Beer, Downstairs

Beer is best consumed in two places: outside, under the sun, at a picnic table with friends or downstairs, in a basement bar, at a small table with friends.

While I look forward to this summer's biergartens here in Germany, my final round in Washington was in the perfect downstairs environment. Two days before our departure, a few friends huddled with me around a table at the Beer Baron, what Brickskeller near DuPont Circle used to be. It's essentially the same thousand-beer bar with some minor improvements in the important areas, such as service, cleanliness and having beers on tap available downstairs.

Downstairs bars should be dark, but not in a lost or oppressive sense, but in a way that is warm, welcoming and comfortable. In such an environment, we check our worries around the same time that the girl at the front checks our IDs, leaving them to choke on city streets filled with cars, haste and the need to be going somewhere. Beer Baron fits the bill. Golden light trickles from each lamp like a back yard stream. The walls are brick. Downstairs bars should have brick walls, or stone, or something that, in the old days, would have looked presentable caked in cigarette smoke.

An important point: where we sat, we could not see a television. So many bars these days have TVs in every direction. Given the American attention span and our appetite for sports and news, I suspect that any bar not bricked with glowing screens puts its bottom line in serious danger. Don't get me wrong; I do enjoy watching sports at bars, with friends, where we can hear each other shout at the players and refs, but bless the bars without televisions. Televisions perniciously distract from what the best bars can do. They allow men to talk, to bond, those two mysterious things we observe women doing pretty much everywhere else. So we sit at our table with delicious, carefully-brewed beer, warm light and bricks shortening the path between our hearts and our mouths.

DC is a city of monuments and museums, green space and French architecture. I love walking around it, breathing in accomplishment wherever I go, being carried by the idealism, the expertise and the ambition. Two days before my departure, however, I left all of these things on the surface. Instead, I descended into a basement to drink beer with friends.

A Poem Worth Reading, Especially This Week

I randomly bought a book of Gerard Manley Hopkins poems at a used bookstore (a dangerous place for me to carry cash). Many of his poems are a chore to read and don't conform a lifestyle of glowing screens and busyness, but every time I practice concentration to read one, I find it well worth the effort. They were full of complexity - complex verse, complex thoughts, complex Christianity. I wish I could say I read him more often, and I won't see my book again for at least six weeks.

Fortunately, one of my pastors posted a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, both a chore and a joy to read, that is better than anything I read in my book. It's especially worth reading this week (which is why he posted it), as we remember death darkest, resurrection and new life. Read it.

The Joy of a Job Well Done

I'm sure you've had this experience before. You're doing a task you don't particularly care for, perhaps even at a job you don't like, but in all of the repetition, you start to feel joy. You grow in excellence and work quickly, and the satisfaction of a job well done sneaks in like an unwelcome guest at your negativity party.

I don't know whether or not the man who packed our belongings into a 200 cubic foot pod liked is job or not, though I suspect he does. He has been at it for fifteen years, ever since he moved to the States from Guatemala. He packed, taped and carried boxes of books, clothes, wedding presents and baby toys with a sort of gusto that comes from professionalism and know how. He was only about 5'6", maybe even less, but I think he could bench press my entire extended family if they all sat evenly on a metal pole. He was cut. In fact, with his shaved head, tanned skin and action movie physique, he looked just like Vin Diesel.

The best part was when taped up a box. Here his motions were more Bruce Lee than Vin Diesel (though no high-pitched Kung Fu screams). Within the span of a single second, he would rip off a piece of tape, close the box lid, tape it firmly and without creases or bubbles and without danger to any of the box's contents and, with that same gusto, tear off the end of the tape from the roll. He did this with machine-like precision. Whenever I tape up a box, the same process takes me five minutes and usually involves wasting too much tape as the pieces fold in two or get stuck on the floor. I look like a chimpanzee trying to open a jar of pickles.

I stood in the corner, nibbling my lip as I fretted about our worldly goods, wondering if they would all fit in the pod, while Vin Diesel/Bruce Lee merrily boxed and carried. I bet he could have fought 20 ninjas at once. It was a beautiful morning, and later, my wife and I stood outside to see him and his two partners pack everything in. It was incredible. My wife got annoyed when I hummed the Tetris theme song. Everything fit and then some. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding, that all of our belongings make it in tact to Germany. In the meantime, like a sunny spring morning, it does the soul good to watch someone take joy taping, boxing and carrying.

My Contribution, Part 2

Here is my second posting to the Lenten devotional.

In the 10th Commandment, God prohibits “inordinate” desires. Why? Because, as we saw yesterday, God loves us so much that he wants for us to be at peace, not only with one another, but also in our hearts. Consequently, God’s prohibition against covetousness is simultaneously a commandment to contentment. We are to be so satisfied in the Lord that, instead of resenting God or neighbor for what we do not have, we remember what we do have and give thanks. A covetous heart makes it impossible for us to experience God’s peace. That’s why this commandment comes at the end of God’s list of ten. Covetousness makes us much more likely to break the other nine commandments, as theft, adultery, idolatry and the rest are often rooted in it. A content heart, however...

Read the rest.

My Contribution

I am privileged to be a contributor for my church's online Lenten devotional. The devotional goes through the Ten Commandments, and I wrote two articles on the 10th Commandment, the first of which was posted this morning. The entire series has been excellent, so if you have not read them yet, by all means start from the beginning. My post is below. My pastor made some good edits to what I originally wrote, including smoothing out the syntax and adding the sign post analogy to emphasize the 10th Commandment's connection to the previous nine.

