WEST MIFFLIN, Pa. — A
Pittsburgh-area girl born without hands has won a penmanship award —
and $1,000 — from a company that publishes language arts and reading
textbooks.
Zaner-Bloser Inc. recognized 7-year-old Annie Clark at Wilson
Christian Academy in West Mifflin on Wednesday with its first-ever
Nicholas Maxim Award.
Nicholas was a Maine fifth-grader born without hands or lower arms
who entered the company's penmanship contest last year. His work
impressed judges enough that they created a new category for students
with disabilities.
After the ceremony Wednesday, Clark demonstrated her ability to write
by manipulating a pencil between her forearms. Asked whether she was
nervous about the attention, the girl said, "Not really, but kind of."
The girl's parents, Tom and Mary Ellen Clark, have nine children —
three biological and six adopted from China, including Annie. Annie is
one of four of the adoptees who have disabilities that affect their
hands or arms. The Clarks also have an adopted child, Alyssa, 18, and a
biological daughter, Abbey, 21, with Down syndrome.
"Each time, we weren't looking to adopt a special-needs child, but
that is what happened," said Mary Ellen Clark, 48, of McKeesport. "This
was the family God wanted for us."
Annie has learned to paint, draw and color. She also swims, dresses,
eats meals and opens cans of soda by herself, and uses her iPod touch
and computers without assistance. She hopes to someday write books about
animals.
"She's an amazing little girl," said Tom Clark, 49, who owns an
automotive dealership. "It's a shame because society places so many
rules on how people should look, but the minds of these kids are
phenomenal."
Mary Ellen Clark hopes the award encourages her daughter "that she can do anything."
“The King is the most important
piece. When he is trapped, his whole army loses. The King can move one
square in any direction. The main goal of chess is to checkmate your
opponent’s King. The King is not actually captured and removed from the
board like other pieces. But if the King is attacked (‘checked’) and
threatened with capture, it must get out of check immediately. If there
is no way to get out of check, the position is a ‘checkmate,’ and the
side that is checkmated loses.”
We
all know what the game of chess involves. Now there used to be a
painting in the Louvre art museum called "Checkmate", painted by
Friedrich Moritz August Retzsch. It is now in private hands after being
sold at Christie’s in 1999. This painting depicts 2 chess players, one
is satan whom appears arrogantly confident, and the other player is a
man who looks forlorn. If satan wins, he gets the man's soul.
According
to legend, a chess champion visited the museum once and after studying
the painting, noticed that the arrangement of the chess pieces were
incorrect. According to him, the devil who thought he was winning, was
in fact not winning. The man, who thought he was losing, was winning,
because according to the pieces left on the chessboard, his king had one
more move left, which would make him the winner of the game!
He
called the curator and they determined that the title didn’t fit the
scene because the forlorn-looking player actually has the ability to
defeat his opponent, though he obviously doesn’t realize it. The
painting is a lie. His king can still make another move!
-
A little boy with two fishes and a few loafs of bread, sees that
thousands of people needs food. It looks like checkmate, but it is a
lie, our King has another move left! They collected twelve baskets of
leftovers afterwards!
-
Daniel gets thrown into a lion’s den full of hungry lions. It looks
like checkmate, but it is a lie, our King has another move left!
-
The woman by the well is about to be killed by angry men with stones.
It looks like checkmate, but it is a lie, our King has another move
left! He tells her to go and not sin anymore.
-
The murderer next to Jesus on the cross thought it was the end, yet he
still repented. It looks like checkmate, but it is a lie, because the
King has a move left and says: Today you will be in Paradise with me.
- On Good Friday the people were
screaming: Crucify Him! They mocked and hit Him, spit and tortured Him
and nailed Him to the cross. They said He could save others, but not
Himself. It is over. Checkmate. Satan smiles as everybody leaves
thinking God is dead. But Jesus still has a move left! Come Sunday and
Jesus rose from the dead! Our King had another move left!
-
We think our country is a mess. Farm murders and violence everywhere.
People lose their jobs, marriages gets destroyed, moral values are
non-existent. You get scared and feel lost. You are looking for
direction but end up on the wrong path. It looks like checkmate, but it
is a lie, do not fear, the game is not over.
Our
King still has one move left! Our lives and future are in His hands.
You have been bought with His blood - a very expensive price, and
received amazing grace.
