggan down enormous hills. These are my memories as well. What I don't remember is the battle Armageddon my mother must have went though just to get three kids dressed for the winter. I'm struggling with just one.

It takes about seven and a half hours to dress your average three year for snow. Five of those is just getting her little fingers into those friggin mittens, but the rest consists of several pairs of tights, wooly socks over thins socks, hats not truly designed for children, water-resistant snow pants with zippers to bleed your fingers and the most incomprehensible pair of snow boots in the world (they look so simple, then you try to put her feet in them). Once my daughter is wearing enough layers that I could safely roll her down a mountain with a sled (don't worry, haven't tried it, no plans to), she removes her scarf from her lips and announces that she has to go potty.

With this news in mind, I teach my daughter three choice curse words, and frantically unbutton and unzip enough for her to do her business at the proper way in the proper place. By the time everything's ready to go, of course she's already soiled herself. I can now only sigh and check which of her many layers are salvageable and which need to go directly to laundry. My daughter, then, sees her shadow in the bathroom light and declares six more weeks of potty training. Or, I could just remember to let her empty herself before we hit the sleds.

Of course, we've managed to go out in the snow a couple times this winter. It's fun - watching a little girl discover how snow crunches under her little boot is a reminder of all that is good about life. But it only takes a couple of snowfalls to crush a few of your idyllic snow scenes, and this has much to do with the nature of snow itself. You really can't have it all. Snow that is powdery and good for sledding is rubbish for snowmen, and wet, heavy snow ain't up to snuff when it comes for sledding. The snow is the great decider of your activities, even as your daughter is screaming "I WANNA BUILD A SNOWMAAANNNNNN!!!" Nope! We're going sledding, darlin'! This is after we built a snowman that looked more like a six-inch dollop of whipped cream. Just like in the commercials.

Surviving the German Winter Part I: Salt it. Salt it Good.

I came back suntanned and smiling from my Christmas vacation only to find Germany suffering under a plague of fog and gray. This happens every year, but I tried not to think about it when I was cycling around the big lake near my parents' Orlando residence. A few weeks later, we're adjusting, and as a brave, experienced winter warrior (with icicles hanging from my beard as my huskies struggle to pull textbooks over the Swabian Alb), I feel it my duty to offer the following survival advice for sun-stroked southerners. This is the first in a four part series on surviving the German winter.

When the winter comes, the Germans salt it, and salt it good. I used to live in the Washington  DC area,  and no one bothers salting anything until at least two blissful snow days pass and everything from the local schools to the national government shuts down. This annoyed the hearty northerners, who see snow as an invitation to the office, but for the rest of us, well, hello snowball fight! In this part of the world, there's no difference between work day and snow day. I awoke one morning after it had snowed through the night only to see streets and bike lanes so clear, you'd think the Red Baron had flown over Plochingen in a salt-shooting crop duster. Well, no, that's not how it really happens (unfortunately). As soon as potential snow is reported, salt truck swat teams are deployed all over the nation. They are the salt of the earth, and if the earth loses its saltiness, all the Daimlers slide into the Neckar River causing world-wide economic inefficiency, which is the worst possible thing that could happen. Also, since the cyclists here aren't the kind of Warmduschers who use sub-zero temperatures as an excuse to sit by the heater, the city is kind enough to salt most of the bike lanes as well. Warmduscher literally means "warm showerer" but really means wussypants. In Germany, you're a wussypants if you waste valuable energy resources by heating water to wash yourself.

However, the state doesn't salt most of the sidewalks. That it leaves to the power of collective legal coercion. Back home in the USA, you can spill hot coffee on yourself and and sue McDonald's for millions. In Germany, the quickest way to get rich is to slip on the ice in front of some irresponsible person's (likely, a foreigner) house who failed to salt and shovel before sunrise. Thus, every snow day at 6 AM, Germans of all ages can be seen working like ants to de-ice the sidewalk in front of their house with the harried look we all get when thinking about potential lawsuits.

Even as this excess of salt turns the average snow-on-the-street into a grayish sludge, the snow on the roofs and mountains remains exquisite.  In my sunny Christmas post, I joked about preferring a sunny Christmas to a white one, but a good blanket of snow is better than pretty much any other winter weather north of the Mediterranean. You see, for this southern expat, the worst part of winter has nothing to do cold or ice or frost, but everything to do with the darkness. The sun barely bothers to rise this far north and usually wears gray clouds like a dull fur coat. The lack of light turns the world pale and bleak and lonely. This is worst when combined with that weather we now call "wintry mix." The clouds spew this horrid precipitation that's somewhere between rain and snow and sleet and spit. Temperature and water particles combine as if the heavens are mocking the lack of commitment so pervasive in my generation.

