The Act of Creation

By Bobby Neal Winters

My house doesn’t have a basement; it has a well that you can walk around in. Down the middle of it is a wall that used to separate part of it off as a furnace room, but at some point the water that regularly bubbles up from below rotted it off at the bottom. Now it is not so much a wall as a curtain of wooden planks.On one end of the planks was a beautifully weathered 3-by-4. 

A month or two ago, I’d gone down there to do some electrical work and saw it anew.  The new woodworking mania that lives in my head now said to me in a voice like Gollum, “We wants it. We wants our precious wood.”

I brought it up and began thinking of what to do with it. My brain--on its own behest and operating under the influence of old-school British woodworkers on YouTube--formed a plan. 

Cut the 3 by 4 into 4 equal pieces and divide the pieces into pairs. Connect each pair together with a stretcher, joining them with mortise and tenon. Then connected those two stretchers together with another stretcher using mortise and tenon.

Rabbet the corners of the top so they fit into a frame at the top, and join the frame to the legs below with dowel pegs.  Then put a top on it.

I saw this all in my head all at once.  It was quite a rush. I knew exactly the design and the materials.  What I didn’t know was what it was.

Given the description and any sketch made from that, it could be an end table, a stool, a step-stool, or a table.

I didn’t know what it was, and I was the one making it.

I was in the process of making the top from one of the planks retrieved from the basement, and my wife Jean looked at it and said, “A game table to put puzzles on.”

And that is what it immediately became.

This is an example of the Act of Creation with the Word. She pronounced it, and so it was.

God spoke the world into existence. After Adam was created, God took him on a tour of the Garden of Eden, and Adam named all of the animals.  Man takes part in creation too, but is somewhat limited. God spoke the animals into existence, but Adam took it from there.

There’s a fellow I know who likes to tell a joke: “If you say that a dog’s tail is a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” His answer is: “Four. Saying that a tail is a leg, doesn’t make it so.”

That is a good, common sense rhetorical argument. A dog’s tail clearly differs from its legs in any number of ways.  But we could call it a leg.  We would then have the linguistic burden of distinguishing it from the other four legs. This leg does not support the animal; it is attached differently; it has a different form.  It differs from the others in so many important ways that picking a separate name for it is just more efficient. 

God has given humankind the power to name things, and over the course of millennia, we have.  It has been a dynamic, iterative process, and we’ve done it in multiple cultures and innumerable languages.

But it is even more complicated than that.

There are layers of naming. (And it is at times like this when I wish I knew more philosophy because those guys can really shell the corn when it comes to stuff like this.) Let’s look at a “human”.  That is one layer of naming.  When we get into another area, I can look at a human, and say that is a “friend” or that is an “enemy.”  There is still another layer when I would look at the same human and say, “That is my brother.”

The last of these is God’s language.  God has names for things as well: “That human that you call ‘enemy’ is your brother because you are both my children.”

Names affect the way we think. We often switch codes when we are trying to make a political point.  The word “slave” is not used in the original U.S. Constitution.  Slaves are there, but the writers twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid using that word. 

When you call someone a slave, that is a step toward separating them from being human.  Think about this when you see illegal immigrants being referred to as “illegals” or pre-born babies being referred to as “fetuses.” 

We have God-given power.  We create with our use of language; or we can destroy. We can bind and we can loose.

This is all rather heavy going for me.  I need to get back out to the shop and glue some more pieces together.  I’ve got a game table to finish.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

Frozen Acorn-Jelly Soup

 Frozen Acorn-Jelly Soup

By Bobby Neal Winters

We can travel in space, but we can also travel in time.  And as has been observed by Einstein and Tennessee Williams, “Time is the farthest distance between two places.”

My group had been visiting Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea.  We were in a (Korean) Barbecue restaurant when I saw something that made me think of a beautiful girl I’d met in graduate school 40 years ago and on the other side of the planet from where I was then.

