There's a lot of great Advent blogging going on. Roger Overton, who writes for The A-Team Blog, is doing a line-by-line devotional series on the great Christmas hymn O Holy Night.
From Roger's introduction:
The original “O Holy Night” was composed in French in 1847 by Adolphe Adam. He used the words from a French poem called “Minuit, chrétiens” (Midnight, Christians) by Placide Cappeau. It was translated into English 1855 and in 1906 became the first piece of music known to be broadcast on the radio.
Bookmark The A-Team and visit them regularly for some good reading. (A-Team is their inside joke based on the old TV show of the same name: they love to write about Apologetics, hence, A-Team.)
He was unknown, just a low-level government clerk in the Bern, Switzerland patent office with big dreams, and a big ego to match. Every morning he would arrive at his desk early and hurry through his day's work in the first few hours. Then he would remove a sheaf of papers from the drawer, spread them across the desk and lose himself in musings about some of the deepest mysteries in theoretical physics.
He had his "ah-hah" moment in 1905 when one by one the pins of the tumbler dropped into place and he could see the solutions as clearly as a photograph. Historians ever since have called this the "miracle year," when 26-year-old Albert Einstein submitted four scientific papers that would crack the Newtonian foundations of physics and open the door to the atomic age.
...science had not seen [such a creative outburst] since 1666, when Isaac Newton, holed up in his mother's rural home in Woolsthorpe to escape the plague that was devastating Cambridge, developed calculus, an analysis of the light spectrum, and the laws of gravity. — Einstein: His life and universe, Walter Isaacson, pp. 93
His first paper proposed a new theory of light, which Einstein correctly argued consisted of a stream of particles, or quanta, each containing a fixed amount of energy. This paper later earned him the 1921 Nobel prize in physics.
His next paper proposed a mathematical technique for calculating the number of molecules in a liquid, a problem that had not been successfully analyzed before.
His third paper examined the phenomenon known as Brownian motion, and from that analysis added new evidence for the existence of atoms, which were still a subject of debate at the turn of the century.
His final paper, on special relativity, produced the famous equation E=mc². It was the most daring of the four, making the dual claims that light always moves at a constant velocity of approximately 186,000 miles per second, and that time is elastic. This latter insight overturned the belief, going back to Isaac Newton, that time was an absolute, universal constant.
The obscure patent clerk was suddenly a very hot topic in the world of physics.
Einstein's name has become synonymous with genius, but it was not primarily his intelligence that made him a successful theorist. He was a prodigious reader, not only in the sciences but in history, literature and philosophy. He had amazing powers of synthesis, enabling him to grab an insight gained in one discipline and apply it to another. He was skeptical of conventions and relished the chance to challenge the status quo. And, he had remarkable powers of imagination, which enabled him to engage in thought experiments where he could often visualize solutions to the theoretical problems he was working on.
Supporting those prodigious mental gifts was a firm belief that the universe was orderly, not arbitrary. "God does not play dice," he famously exclaimed. He did not actually believe in a personal God, but he was convinced that a creative authority of some sort had built the universe on a system of laws. The structures that govern physical phenomenon were not hidden, Einstein believed, but plainly evident in the behavior of all things. The nature of things could be deduced by careful observation, and by freeing the mind of preconceptions about what might be true or false.
Like Italian crooners and Latin lovers, male blue whales serenade potential mates with song. Scientists have been recording these songs since the early 1960s, first in the Atlantic, then branching out to listening stations around the globe. A few years ago they reached a startling conclusion: year by year, the voices of blue whales were getting deeper and deeper.
"It's a fascinating finding," said John Calombokidis, a blue whale expert at the Cascadia Research Collective. "It's even more remarkable, given that the songs themselves differ in different oceans. There seem to be these distinct populations, yet they're all showing this common shift." Blue Whale Song Mystery Baffles Scientists, Wired Science, December 2, 2009.
The question, of course, is why? One theory being tested is that by lowering their voices, blue whale crooners make themselves appear larger than they really are. And, as everyone knows, female blue whales like their men... plus-sized.