Snow, though on colder days, gives winter a surprising warmth. The mountains and the rooftops are frosted white, and each snowflake works together to catch whatever light their is and reflect heavenward, reminding every pilgrim that in the darkness the sun still exists, and spring will be here soon enough. Let it snow.

Not Athletic

From the moment my legs could kick, from the moment my fingers could touch the leather stitches and lacing of a ball, from the moment I could watch modern titans put on superhero costumes to reap points, touchdowns, goals, runs for their city, country or university, I have loved sports. My earliest audio memories include my father's voice, my mother's voice, my grandmother's voice and football commentator John Madden's voice. (if you don't know who that is, ask your American friend to imitate Madden's trademark "BOOM"! He would yell "BOOM" for touchdowns, good hits, good blocks, good runs and effective athletes foot fungus removal. "BOOM" is America's answer to "GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!!!")

My dad took me to my first baseball game when I was just five - Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field, standing room only, industrial stadium nachos, Cubs lost to the Mets. I dressed up like Washington Redskins' Quarterback Joe Theismann for Halloween. My walls were decorated with the likes of Michael Jordan, Charlie Ward and Gred Maddux, among other titans of my youth. Today I can straddle the Atlantic and rage and rejoice with the tides of European and American football. (to those who think one or the other is boring, then you need better cultural understanding: Americans like to hit things and need to take frequent breaks. Europeans think life is too complex for winners, losers and scoring opportunities.) With every major tournament my spine gets sparkly and my eyes get tingly (or maybe I overcooked the barbecue). Athletic feats! Matching uniforms! Philosophical arguments about meaningless things! Yes, from the very beginning, I could watch sports like a champion. Playing sports, however, was a different matter.

You see, the problem, the suffering, the shame, is that I was always awful at sports. Really awful. From the moment the first gentle grounder avoided my baseball glove and went through my legs because I was imagining dinosaurs sitting in the dugout, I tried to keep up, but never quite had that spark. My trophy case is full of participation trophies and the occasional coach's award for team spirit. I tried, but sports required an amount of concentration I could only give to stories and television, as well as a coordination that only existed in my muscular imagination. (My imagination needs no performance enhancing drugs)

Now, this never stopped me from useful childhood participation in team sports. But from the little leagues to pop warner, coaches recognized my deficiency. They would place me in positions that required the least amount of participation. In baseball, that meant left field, the part of the diamond where it was statistically unlikely for a ball to reach me. I'd stand there fantasizing about hitting home runs like Andre Dawson while my teammates fielded double plays. By the way, baseball's the worst for a non-athletic person. In all other sports, I could hide my inability in a cloud of dust, cleats and team activity. But when I came up to bat, all eyes were focused on my stance, my motion and my strength, and this knowledge hung on my mind like an ice brick. It's like every play is a penalty kick. My greatest triumph was whenever I was walked. "Good eye!" my coach would shout, encouragingly, after I trotted to first after not swinging through six pitches. Yes. My "good eye" (where did I leave my glasses?) and the knowledge that not swinging was my best chance at reaching first base.

When I played youth soccer, the coaches always had me play sweeper. Now, in Germany, sweeper is a hallowed position, but in American youth soccer, sweeper is where you put a slower person who doesn't have the hands or the attention span to play keeper. Essentially, I would stand in a defensive position and dream about dinosaurs attacking the neighboring parking lot, and if the ball got close, I was supposed to kick it away from our goal. I remember actually kicking the thing, like, three times. The rest of my teammates would fight tooth and nail for goals and glory. If we won, I was overjoyed for our group effort. If we tied, I was relieved. If we lost, I wept. But no matter how the game ended, there were free soft drinks for everyone, which was by far the best part of youth team sports. I did score a goal, once, when I was seven years old. My coach let me take a penalty kick, probably to fulfill some contractual obligation to have everyone touch the ball at least once. Without any particular strategy in mind, I kicked the ball straight ahead as hard as I could, and the keeper was kind enough to had been standing somewhere else. I was ecstatic, and my father, to his eternal credit my biggest fan wherever I went, erupted in a triumphant scream like I had just struck out Willie Mays.

It's a horrible thing for a boy to be bad at sports. It's like a fish being bad at swimming. It's like a calculator being bad at math. It is psychologically and spiritually important for boys to test their speed, strength, agility and endurance against one another, and to overcome - to triumph. Sure, there are other talents out there, but none so primal as athletic prowess. For such amazing feats, the athletic boys received respect, honor, swoons and early first kisses. I would play in the playground and in the large backyards of Virginia, hoping desperately that at some point, mind and body would kick in to find me home-running, slam-dunking, last-second-diving-catch-for-a-touchdown-celebrating like all the other neighborhood boys, for whom these things just clicked like the button of an old-fashioned coke machine. Instead, I was the easy out, the last pick, the "everybody go long except you" guy.