1
Peter 2:24-25 …who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree,
that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose
stripes you were healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but have
now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
*I
heard this story and after doing some investigation, I found that the
original story was published in a chess magazine in 1898/99. Various
sermons were based on it afterwards.
Christianity has been destroyed
by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists. Ignore them, writes
Andrew Sullivan, and embrace Him.
If you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.,
you’ll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages
are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this
was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas
Jefferson when he was a mere 27 years old. Painstakingly removing those
passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth,
Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New
Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15).
What did he edit out? He told us: “We must reduce our volume to the
simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of
Jesus.” He removed what he felt were the “misconceptions” of Jesus’
followers, “expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not
understood themselves.” And it wasn’t hard for him. He described the
difference between the real Jesus and the evangelists’ embellishments as
“diamonds” in a “dunghill,” glittering as “the most sublime and
benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Yes, he
was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure.
When we think of Jefferson as the great architect of the separation of
church and state, this, perhaps, was what he meant by “church”: the
purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity, purged of the agendas of
those who had sought to use Jesus to advance their own power decades and
centuries after Jesus’ death. If Jefferson’s greatest political legacy
was the Declaration of Independence, this pure, precious moral teaching
was his religious legacy. “I am a real Christian,” Jefferson insisted
against the fundamentalists and clerics of his time. “That is to say, a
disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”
What
were those doctrines? Not the supernatural claims that, fused with
politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions,
pogroms, reformations, and counter reformations. Jesus’ doctrines were
the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately
leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in
everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and
forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the
ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually
your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up
power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately
requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the
total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the
sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching. That’s why, in his final apolitical
act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his
crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on
the cross and forgave them, and loved them.
Politicized Faith
Whether
or not you believe, as I do, in Jesus’ divinity and resurrection—and in
the importance of celebrating both on Easter Sunday—Jefferson’s point
is crucially important. Because it was Jesus’ point. What does it matter
how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do
not live as these doctrines demand? What is politics if not a dangerous
temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself? If
we return to what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be—rather than
the unknowable intricacies of what we believe he was—he actually emerges
more powerfully and more purely.
Brooks Kraft / Corbis
And
more intensely relevant to our times. Jefferson’s vision of a simpler,
purer, apolitical Christianity couldn’t be further from the 21st-century
American reality. We inhabit a polity now saturated with religion. On
one side, the Republican base is made up of evangelical Protestants who
believe that religion must consume and influence every aspect of public
life. On the other side, the last Democratic primary had candidates
profess their faith in public forums, and more recently President Obama
appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast, invoking Jesus to defend his
plan for universal health care. The crisis of Christianity is perhaps
best captured in the new meaning of the word “secular.” It once meant
belief in separating the spheres of faith and politics; it now means,
for many, simply atheism. The ability to be faithful in a religious
space and reasonable in a political one has atrophied before our eyes.
Organized Religion in Decline
Meanwhile, organized religion itself is in trouble. The Catholic Church’s
hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the
unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But in the
last decade, whatever shred of moral authority that remained has
evaporated. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up,
an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and
children. I don’t know what greater indictment of a church’s authority
there can be—except the refusal, even now, of the entire leadership to
face their responsibility and resign. Instead, they obsess about others’
sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays
for birth control in health insurance. Inequality, poverty, even the
torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues
attract far less of their public attention.
For their
part, the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious
moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. Evangelical
Protestantism has stepped into the vacuum, but it has serious defects of
its own. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores in his unsparing new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,
many suburban evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity, which
teaches that living a Christian life will make you successful and rich.
Others defend a rigid biblical literalism, adamantly wishing away a
century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the
canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are
copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory. Still
others insist that the earth is merely 6,000 years old—something we now
know by the light of reason and science is simply untrue. And what group
of Americans have pollsters found to be most supportive of torturing
terror suspects? Evangelical Christians. Something has gone very wrong.
These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear
before an amorphous “other.” This version of Christianity could not
contrast more strongly with Jesus’ constant refrain: “Be not afraid.” It
would make Jefferson shudder.
It
would also, one imagines, baffle Jesus of Nazareth. The issues that
Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either
Jefferson’s or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of
homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a
condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and
forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public
as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to
follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers,
anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was
completely irrelevant.
