To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
24
Jan
2022
Thursday January 20, 2022
“My wife keeps getting younger,” friend Bob bragged the other day. “Since I married her, she’s had a new hip, a new knee, a new kidney, and a new shoulder.”
He was joking, of course. But it’s no joke. Most people my age have replaced some of our original equipment with spare parts. I have a titanium elbow. Another friend walks on two artificial knees and two artificial hips.
And almost all of us benefit from eyeglasses, hearing aids, and enhanced teeth.
I read an essay, years ago, that wondered what the boundary was between human and artificial. How many parts of the body can be replaced before we lose our identity as individual human beings?
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Renewal. cells, human
16
Thursday January 13, 2022
The only channel where I can watch Jeopardy is a U.S. channel out of Seattle. So, in addition to the contestants’ wit and wisdom, I get to listen to ads for U.S. pharmaceutical products.
The first few lines urge you to try the drug. Followed by a full minute – or, in magazines, a full page, or more -- of warnings about possible risks and side effects.
It got me thinking that maybe other human institutions should be equally up-front about potential consequences.
The most obvious target would be religion. So I’ll chose the one I know best-- Christianity.
Tags: satire, Christiaanity, caveats
7
Thursday January 6, 2022
I’m turning into a sentimental old fool. I find myself unexpectedly moved to tears, or at least to sniffles, by some act of kindness or caring.
It could be anything. A video clip about a group of people working together to extricate a moose from a mudhole. An anonymous donation to my church’s Thrift Shop that prepays purchases for a dozen or more shoppers.
The very best present I received this past Christmas was a letter from my granddaughter Katherine. “Is it okay?” Katherine asked, when I looked up from reading her letter. I couldn’t answer; I was too choked up.
Tags: aging, Tears. sentiment
30
Dec
2021
Thursday December 30, 2021
There should be a day for celebrating lost causes.
My little hummingbird didn’t survive the cold snap after Christmas. She showed up here after all the other hummingbirds had migrated south. I assume that the “atmospheric river” swept her up from the coast and dumped her in an Okanagan winter.
I had not bothered taking down my sugar-syrup feeders when all the other hummingbirds had fled south. So there she was, one day in December.
Temperatures dropped to minus-6 Celsius. And still she came back, every day.
Tags: hummingbirds, cold, St. Jude
28
Thursday December 23, 2021
I call myself a Christian (though I’m sure some would consider me a humanist at best, an atheist at worst). Certainly, I come from a Christian tradition. And Christian tradition has asserted, for centuries, that God was born as a human baby. We call him Jesus. Other cultures call him Jesu, or Yeshua, or some name that I don’t know.
Think about the sheer audacity of that claim. God became human! God didn’t just pretend to become human. God didn’t put on a human mask and go around in disguise. God became a human. A very specific historical human.
The Incarnation makes my faith much simpler. If I want to know what God is like, I need only look at Jesus.
Tags: God, Christmas, Jesus, Incarnation