Talked with Jim Libby for a while. He’s on the chaplaincy staff. After the usual formalities about why I’m an atheist, and the problems I see in the US where religion becomes a wall, rather than a bridge. I don’t care how big your congregation is, that’s not the point of who has the biggest congregation. Religion, if it is to serve the role of building community, must not shun, it must not exclude.

Jay was interested in how I manage to keep my spirits up around Xmas. I know, from past experience, that the holidays can be the loneliest time, when you would normally have been surrounded by family and friends and you’re stuck working, or living in a strange city. I think Jay helped me see how blogging helps keep me happy. First, of course, it’s a discipline and helps provide local focus, but beyond that, it gives me an outlet for my creative needs, a way to make something. And in return, it brings me life from my family and friends, either through the guestbook or through personal emails. This is the electronic I-Ching.

[Incidentally, someone please tell me how a family sitting around an X-box 360 is brought closer by shooting up bad guys? I think I’ll wait for the Playstation 3.]

I have known for a long time that we are all connected on this earth. An Iraqi death, a Pakistani death, grieves me no more nor less than an American death. My death I value no more than anybody else’s. Of course, it feels different when it is close family and friends, but we are all family. Sometimes that connection feels almost tangible, like a grapevine, and we are its leaves and stems and grapes. This image of the grapevine has long been a powerful image for me, ever since my realization in the South of France many years ago, that God did not exist. You can play with the word, but once you put a name to it you have lost the way.