The Children of Hurin

Like many of my fellow-geeks, I'm a great Tolkien fan. So even though half a dozen volumes of The History of Middle Earth currently lie unread on my bookshelf, I was quite excited when Christopher Tolkien recently released a new novel by his father, The Children of Hurin. After a long bike ride today, I came home and finished it over dinner.

My reactions to it are mixed. On the one hand, I think the story itself is amazing: a tragedy that ranks with the best of world literature in its exploration of the many griefs that inhabit our world. As in the Silmarillion, Tolkien makes oblique reference to the Biblical story of the Fall: "A darkness lies behind us," Sador says,"and out of it few tales have come. The fathers of our fathers may have had things to tell, but they did not tell them. Even their names are forgotten." Indeed, for all its attempts to tell a story of the world before Christ -- for all its attempt to recreate the pagan world of the Norse myths that Tolkien loved -- the book could not have been written by other than a Christian.

That said, nearly all of this story has already been told in The Silmarillion, in the long chapter "Of Turin Turambar". The story is told somewhat more fully in The Children of Hurin, and some of the details are changed, but it's fundamentally the same story. Having been a year or two since I last read The Silmarillion, I wasn't able to pick out where the one was more expansive or even where the two differed. Even as it presents more details, The Children of Hurin still largely maintains the summarizing, distant style of The Silmarillion: if you liked The Silmarillion, you'll like The Children of Hurin; if you didn't enjoy the former, you won't enjoy the latter.

That said, it's worth reading. It was one of the stories which most engaged Tolkien's mind throughout his life, and it stands as a firm refutation to those who critique Tolkien for creating only two-dimensional characters, either all good or all bad. Indeed, in Tolkien's universe, LOTR stands distinct from the rest of his tales: it is the one story where all finally goes well, where nearly all of the main characters (Denethor, Boromir and Saruman excepted) stand true and remain admirable throughout. That cannot be said of any other story in Tolkien's universe.

Making a Contribution

I had lunch today with Andy Sack, the CEO of Judys Book, and a longtime board member here at Zango. He keeps a regular blog, A Sack of Seattle, with a readership, shall we say, substantially larger than this one. He and I spent most of lunch talking about blogging, and I quickly realized just how disconnected I am from the blogosphere. I confess that I've spent much more time writing this blog over the last month or two than I've spent reading other people's -- just as I've spent more time writing poetry (when I write it) than reading it. Andy kept asking me, "So you read this blog right?" And I kept having to shake my head in shame. Most of them I hadn't even heard of. It's a lack that I will try to remedy. The issue is figuring out where to add in all that reading, what with work, church, my wife, an impending adoption (more on that later), trying to stay in reasonable shape, finally some sunshine here in Seattle, and already too many books to read.

Still, it made me think. One of the things that I haven't done very well as a CTO is reaching out beyond Zango's walls. A friend of mine, John Schneider, is the CTO of AgileDelta, a small but impressive company that has some very impressive technology. John seems to spend most of his time on W3C committees, working out XML standards, speaking at conferences, coordinating Efficient XML tests with NATO. It's a different sort of job than I've been doing so far: nearly everything I've worked on has been internally focused, just trying to get the next product release out the door. I think it's something that will need to change: hopefully we can get Zango to the point where the internal Dev organization doesn't require so much attention, and I can focus my efforts more externally. With any luck -- if I can get it past our omnipresent PR department (Hi Steve!) -- this blog may yet serve as a steppingstone along those lines.

Blog Editors

I'm trying to figure out if it's just me, or whether, in fact, the Blogger editor sucks as badly as I think it does. Every time I try a fairly simple use case -- inserting a picture, say -- it totally screws up the look and feel of my post, and I have to spend 10-15 minutes working through the HTML to clean itup. Behind the scenes it tries to do all sorts of bizarre things like inserting tables and what-not that apparently confuse the editor very badly. I've tried several alternatives -- the "blog" feature in Word, Google Docs, etc. -- and each of them have troubles. I'm writing this particular post in Google Docs, and if a core of software development is the "principle of least surprise", I have to say, it fails miserably. The simple use case of inserting a link to another site does some very strange and bizarre things to the document that I don't understand in the slightest. Perhaps it's the result of using IE7 on Vista, but I would have assumed that's a fairly standard configuration. I'd be very curious to hear what other folks have managed to use successfully.

Spiritual Israel

I grew up in an Assemblies of God church, where most folks supported Israel almost instinctively. In the Presbyterian church I now attend, many members dislike Israel just as instinctively. As for myself, I like Israel: I identify with it emotionally: I like the people there: I love the country and celebrate its successes. As I walk around the streets of Tel Aviv, I smile at the עם ישראל חי graffiti that shows up everywhere: so different from what you see in the States, and redolent of a people so in love with their nation that even their hoodlums are patriotic.

My pastor recently loaned me a DVD called The Iron Wall. (It’s posted in its entirety here.) It tells the story of Israel’s settlement, and the building of the wall – or the “barrier” as my Israeli friends refer to it – and the consequent suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis. It’s blatantly unfair in some respects, as it tells the story of Israeli injustice and brutality without any sense of the context in which those acts occurred, but what remains is still troubling.

