Jan 1st: Not Ease, But Comfort...

The labor of obedience will bring you back to God from whom you had drifted...
The Rule of Benedict. Prologue:2 (From J. Chittister, The Rule of Benedict, A Spirituality for the 21st Century, pg 3)

I drift. I look forward to return. Is it easy? Not always.

In my blog yesterday (Dec 31, 2014) I shared I am not feeling the same balance I have previously, and that I miss that balance. As I read Joan Chittister's reflections in The Rule of Benedict, A Spirituality for the 21st Century (Crossroads, 2010) I come across a number of nuggets that speak to me:

• We begin to grow when we finally want to grow
• We cannot be our own guides
• The person who prays for the presence of God is, ironically, already in the presence of God
• We come to realize that we did not find God; God finally got our attention
• God is the only lifeline that life guarantees us

Today I see comfort. Not ease, but comfort. I need to labor, but as Ms. Chittister reflects, simply starting to let God in is part of the answer.

A Note To Anyone Reading:

This entry is part of a series that is developing as I read The Rule of Benedict, A Spirituality for the 21st Century, Joan Chittister, Crossroads, 2010. Unless stated otherwise I will be using the translation St. Benedict's Rule from that book. I am offering this both to those at St. George's Episcopal Church, Arlington VA, that may be reading Ms. Chittister's book and to anyone that is interested.

Comments are welcome, and encouraged, please use the blog comment feature.

Endings, Beginnings, Discovery, and a Bit of Discernment

I begin here with an open question to myself: "Am I Called?"

"Of course" is the easy answer, we all are. The harder question is "Am I Called to something specific?" My answer is equivocal, as you might gather from the "Bit of Discernment" in the title for this entry.

So, what's the deal? The "deal" is getting back to basics and attempting to read the Rule of Benedict on a daily basis. In the past decade the Rule has become an important part of my life: I have read and re-read it, I have spent retreats at a monastery, and I have become a Benedictine Oblate associated with the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia. I am also a rather fallible human being that still finds I put myself first more often than I like to admit and struggles with giving myself to God on a daily basis. Over the past year I have even acted like I have "accomplished" spirituality, recently spending more time in career and less in God to the point I am now a bit uncomfortable with the current balance.

However, I do feel a call to a new ministry that my church (St. George's Episcopal Church, Arlington VA) is working to join called The Community of Hope a ministry that is "shaped by Benedictine spirituality". This effort uses Joan Chittister's The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century as part of our study of Benedictine Spirituality.

I am hoping (and expecting really) that as I read the Rule I will again feel the Lord in my life and become part of the balance that Benedictines have experienced over these past 1,500 years.

And the blog entry out of no-where? It is the day before the start of the new year! By tradition the Rule has been divided so that it can be read three times through in the year. January 1 is the traditional start, and I am hoping to share this journey with others for at least the next four months. I don't expect any great insights, just a few thoughts that some might find useful, and just the knowledge that others are not alone. (Not being alone is an understatement, as there are thousands of Benedictines reading the Rule daily, but that will wait for another blog entry.)

Please watch this blog, and join me in the daily reading of the Rule of Benedict.

Six things I am looking forward to in the United States

I have been really quite for a while, but the more I ponder all the political "discussion" these days, I realize that there are six things I am looking forward to in the United States. There may be others, and I may end up rebuilding the list as we go forward, but as a start I look forward to the following six:

1.       Big Business and Big Government are both subject to the citizens of our country

2.       All citizens have equal say in these decisions regardless of:

·         Sex

·         Age (as long as they have reached voting age)

·         Job (or lack of job) status

·         Economic status

·         Health Status

·         Marital Status (and if married, the sex of their marriage partner)

·         Sexual Preference

·         Handicap

·         Education

3.       Women have the same ability, at the same economic cost, to choose if (and when should the wish) to become a parent as men

4.       We stop killing people in wars or in the name of “justice”

5.       We worry more about how to care for the earth than how to reduce the cost of energy

6.       We pay for what we provide, without borrowing from our children and grand children

Jump-starting and New Year's Resolutions (and God)

The headline "Jumpstart your New Year's resolution" appeared in my email "In" box this morning. What spoke to me wasn't a renewed interest in getting back on the health and wellness site that sent me the email, but more the concept of starting anything at all.

