POTATO POTAHTO

I've been rereading my blog entries, this is from 2008. And you probably should read Lisa's entry on dignity or the lack thereof. This is from 2008 and the situation has not improved. 

Lisa writes with feeling about dignity or the lack thereof we’re facing. Lack of community and modern technology have created an unholy alliance that allows us to let it all hang out because nobody knows who we are and go just about anywhere we want in order to do it.

We’ve always pushed the envelope. Cromwell’s commonwealth of plainclothes, closed theaters, whitewashed churches and a ban on celebrating Christmas is offset by the Restoration. Complete with silks, satins, outrageous wigs (and that was for the men), the comedies of Wycherly, and a king who was too much a gentleman to ignore a pretty (and willing partner). Charles II fathered at least a dozen children, acknowledged them all, yet died without a legitimate heir. He was also too much a gentleman to put aside a barren queen.

Regency excess was followed by Victorian whalebone. Clingy empire waistlines gave away to corsets and crinolines. Seventeenth century lace and frills (again for the men) gave way to sober shirtfronts and starched collars.

 America’s Gilded Age was a glittering era of starched shirt fronts, bared shoulders, glittering gems and Robber Barons. The Grover Cleveland of the 1880’s joined list of public men with private affairs (and children born on the “wrong” side of the blanket) that included Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton.

The Roaring Twenties gave way to a worldwide economic collapse followed by a World War followed by what I guess you could call the fit in at any cost fifties.

Through the years there was an unwritten code that allowed the private affairs of public men, and women in some cases, to stay private. Was this wink, wink hypocrisy? Or was it simple acknowledgement that no one is perfect? Most of us tittered when Bill Clinton claimed he smoked, but didn’t inhale. Perhaps it would have been better if he’d just said “mind your own business.”

The generation that helped win WWII was also the generation of the Organization Man. If the corporation said “move to LA” the answer wasn’t “but my whole family lives in Chicago.” It was “how soon to I need to be there.” The family scattered and the folks got too old or tired of shoveling snow and moved to Florida. We lost not only family ties but community ties.

We traded the Ma and Pa diner on Main Street for the McDonalds near the new freeway exit. We gave up the folks who knew our names for the harried sales help with name tags. We gave up the gal or guy behind the counter who knew just how we liked our coffee, that the eggs should be over easy and the hash browns extra crisp for fix your own coffee, eggs cooked to fit a biscuit and potato patties in greasy little baggies.

We traded the local shoe store where they knew your size and the clerk would probably tell everybody at the pub about your new pumps for do it yourself at Fred Meyer.

We traded the local hardware store and the guy behind the counter who probably helped you plan your new kitchen and would sell you three widgets if you needed them for plastic packaging with two more than you needed.

We traded the local meat market where the meat in the back was probably chewing grass in the next county  a couple of weeks ago and the butcher knew who was in the market for soup bones for CO2 treated meat in plastic packaging and E coli.

We traded the anticipation of the first local tomatoes of the summer for red “things” that look like tomatoes and taste like plastic.

There were three or four TV channels and we all watched Ed Sullivan or the Untouchables, or Laugh In. Folks knew which friends or relatives probably wouldn’t answer the phone when PBS ran the original Forsyte Saga back in the sixties. It was a community of sorts. New shows had at least half a season to find an audience, maybe even a season or two.

Now we have I don’t know how many channels and shows that don’t find an audience within the first couple of weeks simply disappear. They’re gone before I even know they’re there. I loved the X-Files. After I stumbled over it half way through the second season and eagerly looked forward to any reruns from season one so I could catch up.

We traded standing on the stool watching and “helping” mom make dinner for soccer moms, video games and little kids who have to have their moms figure out when they have time to play together.

We forgot, if we ever realized it, that businesses are in the business of selling “something.” The move towards preserved prepared foods had been slowly growing for over a century before WWII. And the first efforts at preserved foods were to supply the military, long distance shipping and the pioneer trade. There was a huge need during the war for food that could be prepared and preserved or shipped as mixes for military use.