I once read an article in which an atheist ridiculed the 10th Commandment, because, unlike the other nine, it commanded inner thoughts and desires rather than actions. What he didn’t understand was that the first nine commandments share the same problem. As we have already seen in previous posts, outward sins like murder and adultery begin in the heart too. There’s nothing new about the starting point of the 10th Commandment. Rather, it’s like a sign warning that the bridge is out. The sin that pours forth from within our hearts has washed out any way ahead paved by our own external moral righteousness. The 10th Commandment is one last barrier erected across the road, warning that peril awaits all those who continue on ahead unimpeded. But what does it mean to blow through the barrier of the 10th Commandment? It can’t mean the prohibition of all desires. There are, of course, healthy desires... Read the rest.

Humanity Does Its Worst

Roger Cohen's anger is righteous. Any reasonable person should be angry. A buffoon of a cleric apparently burns a Koran in Gainesville, enraged Islamists react with murders, which their leaders fail to condemn. Jones' demonstration of what the Apostle Paul calls zeal without knowledge would have been more compelling if he himself were walking the streets Mazar-i-Sharif. As it is, his violation of another Pauline admonition ("to make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be Holy," as Adam points out) made unwitting martyrs out of UN staff in the same city. Of course, no act of buffoonery or provocation can justify cold-blooded murder, and if Cohen is right that Islamic leaders have failed to make unqualified condemnations, it is all the more despicable.

Here is Cohen's conclusion:

"This column is full of anger, I know. It has no heroes. I’m full of disgust, writing after a weekend when religious violence returned to Northern Ireland with the murder of a 25-year-old Catholic policeman, Ronan Kerr, by dissident republican terrorists. Religion has much to answer for, in Gainesville and Mazar and Omagh.

I see why lots of people turn to religion — fear of death, ordering principle in a mysterious universe, refuge from pain, even revelation. But surely it’s meaningless without mercy and forgiveness, and surely its very antithesis must be hatred and murder. At least that’s how it appears to a nonbeliever."

Indeed. But I think Cohen has the wrong culprit. Much violence has been committed in the name of religion. But much has also been committed in the name of politics, and people like Cohen certainly don't avoid that. Much has been committed in the name of tribalism. And much has been committed for reasons purely personal. Self-serving buffoonery and bloody revenge, as inhumane is they are, are human characteristics. Religion is at its worst when it channels and institutionalizes these characteristics. The same can be said for political or tribal activity.

Now, I can't speak for another religion, but Christianity agrees that religion is meaningless without mercy and forgiveness, the antithesis of hatred and murder. That's why Paul preaches against zeal without knowledge. That's why Jesus commands us to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us.

"Religion" has as much to answer for as politics, tribalism, passion and so many other isms. The answers Cohen seeks actually belong to the perpetrators themselves. In fact, Cohen's longing for an answer, for justice, is a better reason than any on his list why "lots of people" (historically, the overwhelming majority of the human race) turn to religion. Jones, along with every terrorist and inquisitor, will one day give an account to God himself, who is far more offended, hurt and angry at murder than we are.

Unfortunately, the desire for justice, right at it is, will lead to a mirror. In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis writes that the essential question of hell is not about Hitler, Nero or Judas Iscariot (here he could add today's religious terrorists), but about you and me. On that same note, Paul reminds us (I say remind, because if we're honest, we know) that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." We all will have to give account to God some day. Thankfully, Paul's sentence does not end there. He continues "...and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."

That's the best reason for turning. Not turning to religion, which anyone can use or manipulate. It's turning to Jesus Himself. God's own Word, made flesh, took on God's wrath, offering us mercy and forgiveness. We humans have a lot to answer for, and in Jesus, we find the answer we need.

You've Got Tweets

At least one other blogger beat me to it (I did a "just in case" Google search on the topic), but at least it was an original idea among my friends, and besides, we have a different angle.

With Borders bookstores closing all over America, and various social media replacing that quaint, old-fashioned practice known as electronic mail, it's time for a sequel to that quintessential 90s movie, You've Got Mail. Yes, it's a generic love story - "oh, no, I hope they end up with each other and not with the uncomfortable, incompatible person they're currently dating!" plot regurgitation, but the backdrop of the rise of internet, email, online relationships and mega-bookstores makes this the kind of movie future historians will watch as they consider the 90s.

The plot of the sequal could be something like this: Played by Tom Hanks, widower Joe Fox (Meg Ryan's cold at the end of the movie was actually a warning sign) is also grieving the loss of 60% of his mega-bookstores, forced to close in the wake of fierce competition from a popular web-based discount store called "Nile." From his iPhone, Joe vents his sorrows through his anonymous Twitter account, @NY154. He begins to be followed by another anonymous person known as @Netgirl. The two begin playful but earnest banter and begin to fall through instantaneous messages of 140 characters or less.

Of course, @Netgirl is really the owner of the Nile website, who mostly tweets inside her expensive but lonely office, located in Nile's 150-acre Silicone Valley complex. She could be played by... oh, I don't know, Reese Witherspoon, or how about Gwyneth Paltrow? Of course, the love regurgitation story is beside the point (I'm sure they'll both be dating undesirable comic-relief characters who you pray they don't end up with). The real point will be to show future generations the rise of smart phones and social media, along with the demise of outlet chains. One of the classic movie moments will be where Joe Fox waxes on about the good old days, when people sat around in bookstore coffee areas reading magazines instead being glued to a screen all the time. At another point, @Netgirl would tweet from Fox Books: " Only 40% off for a best seller? Who pays that much!?" She will also make fun of Fox Books' awkward attempts to come up with a rival to her successful electronic reader, "The Blaze." At the end, of course, we'll learn that love conquers all, even sentimental attachment to your doomed business.

Yes, I think this is the movie you've been looking for - the one you'll use when telling the grandkids about early 21st century life.