Not surprisingly, this same phenomenon has been observed in human courtship rituals. In scientific studies at major universities, the honey-smooth basso profundo voice of Barry White singing "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe" was guaranteed to send female test subjects into passion-induced seizures, whereas the chalk-board screeching of Barry Manilow's "Copa Cabana" would send them fleeing for the exits. It is a well-known fact that among humans, the deeper the voice, the bigger the swoon factor.
To test this theory on whales, cetacean researchers played Barry White's "It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me" through hydrophones in the northern Pacific for 48 hours straight. While the music was playing, at least a dozen female blue whales made amorous advances on a 200-ton Scripps Institution research vessel.
Next, scientists piped Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs" into the water. Within hours, 5 whales had beached themselves and others were showing signs of acute distress, prompting an emergency decision to terminate the experiment. "It was just too cruel to continue," said a tearful Scripps Institution spokeswoman. "I consider myself a professional, but even I was about to throw myself overboard to end the pain. If they had brought up 'Mandy' on the playlist, there would have been blood in the waters."
Juvenile blue whales along the Pacific rim have recently been heard beatboxing, causing researchers to wonder if a dramatic cultural shift is underway in the deep oceans. "Like teenagers everywhere, juvenile blue whales seem to be rejecting the staid conventionality of their parents' songs in favor of the avant-garde music of the streets," suggests Dr. Lynn Esposito of Duke University's Marine Labs. "If whale musical styles continue to evolve at this pace, I expect we'll soon see a clash between the blue whale hip hop vanguard and the establishment classical purists. The kids will win out in the end, of course. Except in a few, small, traditionalist enclaves in the north Atlantic, those old whale standards will gradually fade away, signaling a sad end to a great musical era for the blue whale."
While Zechariah was in the sanctuary, an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing to the right of the incense altar. Zechariah was shaken and overwhelmed with fear when he saw him. But the angel said, "Don't be afraid, Zechariah! God has heard your prayer. Your wife, Elizabeth, will give you a son, and you are to name him John. ... And he will turn many Israelites to the Lord their God. He will be a man with the spirit and power of Elijah. He will prepare the people for the coming of the Lord." — Luke 1:11-13, 16-17, NLT
Does God pay any attention to our prayers? Do they bounce off the clouds and rattle around the atmosphere in futility? Or is God a listening God, an attentive God, a God who hears, remembers and responds to our requests?
Luke begins his account of the Advent story with what seems at first to be a superfluous historical detail, the account of an angelic visitation to the husband of Elizabeth, who was a cousin of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Zechariah and Elizabeth were childless and old. They had prayed for a son, but their prayers, apparently, had not been heard. I would imagine they had long since stopped praying for a child and had come to accept their situation, with regret.
But the first words out of the angel's mouth that morning were "God has heard your prayer. Your wife, Elizabeth, will give you a son..."
Advent is a season of anticipation, of awaiting the coming of Jesus. But before getting to anticipation, we have to deal with prayer. Advent is also a time to acknowledge prayers spoken, prayers heard, and prayers answered. The coming of the Messiah was an answer to the continuing prayers of a devoted people to be rescued from bondage and restored to greatness, and intimate fellowship with the Lord.
In other words, Advent tells us something significant about the Christian view of God: he is a God who hears, he is a God who remembers, and he is a God who answers the prayers of his people. Our prayers never fall on deaf ears. God is always attentive. God is active and at work in history, and also in the minute, gritty details of our lives.
The headlines don't seem to offer much reason for being thankful this Thanksgiving.
My home state of Arizona is second in the nation for "underwater" mortgages, according to a Wall Street Journal report. 48% of all homeowners here owe the bank more than their homes are worth. Nationally, 23% of all mortgages are upside down, creating a flood of foreclosures and a shocking decline in housing values.
A University of Arizona law professor is counseling homeowners to simply walk away from their mortgages. Prof. Brent White argues that the government pushed Americans into home ownership as a safe, long-term investment. Now that that investment has tanked, the government's first instinct has been to rescue financial institutions and leave homeowners to fend for themselves.