After the war there was all these consumables needing consumers. We found ourselves with a new label. We were no longer customers we were consumers and Madison Avenue stepped up to the plate. The cake from the mix was “in” and do it yourself was out. Even if the home made cake tasted better. Somehow dinner in a can was trendier than what you cooked in your own pan at home. There was this new line in the national ledger. The consumer price index. And forty years later we found out that what we’d been consuming had more in common with the chemistry lab than the pantry just off the kitchen.

We woke up one day and discovered that the local shops where your custom (patronage) mattered were gone. We ended up with big box stores that advertise gift bags for the first five hundred customers who show up at 2 AM on Black Friday and are “shocked” when everybody stampedes through the door trying to be first. And happy as hell that the stampede made the regional cable news channel for a bit of free advertising. They ran it over and over and over.......

And the elected hired help has cooked the books so that only the finished products and the money used to buy them are counted in the national ledgers. Mom staying home and baking bread or cookies isn’t even a blip on the radar screen. Mom going out and working so she can buy bread and cookies for her family is part of the Gross National Product. Jerry was the guy downtown who sold hardware, not Jerry’s, the big box store across town that you can use for your daily walk.

I don’t want to go back to the days when we had to make everything ourselves, a bad harvest meant everybody in the neighborhood might go hungry, or it taking a week to get to Portland by horse and wagon. There has to be a balance between being a consumer and a customer. We aren’t going to be treated with respect or allowed any kind of dignity unless we demand it and work towards a day when the threat to take our“custom” someplace else means something.

You go girl. I'm not sure we have time to wait for the pendulem to swing back.

GUIDE TO CALORIE BURNING

What with the holiday season here and the politics crazier than ever we present the following.

Beating around the bush 75
Jumping to conclusions 100
Climbing the walls 150
Swallowing your pride 50
Passing the buck 25
Throwing your weight around (depends on weight) 50-300
Dragging your heels 100
Pushing your luck 250
Making mountains out of molehills 500
Hitting the nail on the head 50
Wading through paperwork 300
Bending over backwards 75
Jumping on the bandwagon 200
Balancing the books 25
Running around in circles 350
Eating crow 225
Tooting your own horn 25
Climbing the ladder of success 750
Pulling out the stops 75
Adding fuel to the fire 150
Wrapping it up at days end 25

From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Author unknown

PLEASE NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER REPOST

I've been rereading journal posts. Blasts from the past so to speak. Right now it's late November in eastern Oregon. We were living in Springfield back in 2008. November to January in the southern Willamette valley is foggy, chilly, damp, and gloomy. Who knows? Maybe the smoothie recipe was meant to cheer us up. All it did was give me the chills. 

"We take two newspapers and sometimes I wonder what universe some the special editors are hanging out in or what they’re sniffing. It must be some seriously good shit or a galaxy far, far away.

It’s morning (well, it’s not morning now, but it was when I read the paper) in western Oregon and it’s January. The temperature outside is about thirty degrees, give a take a couple. It’s dark. It’s foggy. We’ve barely seen the sun in days. And when it does come out we’re lucky if it hits fifty degrees in the afternoon. I feel like a mushroom. And what does the food section offer me as an alternative to my nice warm oatmeal with cinnamon, raisins and blueberries? A beautiful, icy, cold, fruit smoothie.

I’m still shivering. And hey, chucklehead. Do have any idea what frozen fruit goes for in the store? Yes we have frozen blueberries in our freezer. That’s where the berries in the cereal came from. They were delicious. Especially after they thawed out and warmed up. We grew them. If we hadn’t grown them we would have bought them last summer and froze them. Same for the blackberries, strawberries and raspberries. And I’m not wasting those precious Oregon berries in a blender. Sacrilege.

I’ll save the smoothie (good use for the culls) for August. For mid afternoon when it’s about sixty degrees warmer outside and the sun is shining."

SPIRIT MOUNTAINS

One of my favorite quotes from Carl Sagan. Sorry I can't remember which mountain range these peaks belong to. I suspect they might be in the Andes. The light is fantastic. Early morning? Almost sunset? Light through a gap in the clouds.

FLOWER ROOTS AND STONES

Take a drive up the coast on 101 and check out the basalt cliffs. If there is a little soil in a crack a bit of green can be seen. Drive east throught the gorge. Where there is a crack a bit of green will find a foothold. As the trees give way to scrub watch where the hills fold into each other. Any place the rain manages to trickle through. That's where you will find low shrubs, scrubby trees with delusions of grandeur.