I kept trying though, and in high school, I ran cross country - a sport that required zero coordination and that valued camaraderie among under-nourished high school kids above talent. A sport for the weirdoes, where I was a four year junior varsity member and a winner of the coach's team spirit award. And I still run today, for fitness and vanity. Fitness, because I want to live a long and comfortable life, and vanity, because I want to give my wife a reason to look up from her iPad whenever I walk to the shower. It's for those reasons that this past Saturday, participated in my first public sports event since my cross country days. I ran the Plochingen 5K.

Saturday was brutally hot. Now, I'm from Florida, and Florida is brutally hot, but Florida is at least decent enough to have a violent thunderstorm every afternoon to cool things off. On Saturday, every air particle hung over the pavement like it was in suspended animation. Every speck of dust, every piece of pollen, every smudge of pollution stuck to the the inside of your lung like old rice in a pot.

But we persevered! My goal was 25 minutes, and in the face of rainforest conditions between three-story houses and the occasional friendly man with a garden hose, I reached it! Crossing the finish line, I tore off my shirt and flexed my muscles like Mario Balotelli, except that my body hair to muscle ratio is much higher than his. Ok, actually I kept my shirt on and walked like a drunk in an obstacle course towards the water station. My wife cheered (we even had our own WAG section!) and my daughter cried (mainly because of the weather). Ok, so a girl overtook me on the last lap. That doesn't matter. What matters is that I reached my goal and I had fun. Besides, everybody deserves a victory dance.

Chocolate Eggs

The moment finally came, the spring equinox, the part of the year where the light begins to overwhelm the darkness in the Northern Hemisphere and all the birds start singing love songs. There was a day a few weeks ago where the cafes first opened their doors and put chairs and tables onto Plochingen's cobblestone market street and every child between the river and the top of the mountain went down to the local park (mine included). I saw new friends, sympathized with fellow parents and found out someone had waxed the slide when my brave daughter landed on her bottom three feet (one meter for all you continental Europeans, one metre if you're the writer of the technical English book I use) in front of it. The sun stayed up later, giving everyone color and smiles. (It's not all fun, of course - right now the trees are taking their revenge on my using them for fuel and shelter and lesson plans by warring against my sinuses)

Next week is Easter, and I intend to bite into a big fat chocolate egg (and finally check my Facebook account - what's new?). Here in Germany, they're usually filled with egg liqueur (the taste makes this American think of the Christmas nog), though I hope to get some good Cadbury egg in the mail. You know, the tasty treats that rot your teeth on contact and taste like love mixed with sugar. In any case, I waive my palm in glad anticipation.

These are the feelings of new life: taste, smell, sound, sight, touch. It's appropriate that Christians confiscated pagan fertility symbols for our Easter parties. We eat the eggs and hug the bunnies and then, still shaking from sugar highs and feasting, we go to church and shout, "The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!" Life renewed. Resurrection. New birth.

This is good news. No, this is wonderful news. Wonderful in the literal since, and I find it especially grand here in Western Europe where people have told me they love the feeling of wonder but refuse to believe in wonder itself. After all, how could anyone rise from the dead, the way Jesus did, the way his closest followers risked their lives to say he did.

It means that things like death, suffering, injustice and evil, results of the fall, however they got here, don't have the final say. These things, present as they are to our senses and our newspapers, as real as they are to our lives, especially those who face the worst of it, do not lord over us. This is wonderful news.

It also means that, however messed up we are (and make no mistake, we are) that there's something about us, in our flesh, in our spirit, in our soul and all we are, that God loves and wants to preserve. God sees it, made in his image. He loves us enough to send his Son to die for us, to take the penalty for our sin, and to raise us with him. Jesus' rising means that we will also rise. God wants to renew us and preserve us, for his love, for his unending pleasure.

This holy week, it's worth stepping into a church to observe the worshippers, the smell of spring and new life in their nostrils, celebrate the wild coronation of Palm Sunday, break bread on Maundy Thursday, mourn death on Good Friday and revel in Resurrection on Easter Sunday. If you find you can't believe in wonder, it's a good week to give it a shot. The awakening flowers, the jubilant birds and the chocolate eggs invite us to do so.

Two Eyes (Thoughts on Religious Brutality)

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, I took a short-term job with the para-church organization now known as Cru to help coordinate their hurricane recovery projects. To the thousands of Cru faithful all over the United States, there was no more obvious way to live Christianity than to help those in need, and for the next two semesters, we hosted group after group (the high point being the thousands-strong spring break do-gooders) of students who would camp out, borrow tools and help recover houses and neighborhoods from the wreckage. I traveled to New Orleans quite a bit, though much of my work was from a cushy Orlando office. The real heroes were the student volunteers who took a semester or two off to live and work downtown for the remainder of the year.

