I'm Dangerous, But I Don't Fall!

So said our daughter Sarah late Sunday afternoon after we went for a walk and crossed the bridge to Riverview Park, getting all of us out of the house together for a while without our electronic doodads (one Nook, one iPad, a Nintendo DS, a Nintendo 3DS, and … that … TV) and being there for the first time since the flood. (Actually, Sarah, Jeffrey, and I had been there before, and Martha hadn't.)

That was after resting for a few hours – and we needed it, among church Sunday morning with the most interesting take on the parable of the dishonest steward from Luke 16, but I'll save that for another day – and being out Saturday at the first day of Rock the Leaves, a local concert venue and vendor show after getting the brakes on our Chrysler Town & Country van totally redone that morning!

Keep in mind that all during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the navigators were trying to accomplish just one thing – they wanted to find a comfortable and safe road to the empire of Cathay (China), to the island of Zipangu (Japan) and to those mysterious island, where grew the spices which the [medieval] world had come to like since the days of the Crusades, and which people needed in those days before the introduction of cold storage, when meat and fish spoiled very quickly and could only be eaten after a liberal sprinkling of pepper or nutmeg.

Hendrik Willem van Loon sums it up well in his chapter on The Great Discoveries in The Story of Mankind, but like any good student I like to know more and even show off a bit, wink. I've been reading quite a bit of history lately, which I honestly used to do a lot more than now. Perhaps it's time to change that … after coming off a kid-friendlier biography of the thirteenth century man whose last words are purported to be “I have not told half of what I saw”, Joan Holub's Who Was Marco Polo? (ISBN 9780448445403)

I found myself reading, and just finishing yesterday, Around the World In A Hundred Years (ISBN 0590489100) a Jean Fritz-written chronicle of ten explorers from Prince Henry of Portugal – he didn't get “The Navigator” sobriquet until after his death – to Ferdinand Magellan, whose story of crossing the world with five ships would make awesome drama, no embellishment needed!

They were a brave, cruel, ambitious lot, these explorers. In a hundred years they not only changed the map of the world, they left behind stories no one would want to miss.

And then we come to a book I've wanted to write about for a while, one that maybe has changed my views on going to church Sundays. Charles Freeman's A.D. 381 (ISBN 9781590201718) is hardly an atheistic diatribe or an evangelical fervor. Indeed, the author's point is that the ongoing debate of how God the Father, Jesus Christ His Son, and the Holy Spirit gel together as three separate Beings yet remain ONE Being (the doctrine of the Trinity, nutshell version), when it got brought to a stop.

To find out how, church is on Sunday mornings – decades after the Christian church didn't have to hide underground anymore brought a stop pretty much to debate in the then-civilized world. The live and let live tradition that had existed since the days of the ancient Greeks was brought, by a meeting of church and state in mutual interest, to an end. The true and only true articles of faith became what was expressed in first the Nicene Creed, and then what follows.

Moreover, when Church and state become mutually supportive in the upholding of order, then the punishment of heretics becomes a matter of state policy.

Ok, that didn't come out QUITE like I intended, but for a book subtitled “Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State” I found it really engaging! And the characters – what am I saying, they were real people – of Ammianus Marcellinus and Origen, years apart yet awesome in their own right even now alone made this a book that I was slow starting, yet couldn't wait to finish! And now to A.D. 2013, or in this case last night; I posted on Facebook already how this weekend I called to have our DirecTV service disconnected “of our own free will” and last night when I got home with Jeffrey and Sarah found the order had gone through.

For about two minutes on the couch, they cried about it but Sarah quickly found herself a chapter book to read and Jeffrey came in the kitchen and asked if he could help me make dinner! Sarah came after him, and we all did a great job making turkeyburgers. Then we settled in to watch a Pink Panther cartoon marathon on the laptop before bed. And this morning Sarah has gotten through chapter four of said book, and is really excited about it – she's even brought it to school with her. And Jeffrey who finished his reading and his spelling review has his first Cub Scouts pack meeting tonight at Longfellow, which he is excited about. So am I, because I'm not making him do it.

But some of it might make me, David