Basalt is a strange rock. If it cools properly it forms six sided colums. And, as road builders have found to their dismay, rain and ice and roots do their work over time. Drive sections of 101 and the columns are sheathed in chicken wire. Helps to cut down on rock slides. Heck, drive Franklin Blvd. betwen Springfield and Eugene you will see the same thing. Chicken wire sheathing the basalt columns to try to prevent rock slides. Creation is slow and patient and we mess around at our peril. Or added expense in road upkeep, delays, and detours.

Looking at my Street Atlas. If 101 between Florence and Newport in Oregon is blocked by a slide there is a network of mainly county roads that will get you from here to there. They are twisty and not built for truck traffic. We are talking coast range here. It's a little better further north but we're still talking major detours when the main route is blocked. Man plans and Creation sits back and says "good luck with that folks."

THE FLOWER THAT SHATTERED THE STONE

The Earth is our mother just turning around
With the trees in the forest and roots underground
Our father above us whose sigh is the wind
Paint us a rainbow without any end

As the river runs freely the mountain does rise
Let me touch with my fingers and see with my eyes
In the hearts of the children a pure love still grows
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone

Sparrows find freedom beholding the sun
In the infinite beauty we're all joined in one
I reach out before me and look to the sky
Did I hear someone whisper? Did something pass by?

As the river runs freely the mountain does rise
Let me touch with my fingers and see with my eyes
In the hearts of the children a pure love still grows
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone
Like a bright star in heaven that lights our way home
Like the flower that shattered the stone

Words and Music by Joe Henry and John Jarvis

Or slowly turned it into gravel. 

Holy Days and Holy Ground

A product of reading Joe Campbell, Mary Renault (especially the Prose Singer and Mask of Apollo) and watchig Mythos of PBS. Among other sources

games but it wasn't the only one.

Greek philosophy described an ultimate God/dess who had more than one face. And some of the Gods had more than one face as well. Poseiden was the God of the sea, but he was also known as Earth Shaker. There were various versions of Apollo, Athena, or Artemis and they all had festivals. Many of them lasted several days. Dionysus was not only the patron of the vine but of actors and the theater.

Many of the festivals were times when plays might be presented as part of a contest, sometimes not. And, in theory, actors were under the God’s protection so they could travel from city to city even if those cities were at war with each other. Of course you might find as the actor in Mask of Apollo early in his career. You might get to your next stop only to find that the men were away fighting, the women and kids were barricaded at home and the occupying troops were bivouacked in the theater using the scenery for the cook fires. Whoops, guess we don’t get paid for that trip.

 There was a rich spiritual life that has been either dismissed or barely acknowledged because what became our way was the right way. Period, end of discussion.

What was accomplished by setting a specific day as holy, by breaking the links to a changeable calendar that was tied to sun and earth? It undermined the authority of the astronomer/priests. One of their responsibilities was to keep track of the coming of the full moon for certain festivals of the goddess. Also theykept track of the orbit of the sun to signal the passing of one season to the next and the solstices and equinoxes that were the midseason festivals.  

By undercutting the authority of the astronomer/ priests it helped to reinforce the authority of the Mosaic priesthood. And it isolated the followers of the Mosaic Law from their neighbors. No shared festivals. No ties of guest friendship that allowed people to travel from town to town and be sure of some sort of welcome even if your co religionists didn’t live there.

Under the old calendar any day could be a holy day for somebody. If one day is set aside as holy what does that make of the other six days of days of the week? If only one group within a society is labeled holy because they were born into that “tribe” where does that leave the rest of us? If God lives up on a “holy” mountain, is the rest of the earth not holy?

I don’t think so. I believe that holy ground is right outside my door. And I also believe that if we listen the way we should, any one of us can hear the Song.

A FEAST FIT FOR A SKELETON

I originally posted this entry back in 2006 when social media was really beginning to take off. If we were feasting on ourselves back when the author wrote his original piece imagine the banquet now.

Anger

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is probably the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations yet to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain your are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

This is from a book called Wishful Thinking-A Theological ABC. It’s a skinny little book with entries from Abraham to Zaccheus. I’d read it years ago and finally managed to track down a used copy a few years ago. This particular entry has always stuck with me.

