Muhammad's Sword, by Uri Avnery (from Jewish Peace News) - EXCELLENT

[JPN Commentary: Gush Shalom founder and frequent Israeli government critic Uri Avnery writes this convincing explication of the Pope's comments on Islam last week. In it, he sharply criticizes Joseph Ratzinger's decision to cite a Byzantine Emperor on the Moslems, but he finds it consistent with what he regards as a historically significant rapprochement between Rome and Washington. George Bush, Avnery writes, is to Pope Benedict XVI what certain Byzantine Emperors of old were to the Church: a very powerful ally in the global political and economic struggle between the West and its designated Others. Avnery energetically contests the Pope's implied accusation that Islam is religion of violence and irrationality. Christianity, Avnery reminds us, historically has much more frequently resorted to the sword when faced with perceived religious and political antagonists. Avnery's historical overview of Islam's relatively benevolent relation to its Others may be somewhat reductionistic, but on balance he is correct that the historical record supports the old adage about those who live in glass houses. More importantly, Avnery cuts through the Pope's apologists' obfuscations to point out that we must keep our eyes on vested interests here as elsewhere: clash-of-civilizations neoconservatism -- and its mystification of the non-West -- is not the sole province of the American right. -LS]

23.9.06

Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes.

Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year 306 - exactly 1700 years ago - encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern (Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope, demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.

The struggle between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some Emperors dismissed or expelled a Pope, some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor. One of the Emperors, Henry IV, "walked to Canossa", standing for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope's castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his excommunication.

But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week's speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush's crusade against "Islamofascism", in the context of the "Clash of Civilizations".

IN HIS lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God's actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah.

As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living near the fault-line of this "war of civilizations".

In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul?

To support his case, the Pope quoted - of all people - a Byzantine Emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing Eastern Church. At the end of the 14th century, the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had - or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt) - with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the following words at his adversary:

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

These words give rise to three questions: (a) Why did the Emperor say them? (b) Are they true? (c) Why did the present Pope quote them?

WHEN MANUEL II wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were already under Turkish threat.

At that point in time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the Danube. They had conquered Bulgaria and the north of Greece, and had twice defeated relieving armies sent by Europe to save the Eastern Empire. On May 29, 1453, only a few years after Manuel's death, his capital, Constantinople (the present Istanbul) fell to the Turks, putting an end to the Empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years.

During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countries against the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving politics.

In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the present Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against the mainly Muslim "Axis of Evil". Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Pope supports the forces that object to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.

IS THERE any truth in Manuel's argument?

The pope himself threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned theologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur'an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. He quoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meant verse 257) which says: "There must be no coercion in matters of faith".

How can one ignore such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues that this commandment was laid down by the prophet when he was at the beginning of his career, still weak and powerless, but that later on he ordered the use of the sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does not exist in the Qur'an. True, Muhammad called for the use of the sword in his war against opposing tribes - Christian, Jewish and others - in Arabia, when he was building his state. But that was a political act, not a religious one; basically a fight for territory, not for the spreading of the faith.

Jesus said: "You will recognize them by their fruits." The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to "spread the faith by the sword"?

Well, they just did not.

For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the government and enjoy the fruits.

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.

THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.

THE STORY about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.

Why did he utter these words in public? And why now?

There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of "Islamofascism" and the "Global War on Terrorism" - when "terrorism" has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world's oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a Crusade.

The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?

Listening, Hearing and Conversation

by the Very Reverend Robert V. Taylor

[From "Sermons at Saint Mark’s," preached by The Very Reverend Robert V. Taylor on the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 17, 2006. Lectionary scriptures were
Isaiah 50:4-9; James 2:1-5, 8-10, 14-18 & Mark 9:14-29.]


Listening, Hearing and Conversation

Edith was a Deacon who served in the first parish that I worked in after ordination in 1983. I was amazed at how she knew the names and stories of almost every person who was a waiter at the local coffee-shops and hamburger joints, as well as the clerks in small shops and department stores in that urban, gritty parish. She listened; she wanted to hear. I came to understand that it was a way of being, a spiritual practice. I think about her often.

In contrast, I’ve thought just a little about the priest who seemed unable to listen, unable to hear the requests for a simple burial service for my father. He was convinced of how marvelous it would be for us to have a series of eulogies and remembrances during the burial service, in spite of our clarity about not wanting those in the service, but at a reception. I remember feeling that he could not listen—perhaps did not want to. It was quite striking.