"We are propping up the market on the backs of the middle class," says Prof. White. If homeowners started walking out on their loans en masse, he thinks banks might get serious about offering significant modifications to underwater mortgages. (Arizona Daily Star, "Prof: Maybe more need to walk away," Nov. 22, 2009)
It should be pointed out, on the other side of that argument, that rational adults signed up for risky mortgages of their own free will. In fairness, however, it's true that rational bank CFOs freely invested in risky mortgages, too. Washington has thrown them a life line, while letting consumers drown. Politics as usual.
Meanwhile, Arizona unemployment is 9.4%, 10.2% nationally. Arizona's rate of new job creation is near the bottom of the nation.
None of this seems to be on Washington's radar screen. Instead, Congress is continuing its love affair with FDR, its obsession with Soviet-style central-planning for national health care, its irrational hatred of fossil fuels, and its reckless determination to pile up debt faster than any civilization in history.
Which begs the question, are our leaders merely incompetent, or have they lost their minds?
Millions are out of work, thousands have lost their homes, and according to the WSJ article, a half a million borrowers are currently in default on their mortgages.
And tomorrow is Thanksgiving. How is it possible to be thankful in such times as these?
Bonnie, who blogs at the excellent Et Elle, et al., reminds us that the people who created Thanksgiving didn't have it so easy either. She has posted a fascinating excerpt from Gov. William Bradford's account of the Plymouth settlement's difficult beginnings. Writing about their desperate struggle to raise enough food to survive on, Bradford is honest about their failures:
...All this whille no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expecte any. So they begane to thinke how they might raise as much torne [corn] as they could, and obtaine a beter crope then they had done, that they might not still thus languish in miserie.
There was no government bailout in sight. The colony was "languishing in misery." So they put their heads together, rejected the failed plans they had been following and came up with a new approach. And then, they got back to work.
The Pilgrims were thankful because they had arrived in a place that held hope for something better than they had known. It was not a place of lollypops and roses, but of hardship, suffering, death — and yet a place where there was abundant opportunity. The land was fertile, the climate tolerable, and they had succeeded, by hard work and sacrifice, to build a stable community. They had reason to hope that they and their families might prosper here.
And that they did. But not on their own. They prayed for God's mercy and gave him credit for strengthening them, supporting them, blessing them, and protecting them.
This year, more than ever, it should be clear that Thanksgiving is not really about prosperity, but poverty. When we are stripped of all the stuff that the world counts as treasure, all the stuff we lean on for support and hold dear, God still remains. He is faithful. He listens to our prayers and heals our broken hearts.
Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh each morning. I say to myself, "The LORD is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in Him!" — Lamentations 3:21-24, NLT
May we begin to discover, this Thanksgiving, what it means that God's mercies begin afresh each morning. If we can experience God's faithfulness in the middle of this miserable economy, then we have found something solid, something unshakable and unfailing, in which to put our hope.
Image credit: Carlos Zaragoza, stock.xchng
About Me
This is me, looking
for something. Seems like I'm always looking for something.
At AnotherThink, I talk about what I've found and what I'm
still looking for.
He was unknown, just a low-level government clerk in the Bern, Switzerland patent office with big dreams, and a big ego to match. Every morning he would arrive at his desk early and hurry through his day's work in the first few hours. Then he would remove a sheaf of papers from the drawer, spread them across the desk and lose himself in musings about some of the deepest mysteries in theoretical physics.
Like Italian crooners and Latin lovers, male blue whales serenade potential mates with song. Scientists have been recording these songs since the early 1960s, first in the Atlantic, then branching out to listening stations around the globe. A few years ago they reached a startling conclusion: year by year, the voices of blue whales were getting deeper and deeper.
The headlines don't seem to offer much reason for being thankful this Thanksgiving.
This is me, looking
for something. Seems like I'm always looking for something.
At AnotherThink, I talk about what I've found and what I'm
still looking for.
Thanks