As Charlie was handing over the DVD, we talked about the situation in Israel, and his plan to visit there in the near future. Through the course of our discussion – well, argument, really, but the respectful kind – it became clear that whatever our assessment of the facts, our emotional perception of Israel was quite different. If you were to give names to the ways in which our different perspectives represent the Biblical tradition, I suppose you could say that I’m more like David, and he’s more like Nathan. I respond emotionally to Israel’s glories: he responds emotionally to her failures. I most easily see Israel as somehow, uniquely the chosen people of God; Charlie sees how she has failed to live up to that calling. I think that both perspectives have truth to them; both have some degree of Scriptural warrant; and both are, to some degree, unfair and biased. (As Charlie put it, “I don’t get angry about Darfur the way I get angry about the West Bank. I want to hold Israel to a higher standard.”)

That said, I agree with my pastor that Israel’s settlements on the West Bank have done a great deal of harm, both to the Palestinians who were displaced, and to Israel’s moral standing in the world, and with its own people. The settlements are blatantly illegal, and while the various governments which permitted them did so to solve short-term political dilemmas, they’ve closed the door to all but the most determined peace process. When Arafat refused Ehud Barak’s offer to withdraw from more than 90% of the West Bank, most Israelis reasonably concluded that Arafat was not serious about peace. But when Barak’s same government continued to build settlements, it was perhaps reasonable for the Palestinians to conclude that Israel wasn’t terribly serious about peace, either. Israel has a non-negotiable right to exist in security; it doesn’t have a right to take whatever land it wants from people who already live there; and it saddens me that Israel has continued to engage in this self-destructive policy.

I think my pastor and I could both agree that the whole area seems to be under the sway of an odd mix of sin and holiness. It’s as if life is lived at a different intensity in the holy land: as if spiritual forces are more actively engaged. The first time I touched the Wall, I felt a sudden weight of centuries, of depth, of history, of glory: the legacy of David. The second time I touched it, I felt a sense of waiting, expectation, sadness, and more waiting: the legacy of Nathan.

Are Denominations Dead?

Every once in a while, I still hear someone (usually uneducated) use the word "religion" when they mean "denomination"; and I still sometimes hear even educated people make a distinction between "Christians" and "Catholics" – as in, "I'm not a Christian, I'm Catholic." This particular misuse of language tends to heighten the distinctions that exist between the various divisions of Christianity, but it would be foolish to pretend that those distinctions don't still exist, or aren't important.

In a recent trip to Jerusalem, I heard a story about the wonderfully surreal ways in which those distinctions show up from time to time with particular force. Although most folks in Jerusalem, whatever their faith, have figured out how to get along with their neighbor, of whatever faith, the tensions that remain are undeniable. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is perhaps the pre-eminent example of this. Built on the traditional site where Jesus was both crucified, buried and raised from the dead, few other churches in all the world have such a claim to being "the holiest site in Christendom". Yet the church itself is nearly falling apart, due to lack of repairs. It's not that the good monks running the church can't get their hands on the money to fix it: it's that they can't agree on who should pay for what. You see, throughout the middle ages, while Jerusalem was in the hands of the Muslism, different Christian Churches fought one another, with fair means and foul, for control of the site. Those involved enerally the Orthodox and Catholics, though I think the Ethiopians and Copts got their licks in from time to time.

Eventually, the story goes, the different Churches got so tired of fighting each other – or the scandal reached such proportions – that they agreed to share control of the site. And sometime around 1852, they signed a "Status Quo Agreement", defining exactly who would have control over which areas of the church, and when. The crucial clause in the agreement declared that in all common areas – hallways, doors, windows, etc. – no changes were to be made unless all the signatories agreed. The surreal bit started the very next day after the agreement went into effect, when they realized that a workman had left a ladder leaning up against one of the second story windows. That ladder has now been there for 155 years – I saw it myself just a few months ago. Nobody can agree on how or when or whether or why it should be moved: so it stays there.

And lest anyone think that, surely, after 155 years, we should all have matured sufficiently to allow reasonable, rational discussion (to say nothing of the ειρηνη χριστου) about our differences: in 2002, a Coptic monk, whose job it was to guard the Coptic section of the roof, moved his chair out of the hot sun and into the shade: on the Ethiopian side of the roof. The argument escalated, and in the ensuing brawl, 11 monks were injured, some of them seriously. And lest anyone think that only Ethiopians and Copts are capable of such beautifully surreal moments, in 2004, a Franciscan monk (advertently or inadvertently) left a door open during a Greek Orthodox service. This was taken as a sign of disrespect, and in the ensuing brawl, four monks were arrested.