I wonder about listening as part of my own spiritual practice. I wonder about the triggers that I know of which make me aware of how hard it is to listen to some people. I worry about the triggers that I am unaware of that make me seem unable to listen. I think about how the spiritual practice of listening can cease to be spiritual when the listening becomes unhealthy and when, in fact, something else, perhaps a calling to account or action, is what the most generous spiritual practice might be. I think about the luxury of being listened to, of being heard. I think of the person who said what a gift it was to allow a voice to have voice. I think of the discipline of listening to the voices though whom God speaks and to listen to God in the silences.

Robert Frost, in his poem, “The Secret Sits,” says, “We dance round in a ring and suppose / While the secret sits in the middle and knows.”[i] It is as though the “secret sits in the middle” of today’s Gospel, inviting us in, knowing some profound truth that we have yet to hear or listen for.

In the story preceding this passage, the Transfiguration occurred. Jesus’ appearance was changed in front of Peter, James and John, and Jesus was identified by God as God’s “Beloved Son.” Coming down the mountain, they see some of Jesus’ followers and some scribes having an argument or discussion. There seems to be a lot of energy in this gathering. The animated crowd runs to Jesus as he approaches and he immediately asks what they are arguing about.

Not unlike Mark’s previous story, another beloved child is at the center of today’s Gospel story. The way in which Jesus, the boy’s father, and those in the crowd listen, hear one another and have conversation, is remarkable. We don’t know whether the boy’s mother, grandparents, sisters and brothers were present or what they thought. A healing of deafness happens that is not the result of faith or belief on the part of the beloved child. You wonder what we might learn from this story as individuals and as part of the community of the Church. We so often seem not just deaf, but unwilling to listen to, or hear, one another. This healing reminds us that in the listening and the discussion and the conversation, there is new life to be discovered. As we think about this 75th Anniversary Year of the Cathedral as one of pilgrimage, I remember Pico Iyer once saying something like, the journey of a pilgrim is unlike that of a person who travels because the pilgrim’s journey never ends, it only deepens. It deepens as we are willing to engage in the layers of listening, hearing and conversation.

We know that listening does not always involve a conversation; sometimes it is simply not safe to converse. But listening does often involve conversation. Alan Jones says that a friend of his translates the poetic, rich, magnificent opening of John’s Gospel in this way, “In the beginning was the conversation.”[ii]

How does that connect with the self-righteous sanctity that Christians often feel about today’s passage from James? There is often much in our works to give thanks for, but that misses the point. James clearly understands that conversation leads to action. One person paraphrases James in this way, “Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?”[iii] James reminds us that we are each partial to someone, to some group, captivated by the partiality of some prejudice or condition or privilege. James reminds us that God is partial to those who have no partiality shown toward them. In James’ world, that meant the poor. James reminds us that God invites us to be bearers of God’s partiality through what we do.

Actions of faith are not unlike listening, hearing and converstion, because each of them usually takes us to a place that we would not have expected to end up. We discover that Robert Frost was correct, that the “secret sits in the middle and knows.” For most of us, that is an invitation to the dance or the journey of pilgrimage. To listen, to hear, to discover the secret sitting in the middle and be nudged or spurred or encouraged or cajoled into action.

One theologian offers a helpful way of looking at our pilgrimage, through the lens of four phases that we might go through at varying times along the journey. He says that our lives are a pattern of moving from compassion—which leads us to ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”—to then realizing something deeper, that, “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.” He says that in that moment we know that faith leads us to work for structural changes to redress the very things that keep people poor, or separated from one another. But he says there is more.

He says we move through these first two stages unlearning something, being able to say, “No I am not my sister’s keeper,” which makes us humble, giving us a whole new take on humility. This theologian says that at some point we come to an even deeper spiritual truth, as you and I realize that I am my brother or my sister.[iv]

We so often keep dancing around the edges, on the surface, while the secret sits in the middle right among us. We discover that we are part of the “us” when we enter into listening, hearing and conversation. “In the beginning was the conversation.”

Charlie Brock, one of the people whom the Saint Mark’s community has sponsored for Holy Orders, says that this question is asked of him, and every seminarian, thousands of times: “So, where have you been encountering God?” Charlie reflects that the more pertinent question for us is, “Where haven’t you been encountering God?”

Later this month, John Patrick Shanley’s brilliant play, Doubt, will open in Seattle at the Rep. In his introduction to the play, Shanley writes about what is going on in America right now. “We are living in a courtroom culture….Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere.” Often we yearn for even the beginning of conversation.