The Crisis of Our Time
All
of which is to say something so obvious it is almost taboo:
Christianity itself is in crisis. It seems no accident to me that so
many Christians now embrace materialist self-help rather than ascetic
self-denial—or that most Catholics, even regular churchgoers, have tuned
out the hierarchy in embarrassment or disgust. Given this crisis, it is
no surprise that the fastest-growing segment of belief among the young
is atheism, which has leapt in popularity in the new millennium. Nor is
it a shock that so many have turned away from organized Christianity and
toward “spirituality,” co-opting or adapting the practices of
meditation or yoga, or wandering as lapsed Catholics in an inquisitive
spiritual desert. The thirst for God is still there. How could it not
be, when the profoundest human questions—Why does the universe exist
rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue
speck of a planet? What happens to us after death?—remain as pressing and mysterious as they’ve always been?
That’s
why polls show a huge majority of Americans still believing in a Higher
Power. But the need for new questioning—of Christian institutions as
well as ideas and priorities—is as real as the crisis is deep.
Back to Jesus
Where
to start? Jefferson’s act of cutting out those parts of the Bible that
offended his moral and scientific imagination is one approach. But
another can be found in the life of a well-to-do son of a fabric trader
in 12th-century Italy who went off to fight a war with a neighboring
city, saw his friends killed in battle in front of him, lived a year as a
prisoner of war, and then experienced a clarifying vision that changed
the world. In Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, Augustine
Thompson cuts through the legends and apocryphal prayers to describe
Saint Francis as he truly lived. Gone are the fashionable stories of an
erstwhile hippie, communing with flowers and animals. Instead we have
this typical young secular figure who suddenly found peace in service to
those he previously shrank from: lepers, whose sores and lesions he
tended to and whose company he sought—as much as for himself as for
them.
The
religious order that goes by his name began quite simply with a couple
of friends who were captured by the sheer spiritual intensity of how
Francis lived. His inspiration was even purer than Jefferson’s. He did
not cut out passages of the Gospels to render them more reasonable than
they appear to the modern mind. He simply opened the Gospels at
random—as was often the custom at the time—and found three passages.
They told him to “sell what you have and give to the poor,” to “take
nothing for your journey,” not even a second tunic, and to “deny
himself” and follow the path of Jesus. That was it. So Francis renounced
his inheritance, becoming homeless and earning food by manual labor.
When that wouldn’t feed him, he begged, just for food—with the indignity
of begging part of his spiritual humbling.
Jefferson cut the “diamonds” of Christ’s teaching out of the
“dunghill” of the New Testament., Hugh Talman / Smithsonian National
Museum of American History
Francis
insisted on living utterly without power over others. As stories of his
strangeness and holiness spread, more joined him and he faced a real
dilemma: how to lead a group of men, and also some women, in an
organization. Suddenly, faith met politics. And it tormented, wracked,
and almost killed him. He had to be last, not first. He wanted to be
always the “lesser brother,” not the founder of an order. And so he
would often go on pilgrimages and ask others to run things. Or he would
sit at the feet of his brothers at communal meetings and if an issue
could not be resolved without his say-so, he would whisper in the
leader’s ear.
A Vision of Holiness
As
Jesus was without politics, so was Francis. As Jesus fled from crowds,
so did Francis—often to bare shacks in woodlands, to pray and be with
God and nature. It’s critical to recall that he did not do this in
rebellion against orthodoxy or even church authority. He obeyed orders
from bishops and even the pope himself. His main obsession wasn’t
nature, which came to sublime fruition in his final “Canticle of the
Sun,” but the cleanliness of the cloths, chalices, and ornaments
surrounding the holy eucharist.
His
revulsion at even the hint of comfort or wealth could be extreme. As he
lay dying and was offered a pillow to rest on, he slept through the
night only to wake the next day in a rage, hitting the monk who had
given him the pillow and recoiling in disgust at his own weakness in
accepting its balm. One of his few commands was that his brothers never
ride a horse; they had to walk or ride a donkey. What inspired his
fellow Christians to rebuild and reform the church in his day was simply
his own example of humility, service, and sanctity.
A
modern person would see such a man as crazy, and there were many at the
time who thought so too. He sang sermons in the streets, sometimes just
miming them. He suffered intense bouts of doubt, self-loathing, and
depression. He had visions. You could have diagnosed his postwar
conversion as an outgrowth of posttraumatic-stress disorder. Or you can
simply observe what those around him testified to: something special,
unique, mysterious, holy. To reduce one’s life to essentials, to ask
merely for daily bread, forgiveness of others, and denial of self is, in
many ways, a form of madness. It is also a form of liberation. It lets
go of complexity and focuses on simplicity. Francis did not found an
order designed to think or control. He insisted on the simplicity of
manual labor, prayer, and the sacraments. That was enough for him.