For the first time in several months (OK, since early September) I wrote in my journal this morning, mentioning that life has changed, I have resolved a health issue, that it is a new year, etc. Then, just before I glanced at my email, I began to wonder which little project I should attempt "today". Four came to mind before I could finish writing down the first one, so I captured the first four in my journal and glanced at my email...

No, I don't have a New Year's resolution this year, at least not one that I have written down. I do want to be a good husband, grandpa, and employee. I still love taking walks and taking pictures, but I also find it so easy to read a book or watch a movie for several hours at a time...

As I write this I now remember the missing part: God. God was not in my journal entry either.

Today is the tenth day of remembering Jesus has come into our lives, my life.

No "Jump-Start" needed. Nor some glowing and bouncing New Year's resolution. Just the same old, same old: continue to do the work that God has called me to do, and trust that He will call me, all I need to do is listen...

(Now, where is that pad, I need to write down the shopping list...)

Infrastructure and Cultivating and Caring For Creation

In her book In The Heart of the Temple ( Copyright 2004, Joan D. Chittister, published by BlueBridge) Joan Chittister claims St. "Benedict's theology of life is clearly based...on the passage in Genesis that teaches that humanity was put in the Garden 'to cultivate it and care for it.'" This catches my attention as I consider "Infrastructure". By infrastructure I refer to the many technological elements most of us take for granted: clean drinking water, electricity, roads (and cars to drive on them), internet access, radio, television, snow plows, etc., etc., etc.

Catches my attention? I live for this. God put me (and all of us, I believe) here on earth to be His hands, to do His work. We humans use many different methods in this work, and clearly infrastructure is a part of all this. We harness the power of the sun and direct it to our homes, for example. We call that the "power grid", and (with perhaps the exception of geothermal energy) the sun is the ultimate source of ALL our power - oil and coal is simply solar energy converted by green plants to carbon based molecules we then "burn". Wind energy is from the heating (by the sun) and cooling of different parts of the earth. OK tidal energy may use energy from the moon rather than the sun, but I think you get what I am saying.

Our drinking water and sanitary sewer systems, our communications systems, the roads and railroads we travel on - all are built by us, they are "Infrastructure". Cultivating and Caring? We use each part of the infrastructure to carry out God's work. Do we always use these elements wisely? No, of course not, we are only human, our nature is to sin.

It turns out "Infrastructure" is an interest of mine. I don't see infrastructure as good or bad, any more than I see "forest", "cities", "church", politics, or many other things as good or bad. I certainly see us using them more or less wisely, more or less as God may have intended us to use them.

And another thing: I must remember (and this can be really hard) that my view of how God intends us to use infrastructure may not be your view, and neither view may be how God would really like us to use or care for our world.

Provisioning is Non-Trivial (Some thoughts on jailbroken iPhones and unique IDs)

(And now for something really different than most of the other posts on this blog...)

One of my friends commented "OMG, Seton, the transmitter and its identifier are under application s/w control? Be afraid. Be very afraid" when reading the CNET item on jailbreaking the iPhone (http://bit.ly/4bxraS).

This made me think how non-trivial it can be to provision devices and services. Way back in the 80's there was this thing called "DECnet". It ran over this rather new technology called "Ethernet". When I went to work at PBS HQ in 1986 we had this big thick (think half an inch in diameter) cable making a "U" in our building and all our nice little 80 character by 24 line CRT terminals were attached via DECnet. My techie friends said I should be proud. I just enjoyed making it work.

DECnet worked (at one point) by allowing the software to change the ID of the Network Interface Card. The Ethernet ID of the NIC was programmed to include the DECnet address assigned to the NIC. The other devices didn't need to keep tables of addresses, "discover" their own address, etc. You just programmed the node address right into the Ethernet interface.