Still, apart from a few hold-outs, it's become clear to me that differences between denominations are getting less pronounced, and much less important to their members. In 1964, my mother's Baptist family was scandalized when they found out that she was dating a Pentecostal. Not one of them now can remember why they were so bothered. I myself grew up Pentecostal (Assemblies of God), went to a non-denominational seminary, taught at a Methodist university, and I'm attending a Presbyterian church where we just hired a Lutheran as our youth director. Most of my favorite writers and theologians are either Anglican (C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright) or Catholic (G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. P. Meier, and even the former Cardinal Ratzinger himself, Pope Benedict XVI). I find myself equally challenged by Luther and Aquinas, Augustine and Calvin. I doubt that most members of any church I've attended in the last 10 years could tell you their denominational distinctives. My good friend David Townsend might be raised as a counter-example: he can quote many of the Presbyterian creeds by heart. But despite that fact, his own personal theology smacks much more of Jacob Arminius than John Calvin. And astonishingly from the perspective of any 17^th century Protestant theologian (either Calvinistic or Arminian), he doesn't see that as having much bearing on his membership and active involvement in a Presbyterian church.

Associated with this, I think, is the rise of the homogenized worship service. Apart from a few outliers, any church in America that is of any size or that is experiencing any growth, has nearly the same worship service: what I call "contemporary Baptist". One or two hymns, perhaps, but nearly all the rest choruses; a very contemporary musical style; quite often charismatic in flavor, but generally without public speaking in tongues; a sermon that is mildly exegetical, generally light on theology, and easily applied to one's personal life.

This leads me to my one real concern about the astonishing breaking down of denominational walls that has occurred within my lifetime. Like C. S. Lewis, I agree that the schisms in Christianity are – or should be – temporary: nothing more than adolescent growing pains. But I worry that the reason Baptists have decided Pentecostals aren't so bad isn't that the peace of Christ has finally won out over deeply-held theological beliefs: but rather, we haven't been thinking deeply enough about our faith to realize that there are differences, and sometimes very important ones. The death of denominations is perhaps only a symptom of the death of theology.

Latest Email from Everest

Here's the latest email from my cousin, Brian:

Most of you know that I stood on the summit of Mt Everest yesterday, so I wanted to let you know that I am safely back in base camp as of this afternoon.   If you hadn't heard that I made the summit of Everest, here are the stats of our climb-   Willie, Tendy Sherpa and myself arrived on the summit at 29,035 feet on Thursday May 24th at 2:45 am. We spent 20 minutes on the summit and then descended all the way to camp II 8000 vertical feet beneath us. A good time from the South Col at camp IV to the summit is 9 hours. Many climbers need 12 hours. Willie, Tendy and I made it in 5 hours 45 minutes and were back at the South Col in 8 hours! Most need 17 hours. It was still early being only 5am so we kept going all the way down to camp II at 21,200 feet arriving around noon.   Although I did not get a view from the summit as it was pitch dark, I was really happy to be one of the few to stand on the roof of the world in the middle of the night! It was bitter cold, maybe -60F with the wind-chill so that was really cool. We tried to slow down by turning down our O2 flows and waiting a little at the South Summit at 2am but frostbite was coming on quickly in those temperatures so we had to keep climbing to stay warm.   This was Willie and Tendy's 2nd summit in only a week. I believe that Willie now has the Westerner record. Willie has 7 summits of Everest now and Tendy has 5. Our summit yesterday was by far their fastest ever in half the time of all of their other summits. They were both really excited with our screaming fast time.   Willie gave me the honor of being the first to step onto the summit. My first thoughts were "I am the highest person on the planet right now!"   The BBC is going crazy with my summit. They filmed me climbing all the way to the summit and on the summit. Their two camera crew's filmed me up to camp I climbing through the Khumbu Icefall for the 7th time, and then Willie filmed the rest with camera equipment they loaned him. Then they waited 3 hours in the ice fall this afternoon with camera's set up so that they could film my return. I guess I just made medical history by having HAPE only 3 weeks ago and then returning to summit Everest. Medical articles are being written as we speak and I guess I am the center of a 4 part series kind of like Everest: Beyond the Limit that will be released internationally in 6-9 months. Discovery Channel will most likely carry it in the U.S. Pretty crazy with all this attention. I have never been a minor celebrity so it is kind of fun. There were a bunch of people waiting for me at the edge of the ice fall. Many told me that they had their radio's tuned in on our progress and when we called down at 2:45 am while standing on the summit that the tears started to flow with their excitement for my success. Pretty cool. We are having a big dinner tonight with the BBC and Everest ER to celebrate.   We were also the last of teams to summit Everest from the south in 2007. The weather closed in behind us. The wind is now howling at 70-90mph on the summit and will for the next week. The monsoon is also now here so it looks like things are done on Everest from the south this year.

 I'm looking forward to him getting back, presumably safe, at least for a while.

My cousin Brian Smith summited successfully

I got news about 3:00 pm today that my cousin -- 12 hours away -- has successfully summated Everest. According to Mountain Madness, he, his guide Willie, and Tindy Sherpa left Camp IV at about 9:00 pm, figured out that they were going to summit too soon, and stopped and waited for light. However, it got too cold for them, and they decided to continue on. They stepped foot on the summit at about 2:50 am, called a few people, got cold, and decided to head down. They've reached Camp IV right now, and will leave shortly to head down to Camp II, where they'll take an extended break. (Apparently it's possible to sleep there – which isn't really so possible at the higher camps.)

More as I hear more . . .