The author's entry on bread reminds us that there is an emptiness that even the most elaborate feast won't satisfy. I think that the feast of anger that we're seeing around us is one of the results. Darned if I know what the answer is.

Blessed be

BLOOD MONEY

I mined these entries from 2012 as the country was running up to the November elections. We wonder how a president can turn his back as the violence escalates. The current occupant claims to be a business man and a man of business was running then. And you know what's kind of funny? I came across bishop Romero totally by accident. He had a tiny part in a biopic of John Paul II quoting another embattled bishop as it turns out.

Just when you think it can't possibly get any worse this headline greets your unbelieving eyes. MITT ROMNEY STARTED BAIN CAPITAL WITH MONEY TIED TO DEATH SQUADS.  Included in the list were the supporters Roberto D'Aubisson's ARENA party. D'Aubisson, trained at the school of the Americas at Fort Benning was finally tied to the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero. 

Goddess can it get any worse? Drove me to haul out my old Jackson Brown albums. This one is painfully appropriate. I want to take this sorry excuse for a human being, shake him until his teeth rattle and ask him what the hell he was thinking. 

SOLDIER OF PLENTY

God is great, God is good
He guards your neighborhood
Though it’s generally understood
Not quite the way you would
You try to take the slack
Stay awake and watch his back
But something happens every now and then
And someone breaks into the promised land
Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is long on hunger
This world is short on joy

A-e-i-o
You speak as if you know
What’s good for everyone
What’s good in what you’ve done?
What’s good about a world in which
War rages at a fever pitch
And people die for the little things
A little corn, a little beans

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

You measure peace with guns
Progress in mega-tons
Who's left when the war is won?
Soldier of misfortune--
Soldier of an angry call
Soldier on foreign soil
I’m not here to fight your war
I know what you're fighting for

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

I wonder if he can claim he retroactively returned their investments? 

El Salvador. Two words that make it impossible for me to vote for Mitt Romney even if I wanted to. By 1983 several priests, an archbishop and four American churchwomen (three nuns and a lay missionary) had been murdered.The sister's crime? Trying to get refugees out of the killing zones. Running a school and an orphanage for children who had lost their parents in the fighting? Our ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White was fired by the Reagan Administration for not towing the party line.

 In December 1981 the Atlacatl battalion, American trained at the school of the Americas, entered the village of El Mozote. By the time they left about three days later, the people of El Mozote and several surrounding smaller hamlets were dead. The youngest was eight months old. There was more violence to come before the decade was over, but all of this was known before Romney accepted the investments of the El Salvadoran oligarchs. Known, pretty much ignored, and just one of many involving American training and American arms. Mortor rounds came labeled made in the USA.

That Romney and Bain were willing to business with families that either contributed or stood by while these murders took place is more than I can stomach. There's an old saying. All that is needed for evil to flourish is for good men and women to do nothing.

MEDITATION

The Currrent Occupant has a new spiritual advisor. Near as I can tell she has no actual training in theology. Has run at least one church into bankruptcy and is currently being accused of running a ponzi scheme. Should fit right in.

Anyway I ran into this on my blog from a decade ago. I was looking for something else. And at a time when the lies are a penny a pound it kind of caught my attention,

Danger, curious person thinking in public.

For the sake of argument rewrite the story of the Fall in Genesis without the spiritual element and you find a story is as old as humanity. It’s repeated every time some guy tries to get a girl into his bedroom. It’s repeated every time a joint, a line of coke, even a cigarette is offered with the tired refrain of “everybody’s doing it,” “what’s the matter, you scared,” and the classic “nobody will every know.” There’s at least one problem with trying to keep a secret. No matter how deep you bury that secret at least one person will always know what happened. You can hide things from everyone but yourself. Buried deep inside it festers and creates a wall between you and everyone around you.

And if you believe that in some way the God of scripture set the forces of creation in motion that resulted in humanity and every other creature in the universe, including a certain tempter; there’s always “don’t tell Dad.” And there’s another old standby. Take out the King James sixteenth century language and you might find that the story takes on a five year olds’ playground singsong; “I know something you don’t know.”