Bad guys do the same thing with our Wireless Access Points all the time - one of the attacks is to program the attacking wireless device with the same MAC address as the "victim", then send with more power than the victim. We create whole classes of additional programs, authorization, and encryption to get around this. One that worked for a bit was called WEP, now BROKEN. For Wireless we now have moved to WPA and WPA2, where we trade bits of "secret" information back and forth to ensure we are really who we think we are.

So What About the iPhone ?
So if I can change ID of a phone (and since almost everything is done via computer these days it is likely I can do so if I can "break out" of the "jail" of the box) it is easy to make the phone do funny things. So to ensure there is one and only one unique me the phone I have in my hand and the system I am talking with need to share some unique (and perhaps "secret") information. Thus "Provisioning".

Apple and AT&T want to make it easy (read "doesn't cost much") to uniquely identify the phone, and to make it easy for the system to talk with the phone. I am guessing the fewer things they have to change after building the phone, and the fewer things we have to do or install on the phone, the happier we all are.

The statement about the "Jailbroken" iPhone simply identifies one of the hidden costs in keeping it cheap: By using software to create the ID Apple avoids the infrastructure for uniquely branding each phone and trading "secret" infromation as part of the purchase process (that is as they "provision" the device) and you and I don't need to take time to create or buy a special token of some sort...

But for the bad guys time costs almost nothing so they are willing to spend lots of time finding something that is common to every device and then they will use that one trick for quite a while. Meanwhile Apple and AT&T have to fix the infrastructure. Something that can take significant amounts of time (and quite a few people).

(This made me think of trying to reboot several hundred Internet routers, each one with a whole bunch of customers connected. All in one night. Another non-trivial activity.)

Taking Pictures, Sharing Pictures, and Growing

065/365 - 04-Jun-09 - Rainy Places
Originally uploaded by Seton Droppers

What is it about taking pictures? And why do I share them?

I have never really figured this out. I know I love several aspects of taking pictures. Sometimes it is simply the technical act of capturing the picture in the first place. I love it when technology does something neat. There has always been magic in seeing something in front of me and attempting to "catch" it, and later sharing what I have captured. There is transformation as well. When I was in seventh or eighth grade art class we had our first lessons in darkroom technique. What fun to process our film, then project the image through the enlarger, and create the print. Of course the alchemy of watching the print develop, the stop bath, the fixer, and the washing were important.

Today I have gone all digital. Being a good geek I love watching my computer churn for a while to produce some amazing new creation. My work life has been technology. Filling the "pipes" to the Internet and web. Can I find an application that completely fills the technology I am charged with caring for? Disks, fiber optics, data bases, CPU cycles -- Watch the application chew them up. Movies are great places to wonder about technology. Exactly how many computers did they use to create the latest Star Trek movie, for example?

OK, so what does all this have to do with photography? The answer, I think, is now I am not satisfied simply taking the picture -- The picture needs to "say" something. Now I am not talking about technology. I am not talking about something I can write down a list of rule that make it work. I just don't always get it. I see something that attracts my attention, I attempt to capture that, and I try to print it and share it and it looks just, well, not "special". At least to me. Some of you disagree with the "not special", you tell me about how the image speaks to you, or you find it an interesting and new way of seeing, or that it captures the moment. Thank you. I enjoy the encouragement, perhaps more than you know.

But I am still not satisified. I have images and ideas that are fighting to get out and I simply can't figure out what questions to ask, how to capture the magic, what makes the picture. And it is even harder when I am using the Web. Back in art class there were people and we talked. Well some of us/you tried while others (me for example) built the habit of hiding in a corner and not risking hearing what you would say. So here I am in my little world, taking pictures, trying to biuld some friendships where I am willing to trust the comments and criticism without crying (too much) and improving. But I just can't quite seem to do it since every says Trust Yourself. I will keep working, but can I also find a place to get encouragement and help figuring out what I am?