May
02
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 02 May 2008 |
 Driving home last weekend I passed many crosses, big ones and little ones. The big ones were always in groups of three, always on a prominent elevation, and the middle cross was always bigger. Sometimes the middle cross was painted gold. The little crosses I saw were not so uniform in size or number but they were always near the road – never on a hill or promontory. The little crosses were always garlanded with flowers. Sometimes there were notes attached. Sometimes other items lay there. The space around the little crosses had the reverent and offertory effect of the household shrines one sees in the home of a Hindu, or Buddhist.
I know what the crosses are there for. They are there to remind us of the dead. The big crosses remind us of the sacrifice of Jesus. There are three because he was crucified between two thieves. I don’t know exactly who started erecting the big crosses along the interstates of America, but he is the Johnny Appleseed of crosses because they are everywhere. The little crosses are for people who have died on the highway at the spot where the crosses are erected. They are part of another phenomenon that has risen recently in our country – the spontaneous erection of memorials for the dead. It happened at the chain-linked fence outside the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, it happened at the Pentagon, and at Ground Zero. It happens everyday at the Viet Nam Memorial on the Mall in D.C. Flowers, notes, and personal items are left as offerings in memory of the dead.
I know what the crosses, big and little, are there for. I know who, specifically, the big crosses remember. They remember Jesus, and the two thieves. I don’t know the names of the ones the little crosses remember. I suppose if I pulled off the road, and went to look at the little crosses there would be names on or around most of them. Still, to me the name would be name alone. In my youth three very dear friends were killed in separate automobile accidents. Back then people didn’t erect roadside crosses. I remember their names, faces, voices nonetheless- and always will. I know that each of these crosses represents someone loved and missed. I know that each cross represents loss, agony, despair, and the hope that the cross itself will provide a little relief now, and a lot of relief over time.
That hope is justified. Although I don’t know the names of those represented by each little cross, there is Someone who does (Matthew 10.29-31). That Someone has made sure that grief need not be hopeless, because he has provided for reunion (I Thessalonians 4.13-18). We also know how he has accomplished this – he accomplished it through the One who hung on the big cross (I Corinthians 15).
And so there is a connection between the big and little crosses. The great cross in the middle reminds us of Jesus and all he accomplished on that cross. The large crosses flanking his remind us of the choice we make – the response to his cross, because one thief believed and the other did not. The little crosses below remind us that the uncertainty of life, the often unforeseen violence of it need not be all there is left to us. They remind us that there is more, that there is something that, unlike mortal life, cannot be taken away. The big cross in the middle makes it so.
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Apr
25
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 25 April 2008 |
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 The baby did indeed have a head full of thick, blond curls you would naturally tousle. This is evident in most photos of him, but the best, I think, is of him standing on a bench, flanked by two Westies and two Scotties. The snapshot was taken in the summer of 1931 – not long after his first birthday, and less than a year before he would be kidnapped and murdered.
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Apr
09
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Wednesday, 09 April 2008 |
 Last week I made reference to Barbara Walters’ fondness for the gauzy filter placed over the camera lens. As the years have gone by, when one watches her interview specials, one has to squint a little more to get focused on the screen. Barbara Walters’ fuzzy filters represent only one strategy aging celebrities use to mask the toll of time – we are also familiar with Joan Rivers’ surgeries, Mary Tyler Moore’s turtleneck sweaters, and William Shatner’s girdle. I hope we have at least a little sympathy for them all. We are, all of us, to varying degrees complicit in propagating the culture of youth-and-beauty in which we enslave our celebrities – it is a culture the Bible rejects (I Peter 3.3-4).
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Apr
04
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 04 April 2008 |
 I was recently reading Anne Morrow Lindberg’s first book, North to the Orient which details her and her husband Charles’ pioneering flight between Washington DC, and Nanking, China via Point Barrow, Alaska. The trip, made in the summer of 1931, demonstrated that this direct route across the arctic was feasible. Their Lockheed built airplane, the Sirius, had a longer flight range than any other single-engine airplane at the time, but still had to make 7 refueling stops before it reached Japan. One of those stops was Point Barrow – the northernmost settlement in the United States.
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Mar
27
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
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 I watched a really interesting NOVA last night on PBS about Australian paleontologists who were exploring a recently discovered cache of bones in one of the many underground, limestone caves that honeycomb the subterranean Outback. They found several complete and nearly complete skeletons from little known and previously unknown species of marsupials. The one that really interested me was a man-sized species of kangaroo, now extinct, that clearly had horn-sockets on its skull above its eyes. The Aborigines have long remembered, in their oral tradition, giant, horned kangaroos.
