Reporting on my little life

Reporting on my little life:

This fourth week of October 2014

Written by Dan McDonald

 

        I woke up this morning realizing that one of the curses of my life has been my willingness to hide behind ideas. I am in many ways an ideas man that holds others at a distance. I am that even though in my ideals that is not what I think anyone should be. I decided it was time to put a little of myself instead of my ideas into my writing. This week, from my perspective has been interesting.

            I work at an oil refinery. We are readying for what is known as a turnaround. Most of the time around a refinery, everything just keeps running with momentary corrections and repairs, but there are times when maintenance is done to entire units and this is what happens during a turnaround. I grew up on a farm and the closest thing I can think of to a turnaround is planting season. Spring is when we planted corn and soybeans on the farm, and getting the soil ready by plowing and planting and then cultivating the soil in those weeks surrounding planting was a time of long hours, meals on the go, and nights short of sleep. That is something like what happens in a turnaround. The units come down, every piece of machinery is stripped down, its working innards repaired and brought up to optimum working condition and everyone puts in long hours, few days off, tempers get short while stories get long.

            I have been working on a blog series on the commons. It is a theme that I have been trying to grapple with. I have especially learned of this from following Nathan Schneider and Elizabeth Bruenig on Twitter. The theme of the commons comes from Acts, specifically from the early Jerusalem church’s experience of having all things in common so that there were none in need within the church community. I have begun to see the Jerusalem experiment not so much as a pattern to be copied and reproduced but an experiment in applying an essential principle of the Christian faith. I have been trying to express these thoughts using varied pictures from the Scriptures. We live our lives not only as separated individuals or independent persons but also as human beings living shared lives of co-dependence and interconnectedness. I am beginning to believe that such should be expressed in the way we hold property. Perhaps some property should be held privately but perhaps some should also be held in trust shared with others to express the interconnectedness of our humanity. Perhaps property shared in common with a whole community helps us to realize that life is communal as well as individual and/or personal. I do not think the Jerusalem experiment is one necessarily needing copied, but it is one which necessarily needs to challenge and transform how we view property.

            I exchanged thoughts, on Twitter, with a young woman regarding one of these articles. Sarabeth Caplin is a Christian from a Jewish family. Her story itself is intriguing. She admits to self-conflict in her journey. She has a Jewish family and Christian friends and sometimes finds herself not fitting fully in either world. She readily admits that her life is a work in progress. Her situation, different but perhaps similar in its way to my own illustrates to me the sort of lives we most all live in our modern world. Our communities, that we identify ourselves as part of, are ghettoes in the sense of being self-contained neighborhoods and subcultures existing as oases separated from and yet  interconnected to the world of humanity just beyond the imagined boundaries of our hoods. Our communities are composed of some people living lives focused on embodying the ideals of our communities while others live with conflicted struggles at the fringes of our communities where communities and neighborhoods intersect with other communities and neighborhoods. I imagine a more perfect world would not abolish the ghettoes and hoods, but rather would affirm both the one living out the focused ideals of the community and the one on the fringes between interconnected communities. For each of our communities so needs both the one who lives to embody our ideals and the one who struggles where our communities intersect with others. In modern life almost all of us have a place where we struggle in the intersection between subcultures, and only some of us have really found our homes in a life of sojourn and pilgrimage towards a city built without hands.

            Maybe that is enough for now. I want to tell you of two or maybe three movies I recently rented and viewed from Netflix. There was “Express” the story of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy. There was also a French movie made shortly after World War II entitled “Leon Morin, priest” which was different from any movie I have ever seen, but was excellent. Finally there was a German movie “As Far as my Feet will carry me”. It is about a German Lieutenant in the Second World War, who was captured by the Soviets and placed in a Siberian work camp. The movie is based on a true story of a man who escapes the work camp and makes his way across Siberia to freedom. I will tell you about these movies another day, perhaps soon.