MORGAN'S MOMENT...
“Has the recession hit you yet?”
It was one of those dumb questions
     you shouldn’t have to ask
     if you think a minute.
He looked at me with a slight grin
     suspecting that maybe
     I was putting him on.
“I’ve been in a recession
    for 10 years already…
    so I’ve had plenty of practice.”
He didn’t say so but I knew…
     SSI and food stamps
     don’t add up to even lowest income.
“If you don’t have anything
     what have you got to lose?"
Not everyone could be so philosophical…
     their sense of self
     embedded in what they have.
You have to ask whether it’s true
     where Jesus is quoted saying:
   “Do not be anxious about your life,
    what you shall eat or drink,
    or what you shall put on…”
Maybe the recession will force us
     to test such challenges as this.
— Art Morgan 

BOOK CORNER
This past Thursday night Paul and I did a dialogue presentation using “Jesus and Buddha – The Parallel Sayings,” edited by Marcus Borg.  Since the Buddha preceded Jesus by more than 500 years one must ask how there could be so many similarities. Hearing the Buddha say similar things in a different way allows the reader a fresh look at the words of Jesus. Readers are still left with the scholarship questions of authenticity of texts attributed to either Jesus or Buddha. (Thanks to June Williams of Orange Co. for sending me the book)
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MOMENT MINISTRIES
– February 22, 2009 –
    A MOMENT MINISTRIES production – Art Morgan a-morgan@peak.org

THE PALESTINIAN ISSUE
This is not about solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It is about a way of dealing with the problem that is unhealthy.
Like an article in Christian Century (1/13/09). I usually expect that articles in that magazine will reflect a progressive perspective, usually Christian, based on broadly accepted biblical and theological scholarship.
The article was “Israel and the Land” by Gary Anderson who teaches Old Testament at the University of Notre Dame. You will like the article if you are interested in a biblical story view of how Israel ended up occupying the land of Canaan. He covers the story well.
He concludes:
    “The book of Genesis could not be clearer: Israel is God’s chosen nation, and the land of Canaan will be its land for all eternity.”
Not to take sides, I say, “Really?”
What I notice, as would any of you in any of the scholarly disciplines, that he assumes his source to be actual history and reflective of the divine mind. Two gigantic assumptions.
My mind flashed back a half century (when you are old enough it’s easier to “flash back” great distances!) to my very first seminary class in Old Testament. The professor was the late John Herbert Otwell who pledged to try to weed out the misfits. He laid a doozy of term paper on us: “The Theological Implications of the Documents of the Pentateuch.” If you understand that I don’t need to explain it. If you don’t quite get it, think how it was for me in those days.
Anyway, that the Bible has multiple writers and sources with religious and theological and political spin is well-established fact in biblical scholarly circles. Can you trust such a source to be the basis for science of any sort - natural, religious or political? At best it is revisionist history in the nature of the American story of how some Europeans claimed a continent for a new homeland. When Anderson asserts that “The Jews claim to the land is of a supernatural order. It came to them as a gift of God” my old prof would require that we honestly face the textual issues. I keep waiting for someone with expertise to challenge the article. Or am I missing something? Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
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BILL THE PRINTER
       There are 11 “Bill’s” on my email address list. They are similar only in name. I think I’ve met most of them personally and corresponded with all of them at one time or another.
       There is one Bill not on any of my lists. I count him, though, because he was the guy who printed our Blue Sheet. Only this last time I didn’t see him. I asked, “Where’s Bill these days?”
       “Oh, didn’t you hear that he died?”
       I took a breath for a moment. I was sorry to have to hear news I really didn’t like hearing. I went home to find his obituary.
       When you have mailings and booklets and occasional programs printed over 50 years, you get to know your printers. You gradually learn about them, a little bit with each delivery of copy and pick up.
       I think all of my printers read at least some of my writing, so they knew a lot more about me than I did about them. My printers spoke of occasional pages they especially liked and were quiet about ones they didn’t.
       Bill had a quick wit and chuckled and bantered with me briefly about things each time we did business. There were times when we missed connecting. I knew that he had dialysis each week, so it didn’t alarm me not to see him occasionally.
       Lots of things can happen to people between mailings.
       I began thinking of the other Bill’s I know. There’s Bill the baker where we buy our bread, and Bill the Webmaster who preps the Blue Sheet and gives me a link to send to those who get it electronically. There are two Bill’s who are beach neighbors on Puget Sound. Others are in places like Albany OR and Seattle and Williston VT. I can’t remember them all. Then there is Bill the printer.
       The paper-printed word is a threatened species. People like Bill (as well as my church secretaries) have advanced my writings over the past 50-and-more years from hand-cranked mimeograph, electric mimeograph, typeset and off-set press, photo copy, inkjet and laser. Much of this business has moved into home offices that have advanced printers. Bill stayed in business when others didn’t because he offered special additional services that included addressing and mailing.
       While I regret it, I see that the next step is for electronic publication via the Internet. Some of my writing goes that route. It works, sort of. Bill and I talked about the difference between skimming a publication like mine on a computer screen and holding a page in your hand. He thought he would always have a market. I admired him for staying on top of the technology. No one can measure the number of words he printed and published in his career.
       He was more than a printer, or course. He was a special man who maintained a human touch, living his life and faith with courage and grace.
       His wife, Tammy, and son, Adam, carry on the business. It will take a while for me to stop thinking of it as the place where Bill the printer did our blue sheet.
─ Art Morgan, February 18, 2009