She was a beautiful latina, though no one I knew used the word “latina” in those days. In the words of Bob Seger, she was born with a face that let her get her way. Her parents were college professors. There was a conversation going on and she mentioned that she had some gazpacho in the refrigerator. 

Being ignorant and wanting to repair that I asked, “What’s gazpacho?”

“Oh,” she said, in a tone that only years later would I be sensitive enough to recognize as condescending, “it is a cold soup from Spain and Portugal...you wouldn’t like it if you were raised on Campbell’s.” 

In hindsight, I can see certain things. One, she had me pegged right off. Not only Campbells, but Campbell's Chicken Noodle if you please. Two, even the beautiful, refined daughters of college professors are works in progress. Three, when a beautiful girl says anything to a twenty-year-old boy, he will remember it even 40 years later, 8000 miles away.

What caused my reverie was the soup I saw on the table in front of me.  There was ice in it, so one could argue that it was a cold soup, like gazpacho.  I looked it over and the only ingredient I recognized was shredded seaweed.  It had the remnants of a thin layer of ice on it like a mud-puddle that was in the process of thawing.

I sampled some.  It was absolutely delicious. 

I looked it up later, and the soup is called muksabal.  I prefer to think of it as frozen acorn-jelly soup.  The acorn jelly is called dotori-muk, and acorn jelly doesn’t quite capture it in my opinion. It is made from acorns--yes the ones from oak trees--and it has a consistency somewhere between that of jello and that of tofu.

The soup was spicy and sour and freezing cold, obviously.  And, to repeat myself, it was absolutely delicious.

The last forty years have had quite an effect on me.  When I was twenty, I thought I was the smartest person in any room I was in.  I’ve learned differently now and am reminded of it on a regular basis. But I have at least been smart enough to cure some of my ignorance.

Our time on Planet Earth is the best university there is...if we want to learn. In our youths we can be ignorant and arrogant.  We can be privileged and insensitive. That is par for the course.  Forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and even coming to the realization that there is nothing to be forgiven because that’s just life happening.

Everything we encounter is precious.  Even a bowl of soup can remind us of a beautiful girl from 40 years ago and a planet away.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

Angels in Seoul

 Angels in Seoul

By Bobby Neal Winters

As I write this, I am in my hotel room on a Saturday morning in Seoul, South Korea.  I’ve been here as part of a small group which is cultivating partnerships with several South Korean universities.  We look at programs that we have in common.  We examine their similarities and their differences.  If they are too different, we cannot form a partnership; if they are too similar, there is really little point in forming a partnership.  The trick is finding that magical window where the differences add up to value-added for both sides of the partnership.

This is exhausting.

When I’ve not been meeting with university officials or going to and from meeting them on the Seoul Metropolitan subway system, I’ve been exploring downtown Seoul.

By exploring, I mean wandering out of sight of my hotel and getting lost.  Getting lost is one of my favorite things to do in a strange city.  In Seoul it doesn’t require much effort.  There are two factors that make getting lost in Seoul easy.  The first of these is there is a large number of very tall buildings.  Cross a street, walk half a block, and you are out of sight of your hotel.

The second factor is what I like to think of as the Underground City.  As I mentioned before, we used the subway.  There is a tunnel system attached to the subway system that connects it all up.  Attached to that tunnel system is an underground shopping mall.

There are tons and tons of little shops.  Hardly any of those are shops that are part of any franchise that is recognizable to an American, or at least to a Kansan.  Korean has a different alphabet than we do, but some of the signs are in Korean and English and Chinese and Japanese.  And none of that makes it any easier to pick out a landmark. 

So getting lost is easy.  The irony is that I was not lost when I first encountered the Red Angels.

When I first encountered the Red Angels, I was about 100 feet from the Plaza Boulangerie, the bakery near where our hotel connects with the tunnel system.  They were not difficult to see.  They were dressed in red--and when I say red I mean Nebraska Cornhusker red as opposed to Oklahoma Sooner red--quasi military-style attire. As the design-types say, their uniforms popped.