Perhaps the death blamed on man’s fall in the garden wasn’t the physical death that the far right evangelicals claim. After all there’s no claim in scripture that our physical bodies were meant to be immortal. Even stars and planets are born, age and die. Something the writers who preserved scripture wouldn’t have, couldn’t have known.

Perhaps the meaning story isn’t death of the body but injury to the soul. When truth is ignored, trust is impossible and without trust there can never be love or hope. And without love or hope life is meaningless.

A PREPOSTEROUS SEVEN AND A HALF MINUTES

Back in the seventies NBC produced a miniseries title Jesus of Nazareth. Always been a favorite of mine. I have the DVD's but the film is also on Amazon Prime. And I love to read the reviews. Especially the one star ones. One really caught my attention titled "what were they thinking." Couldn't get past the first seven and a half minutes. Seven and a half minutes out of over six hours of film.

Well I couldn't resist. If you ignore the opening titles seven and a half minutes gets you through the betrothal of Mary and Joseph and just about to the point where a barking dog and a bright light wake her up. Looks pretty tame to me.

But the film opens in the synagogue. During services. Joseph has side curls. Could it be that everyone in that seven and a half minutes is a Jew? That Jesus was born to a Jew? Was raised as a Jew. Was bar mitzvahed? Etc. Etc. The awareness that Jesus wasn't a "Christian?" Didn't stick around long enough to find out that just about everyone in the film was a Jew. Even Herod Antipas. Probably wasn't a very observant one. Just glad he was still alive after dear old dad came to a very painful end.

And presented as one, hen pecked. He married his brother's wife while the brother was still alive. Two? he was a little too interested in his step daughter Salome. As interested as he could get in a seventies miniseries that had to make it past the censors.

All the disciples except Luke were Jews. Wasn't something that was really brought up even in my relatively liberal Methodist congregation while I was growing up. You sort of knew it but it JUST WASN'T MENTIONED. That almost everything that the itinerant rabbi from Nazareth taught came straight out of the Jewish prophets. That the difference was in who sent me. The prophets said "the Lord sent me." And most of them tried like heck to get out of the job. Jonah tried sailing away. Didn't help.

I left a comment. It was very tame along the lines of not much happened in the first few minutes what was so preposterous?

And you know, I don't believe it ever sank in so hard before.

YOU LIVE IN OREGON IF ACCORDING TO JEFF FOXWORTHY

This is actually a few years old but it is still funny. 

HERE IS WHAT JEFF FOXWORTHY HAS TO SAY ABOUT ‘LIVING IN OREGON’…

• If someone in a Home Depot store offers you assistance and they don’t work there, you live in Oregon.
• If you’ve worn shorts, sandals, and a parka at the same time, you live in Oregon.
• If you’ve had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed the wrong number, you live in Oregon.
• If you measure distance in hours, you live in Oregon. Also Washington and almost any state west of the Mississippi. 
• If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you live in Oregon.
• If you have switched from ‘heat’ to ‘A/C’ and back again in the same day, you live in Oregon.
• If you install security lights on your house and garage but leave both doors unlocked, you live in Oregon.
• If you can drive 75 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching, you live in Central, Southern or Eastern Oregon. Or you are driving 75 mph and the local smoky bear blasts past you. 
• If you design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over 2 layers of clothes or under a raincoat, you live in Oregon.
• If driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow and ice, you live in Oregon.
• If you know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction, you live in Oregon.
• If you feel guilty throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash, you live in Oregon.
• If you know more than 10 ways to order coffee, you live in Oregon.
• If you know more people who own boats than air conditioners, you live in Oregon.
• If you stand on a deserted corner in the rain waiting for the “Walk” signal, you live in Oregon.
• If you consider that if it has no snow or has not recently erupted, it is not a real mountain, you live in Oregon.
• If you can taste the difference between Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Dutch Bros, you live in Oregon.
• If you know the difference between Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon, you live in Oregon.
• If you know how to pronounce Sequim, Puyallup, Clatskanie, Issaquah, Oregon, Umpqua, Yakima and Willamette, you live in Oregon. Extra points if you know the first three cities are actually in Washington.
• 
  
• If you consider swimming an indoor sport, you live in Oregon.
• If you know that Boring is a city and not just a feeling, you live in Oregon.
• If you can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese and Thai food, you live in Oregon.
• If you never go camping without waterproof matches and a poncho, you live in Oregon.
• If you have actually used your mountain bike on a mountain, you live in Oregon.
• If you think people who use umbrellas are either wimps or tourists, you live in Oregon.
• If you buy new sunglasses every year, because you cannot find the old ones after such a long time, you live in Oregon.
• If you actually understand these jokes and forward them to all your OREGON friends, you live or have lived in Oregon.