During that time, I saw religious conviction at its finest. I mentioned the volunteers who put off their pursuit of the American dream to dig houses out of the mire. I was even more impressed by some of the local churches. One church not only housed our volunteers but refused to let them get away with just eating cereal from the local discounters every morning and, and their members whipped up eggs, grits, bacon and biscuits. People who lost so much in the Hurricane invested their time and treasure to ensure that those who came to help had a proper Southern breakfast. The resource sharing and generosity of those involved showed the meaning of "labor of love."

There was of course, another side to religious conviction. I saw plenty of silliness preached and promised in the name of the prosperity gospel. (One pastor told me his vision of everyone having a big-screen TV) I heard of another pastor using our volunteer efforts to promote his candidacy in New Orleans' local politics. My volunteers told me he had a habit of turning away people who needed help from outside of his voting district. Religious conviction can be a magnifying glass to the human experience. It can bring out our best, and it can very well bring out our worst.

In her Spiegel Online column last week, Sibylle Berg looked at the religious experience with one eye closed. (Note - if you can't read German, Google translate will give you the idea. I quote her using that and my own rough translations) She sees the bad and not the good, possibly because when she looks at the bad, there is so much to see. The column is entitled "Religion Is, When Men Oppress," and "men" is the operative word. While she stands with intellectuals, homosexuals and racial minorities against the religious oppressor, it's sins against women that most draw her venom. She writes:

"That what we in such a conciliatory way describe as "tradition" is nothing more than discrimination, sexism and racism. Instead of being satisfied to stay home and believe something that doesn't concern anyone else, the world is being ruled over by the power of muscle over mind." (that sentence sounds more eloquent in German) 

Her anger is righteous, appealing and rails against a form of repression that any reasonable person should find disgusting. And she has plenty of current events on which to build her case:

"Dealing with the uncertainty of people with idiocy and brutality is a powerful new trend... in Israel the religious are beginning to throw stones at lewd women. In many parts of the world they are still being circumcised, and then there's the death penalty for homosexuals. The urge to separate grows and makes their already difficult lives unbearable."

And there are plenty of events in history to add to her case - crusades, inquisitions, terrorism, human sacrifice and much else. In fact, when it comes to brutality, I don't think there's anything new under the sun - just new faces and new weapons. She has her vision of paradise - a mind your business coexistence that welcomes headscarves, thongs, chaps and animal masks and that "everyone can believe in something that, at the end of the day, won't prevent their death." Western Europe is closer to this, and I sure prefer it hear to Saudi Arabia. But her one-eyed view of things like religion or tradition misses a few things.

First, and briefly, it misses that not all oppression is religious. If Berg would look East, she would find countries where the religious aren't the oppressors, but rather the oppressed. In China, the officially atheist government evicted the Dalai Lama, crushes house churches that don't tow the party line and threatens Muslims and other minorities on the Western Border. Oppression is when men oppress. This has been done under the banner of every religion and with a little creativity can be done under the banner of every philosophy, humanism included. We rarely live up to our ideals, religious or otherwise.

Second, Berg's righteous anger makes her blind to religion's role in promoting the equity and justice she advocates. With one eye closed, she doesn't see the good folks who refused to mind their own business when Katrina wrecked New Orleans. Or consider slavery. Whatever the religious justification of the original Christian and Muslim slave peddlers, we should remember that it was a motley crew of Quakers and Evangelicals, i.E. religious nuts, who worked to bring down the North Atlantic slave trade. Over a century later, we should remember that Martin Luther King, a Protestant Minister, was one of the most effective forces against the brutality of the USA's endemic racism. King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" should be required reading for all people, but please note how he chides his coreligionists for doing precisely what Berg wishes religious folks would do - nothing. King wrote:

"When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.
I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular." (emphasis mine)

When religion is a passive player, it goes along justifying whatever the Zeitgeist happens to be. Those were the white moderates King criticized. True religion, according to the Apostle James, isn't polluted by such worldliness. Instead, it looks after the orphans and windows, the least of these in society. When they stand for something, you get the likes of Martin Luther King and William Wilberforce. It's true for dozens of my coreligionists, women and men, that I know personally. Whenever we stay home with our silent, private faith, and this is too often, we are doing it wrong. If Berg really cares for her oppressed sisters the world over, she'd do well to remember this.

I sincerely hope that all brutality and oppression will go back into the swamp, to paraphrase Berg's closing metaphor. But the desire to taste the divine lies in all of us, and to throw those of us who nurture it under the banner of thugs, bullies and ignoramuses is to look at reality with one eye closed. We Christians believe that the divine came to us, that he walked this earth in a time when both imperial and religious brutality were common. Something Berg wrote reminded me of him. She wrote that "in Israel, the religious are beginning to throw stones at lewd women." This, of course, happened before, and we get a picture of how the Divine confronted it:

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”