Given the connotation for red I grew up with, my first thought was, “Those have got to be the worst North Korean spies ever.”

But as I approached, we made eye contact and the man (there was one male and one female) asked, “May I help you?”

I declined his offer because I was not lost.

I walked a distance further and found a map of the subway system and a map of the underground shopping market, and paused to study them. I’d been there a minute or two when the earnest young man offered again.  This time he gave me a map and pointed to where I was on it.

I accepted the map, and walked off in another direction, out of their sight.  I was grateful to the Red Angels for the gift of the map.  I opened it and began to try to find where I was on it.  Because, as you know, a map is useless unless you know where you are on it.  As I was looking the map over, I was approached by someone else in a uniform.  

I don’t know if it was a policeman or a mall rent-a-cop, but he saw I had a map open and assumed that I was lost.  In uncertain English he asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m exploring,” I said. But this was beyond his English.

“Where are you going?” he asked again.

I did a quick mental calculation with regard to how likely it would be to get him to understand that I was not lost, but just exploring.  

I told him the name of my hotel.

He led me up a long flight of stairs and pointed to my hotel which was exactly where I knew it would be.

I put away my map the minute he was out of sight.  I was then able to get lost and, after a satisfying length of time, to find my way back.  It was a time well spent. 

“I once was lost, but now I am found/ Was blind but now I see.”

I will see you all on the other side.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 

 Jesus in Seoul

By Bobby Neal Winters

We went to church in Seoul this morning.  We went to the Myeyongdong Catholic Cathedral, though none of us is Catholic.  It was within walking distance; it had a service in English; so we went there.

One of our party had never been to a Catholic service before, so I offered my advice.  Sit toward the back.  Stand when they stand, though they won’t stand all at once because they are doing the same.  They stand when they pray just like Methodists stand when they sing.

And you’ve got to watch out, because the priest will say, “The Lord be with you,” and you will want to reply with, “And also with you,”(because why wouldn’t you), but the congregation will say, “And with your spirit.”

That worked out pretty well.

Though it was an English language service, virtually everyone there was Asian.  The exceptions were the priest and the readers.  There were four readers, none of whom were Korean, but only one of which was a native English speaker.

One of our party who had been to a Catholic service before noted that there were no kneelers.  During the times when Catholics at home would’ve been kneeling, the Koreans bowed.

The Psalm was read by an African man, who had a strong but very understandable accent.  He read, 

“Kindness and truth shall meet;/

justice and peace shall kiss./

Truth shall spring out of the earth,/

and justice shall look down from heaven.”

And we responded, “Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.”

The priest gave his homily on John the Baptist.  If I were to guess from his accent, I would say he was Spanish--the priest, not John the Baptist.

It was wonderful. There we were more than 7000 miles away from home but united with Christian brothers not only from Korea, but from all around the world.  

Christ told his disciples to take the good news to the whole world and make disciples of every nation.  He also wanted us to remain united.  One is tempted to say that two out of three ain’t bad. The truth is that the first two are wonderful, but the lack of the third is shameful.

When time came for the people to receive the eucharist, the priest pointed out that only baptized catholics could partake, so my little group of protestants remained in our pew.  Then one priest can and looked at us--looked at me in particular--and invited me to come and receive.  Rather than refuse and stay in my pew, I stepped out and when I came to the priest I crossed my arms on my chest as I’ve been taught to do to signify that what God has created to be One has been broken by Man. 

The priest blessed me--which is never a bad thing--and I returned to my pew.

In my heart, that hymn from the 1960s plays,

“We are One in The Spirit,/

We are One in The Lord./

We are One in The Spirit,/

We are One in The Lord. /

And we pray that all unity may one day be restored. /

And they'll know we are Christians by our love, /

By our Love, /

Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love.”

I am on the opposite side of the world from my loved ones, but Jesus has preceded me here, and it’s okay.