Learning How to Live
It
wouldn’t be enough for most of us. And yet, there can be wisdom in the
acceptance of mystery. I’ve pondered the Incarnation my whole life. I’ve
read theology and history. I think I grasp what it means to be both God
and human—but I don’t think my understanding is any richer than my
Irish grandmother’s. Barely literate, she would lose herself in the
rosary at mass. In her simplicity, beneath her veil in front of a
cascade of flickering candles, she seemed to know God more deeply than
I, with all my education and privilege, ever will.
This
doesn’t imply, as some claim, the privatization of faith, or its
relegation to a subordinate sphere. There are times when great
injustices—slavery, imperialism, totalitarianism, segregation—require
spiritual mobilization and public witness. But from Gandhi to King, the
greatest examples of these movements renounce power as well. They
embrace nonviolence as a moral example, and that paradox changes the
world more than politics or violence ever can or will. When politics is
necessary, as it is, the kind of Christianity I am describing seeks
always to translate religious truths into reasoned, secular arguments
that can appeal to those of other faiths and none at all. But it also
means, at times, renouncing Caesar in favor of the Christ to whom
Jefferson, Francis, my grandmother, and countless generations of
believers have selflessly devoted themselves.
The saints, after all, became known as saints not because of their
success in fighting political battles, or winning a few news cycles, or
funding an anti-abortion super PAC. They were saints purely and simply
because of the way they lived. And this, of course, was Jefferson’s
deeply American insight: “No man can conform his faith to the dictates
of another. The life and essence of religion consists in the internal
persuasion or belief of the mind.”
Win McNamee / Getty Images
Jefferson
feared that the alternative to a Christianity founded on “internal
persuasion” was a revival of the brutal, bloody wars of religion that
America was founded to escape. And what he grasped in his sacrilegious
mutilation of a sacred text was the core simplicity of Jesus’ message of
renunciation. He believed that stripped of the doctrines of the
Incarnation, Resurrection, and the various miracles, the message of
Jesus was the deepest miracle. And that it was radically simple. It was
explained in stories, parables, and metaphors—not theological doctrines
of immense complexity. It was proven by his willingness to submit
himself to an unjustified execution. The cross itself was not the point;
nor was the intense physical suffering he endured. The point was how he
conducted himself through it all—calm, loving, accepting, radically
surrendering even the basic control of his own body and telling us that
this was what it means to truly transcend our world and be with God.
Jesus, like Francis, was a homeless person, as were his closest
followers. He possessed nothing—and thereby everything.
Christianity Resurrected
I
have no concrete idea how Christianity will wrestle free of its current
crisis, of its distractions and temptations, and above all its
enmeshment with the things of this world. But I do know it won’t happen
by even more furious denunciations of others, by focusing on politics
rather than prayer, by concerning ourselves with the sex lives and
heretical thoughts of others rather than with the constant struggle to
liberate ourselves from what keeps us from God. What Jefferson saw in
Jesus of Nazareth was utterly compatible with reason and with the
future; what Saint Francis trusted in was the simple, terrifying love of
God for Creation itself. That never ends.
This
Christianity comes not from the head or the gut, but from the soul. It
is as meek as it is quietly liberating. It does not seize the moment; it
lets it be. It doesn’t seek worldly recognition, or success, and it
flees from power and wealth. It is the religion of unachievement. And it
is not afraid. In the anxious, crammed lives of our modern twittering
souls, in the materialist obsessions we cling to for security in
recession, in a world where sectarian extremism threatens to unleash
mass destruction, this sheer Christianity, seeking truth without the
expectation of resolution, simply living each day doing what we can to
fulfill God’s will, is more vital than ever. It may, in fact, be the
only spiritual transformation that can in the end transcend the nagging
emptiness of our late-capitalist lives, or the cult of distracting
contemporaneity, or the threat of apocalyptic war where Jesus once
walked. You see attempts to find this everywhere—from experimental
spirituality to resurgent fundamentalism. Something inside is telling us
we need radical spiritual change.
But
the essence of this change has been with us, and defining our own
civilization, for two millennia. And one day soon, when politics and
doctrine and pride recede, it will rise again.