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS

Robert Heaton was a Quaker and my great grandfather seven times removed. He sailed to the New World with his family aboard The Lamb in the fall of 1682. His branch of my family hailed from Yorkshire mostly. Dad's line, if accurate, can be traced to a gentleman with the given name of Adam Deheton born in the county of Lancaster sometime after 1100. And while Ancestry usually lists him with the Deheton surname he was probably Adam Fitz somebody. He died in Yorkshire. And in Yorkshire my ancestors remained, off and on, for five hundred years. Until Quaker Robert said the heck with this religious persecution bit and followed William Penn.

Five hundred years minus a couple of generations in the shire of Lincoln. Mostly around the same little town. Still exists. Name of Kirkheaton. In old English heah is a high place. Tun is a village. And kirk still means church in Scotland. The village in a high place built next to a church.

Five hundred years, give or take a few. That's twice as long as this country has been called the United States. Not look too united right now but, it does put things into perspective. Plague, the rebellion called the Pilgramage of Grace, the reformation, the English Civil War and finally exile. Must have hurt to leave so much behind. Hurt, it must have almost torn their hearts out. You had to have a damn good reason to uproot your whole family and cross the ocean.

I have mixed feelings about the possibility of running into great grandfather Robert in my spiritual journeyings. I can almost hear him. "We risked bad food, bad water and possible ship wreck. Others suffered typhus, scurvy and small pox. We came searching for religious freedom and to build a better life for ourselves and our families. And a fine mess you've made of it. Daughter we expected better of our children."

And if I did run into him, damned if I'd have an answer for him.

And I still don't have an answer for him.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

I originally posted this a few years back Before tRump ended up in the White House. I've run across another poster. Basically says "Do unto others and let ME sort it out. God."

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE FROM A PAGAN POINT OF VIEW

All this manufactured hoo haw over insurance companies paying for birth control for women even if the outfit they’re working for is church affiliated, got me to thinking. Dangerous I know. And it is manufactured. If the editorial in the Register Guard is accurate over half the states in the country require insurance companies to cover contraceptives. So, gentlemen, please take your outrage elsewhere.

I wrote this a few years back. I believe it still works for today. I haven't gone anywhere. Just kind of blah I guess

Recently picked up a little volume on women in church history; Catholic church history so you know there is a bit of an inbuilt bias. The first is Prisca or Priscilla who worked with Paul. One of the early churches was in Ephesus, located in what is now Turkey. Ephesus was also the site of a major temple of Artemis with a well attended festival held every year. And every year the silver smiths did a land office business in little silver images of Artemis. Not content to mind their own souls, the church in Ephesus went after the pagans for their “obscene” images. The church, successfully minding other people’s business for nearly two thousand years.

Jump forward to the late fifth century. Newly converted to the Roman branch of the church by his wife Clotilde, Clovis of the Franks sets out to share the joys of his new faith with the people he rules; at the point of a sword. Here’s to you great great grand dad, four dozen or so times removed. You can choose your friends. All you can do with your ancestors is to try not the repeat their mistakes. Clovis was one of the original “my way or the highway” missionaries.

Surprising how many worshipers of the Old Gods chose the highway rather than convert, or kept as many of their old customs as they could for nearly a thousand years. No wonder the church made attending mass mandatory. At least many of the old ways did survive until they were caught between the hammer of the Reformation, the anvil of the Counter Reformation and the general you’re either with us or against us of European nation building. Even then, some folks on the fringes of Europe, the western highlands of Scotland and the western Isles, kept fragments alive well into the nineteenth century.

We don’t usually look at it from the pagan point of view, but I’m guessing that many of my unnamed and unknown pagan ancestors would have appreciated a little separation of church and state in their own time.