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Mar
19
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Wednesday, 19 March 2008 |
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 In 1777, on his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook gave the King of Tonga the gift of a turtle. The Tongans gave it the name Tu’Imalila, and considered it a chief. It lived at the Royal Palace grounds in the capital of Nuku. The Turtle lived there for 189 years, surviving a fire which blinded it. Tu’Imalila thus lived long enough to encompass the Age of Exploration and the Age of Space Exploration. Had the turtle lived 11 more years, and reached its bicentennial, its lifespan would have included the launching of Voyager 2, which has, for some time, been exploring beyond our solar system.
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Mar
14
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 14 March 2008 |
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 I have a little exercise I do with my three daughters which I thoroughly enjoy, although I am sure by now they find it tedious enough. I like to point out all the famous people whose fathers were (or are) ministers. It all started when they got interested, one by one, in Jane Austen. Now, whenever they watch a Jane Austen movie, or read a Jane Austen novel I ask (ad nauseum) – “And what did her father do?” “He was a preacher, Dad,” they reply. “Yes, Jane Austen was a preacher’s kid, and so are you, and so was: Charlotte, Emily, and Ann Bronte, and Louisa May Alcott, and Aretha Franklin, and Tina Turner, and Nathaniel Hawthorn, and Denzel Washington, and Tori Amos, and Condoleezza Rice, and Toni Braxton, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and W.C. Handy, and the McGuire Sisters, and the Pointer Sisters, and Abigail Adams, and Duke Ellington….”
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Mar
06
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Thursday, 06 March 2008 |
 Researchers nowadays are able to map the history of certain viral epidemics among prehistoric peoples by doing archaeological work inside our own cells. Some viral infections invade a cell’s mitochondria. It seems that when a person survives such a deadly virus, fragments of that virus’ DNA get preserved in the survivor’s mitochondria, and are passed down through the generations as battle scars of survival. Thus, researchers can recover, and identify these fragments in living persons, and know where their ancestors may have lived in the past, and some of the epidemics their ancestors survived. The benefit of these viral DNA fragments to the individual is that they can help cells combat new viruses.
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Feb
29
2008
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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 29 February 2008 |
 Grace is the heart of the Gospel. Without God sacrificing Himself on a cross, we are left with a superior moral system, but with a religion unable to provide for our inability to live up to that moral system. In other words, we are left with nothing. Benjamin Franklin, not long before his death, was asked by Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University, to make a statement of faith. He replied: “Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is in doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you in whatever sect I meet them. As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, is the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see.”
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Feb
22
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 22 February 2008 |
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 Immediately in reach of my left hand is a chafing dish containing multi-colored paper clips. Each paper clip is connected to another in a rainbow chain that extends several feet. In order to use a paper clip I must extricate one from the chain. I take great comfort in this, because I know who linked them. I know, because when I was a kid I would sit at the preacher’s desk and link his paperclips. I did this because I really liked my preacher, and that’s the kind of thing kid’s do. So I feel curiously loved (and arthritic), as I wrestle a paper clip from the chain. Also, the fine motor skills, and squinting involved in the process reminds me of the truth of the scriptures, for:
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Feb
01
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Friday, 01 February 2008 |
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 You may not have heard about this (I doubt it), but there is a school-bus sized piece of space junk which is dropping 1054 feet per day, and is due to hit earth sometime in March. Our government is so concerned about this that they have assigned the Department of Homeland Security to monitor the hunk of space debris’ descent. I wondered why space junk fell under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, but then who else would be assigned to keep a peeled eye on it – Fish and Wildlife? I guess that since our ports are secure, the Y2K bug has been exterminated, and the guy responsible for the anthrax attacks is safely in the federal pen, they have the extra resources available to track the space junk that slips out of orbit (do I have my facts straight?).
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Jan
28
2008
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Written by Barry Bryson
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Monday, 28 January 2008 |
 In the 170’s, in the evenings, as campfires were burning along the Danube river, after a hard day of fighting against the Germanic tribes that threatened Rome’s northern frontier, Marcus Aurelius made notes in his journal. Marcus Aurelius, last emperor of the Pax Romana, and perhaps the greatest of Rome’s emperors, wrote not about tactics, the events of the day, billetings, homesickness, the weather, or any of the other things generals keep a log of. His notes, which may or may not have been intended for others, were about ethics, about wisdom, about living in balance with the ordered universe. Although trained to be emperor at least from the age of 17, he did not love the trappings of power. Although trained as a Stoic, he was influenced by many schools of thought. Although a persecutor of Christians (who were in violation of Roman Law), the vocabulary and sensibilities of his Meditations often correspond with New Testament thought.
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