So, where haven’t you been encountering God? Perhaps it is an invitation to listen, to hear, and to be in conversation. Perhaps it is an invitation to action. Perhaps it is an invitation to discover that the secret sits in the middle and knows. God-talk without God-actions is, indeed, “outrageous nonsense.” For being in love with Jesus leads us to know that talking is different than the spiritual practice of listening and hearing and conversation.

Or is it? Being in love with Jesus leads us to acts of compassion and justice. Being in love with Jesus reminds us that they all belong together, intertwined, on the journey of a pilgrim. Together they shape a conversation and a practice—a way of being.


[i] Robert Frost, A Witness Tree (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1942).

[ii] Alan Jones, Common Prayer on Common Ground: A Vision of Anglican Orthodoxy (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 2006), p. 5.

[iii] Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs: NAV Press, 2002), p. 2204.

[iv] Theologian Albert Nolan’s model of how we participate in reconciliation.

Your God is likely supremely different from anyone else's God

By Jerry Large

Seattle Times staff columnist

Some folks like to say everyone worships the same God. But we know that isn't exactly so, and now we have a description of how American conceptions of God differ.

The Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion and the Gallup organization recently finished a study that went beyond the usual questions — "Do you believe in God?" and "Do you go to church?" They tried to dig more deeply and find out how people see God, how they see themselves in relation to God and how that affects their ideas and behavior. What they found is that when Americans say "God," they are not necessarily talking about the same deity.

The researchers asked 29 questions about God's character and behavior, sifted through the answers they got from 1,721 participants and identified "two clear and distinct dimensions" to people's ideas about God.

Those are God's level of engagement and God's level of anger at human sins. People see God as engaged or not, angry or not. The four combinations of those two traits yield more information about the believer than the usual denominational labels.

Americans see God as engaged and angry (a god who is involved in world and individual affairs and who metes out punishment for bad behavior); engaged but not angry (involved in individual lives and the world, but behaving benevolently without anger); disengaged and angry (withdrawn from intervening in human affairs, but unhappy with the state of the world and likely to punish bad deeds in the afterlife; or disengaged and not angry (a god who set things in motion, then went fishing).

Basically what we have are lightning-bolt God, smiley-face God, bummed-out God and whatever, dude God. The researchers assigned them letters: A (authoritarian), B (benevolent), C (critical) and D (distant).

The combination you choose says more about you than about God.

The researchers found "a clear disconnect between how the media and academics identify American believers and how they identify themselves."

Few people use the term "evangelical," for instance, even when they belong to churches that have "evangelical" in their name. But when the data are organized by type of God, it's clear which groups people belong to.

Only evangelical Protestants showed consistency in their political views. "They agree with conservative agenda items and disagree with liberal ones." They tend to believe in an authoritarian God. Other groups crossed political lines depending on the topic.

It didn't matter whether people were Catholic, Protestant or Jewish; what determined their views on a number of topics was the version of God they believed in.

A Catholic who believed in the authoritarian God was as conservative as any evangelical.

They also found that women leaned toward more engaged versions and men toward less engaged. People with lower educations and lower incomes also tended to believe in a more engaged God, who answers prayers. Most black people believed in a more engaged God. Southerners tend toward an authoritarian God, West Coasters are more into a distant God and Midwesterners lean toward the benevolent God.

Interestingly, not a single black person in the survey claimed to be an atheist. Asked whether they believed without any doubt that God exists, black Protestants were the only group in which 100 percent said yes.

Black folks overwhelmingly believe God is not happy with people's sins and will tan hides when necessary in this life or the next.

The survey was full of stuff you might not know: It found that 3.7 percent of the black population is Jewish, compared to 2.6 percent of white Americans.

Everybody's got a model of God to suit who they are. People's religious views reflected their income, education, gender, race and age.

People 18-30 are about three times more likely than people over 65 to have no religious affiliation. Americans are becoming less tied to denomination.

Americans overwhelmingly say they believe in God, it's just that folks have different ideas about who God is and what God wants from us.

The differences have social and political impacts. Who we vote for and which programs we support all affected by the way we see God, including the small portion of the population that filled in "atheist" on the survey.

On abortion, allowing gay people to marry, military spending and social programs, a person's description of God corresponded with his or her political stand.

If the government were going to back a religion, which version of God would it push? Looking at the survey will remind you why separation of church and state makes sense.

People have a bad tendency to talk past one another, using the same words to mean very different things, which leads to misunderstandings and makes it difficult to put conflicts to rest.

This survey gives people a clearer idea of what their neighbors are talking about when they bring God into a conversation.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

No Left Turns - a 'Garrison Keilor' type story by Michael Gartner

Enjoy! Thanks, Dale Lloyd and Bob Moore.

After reading the following story I wonder how close I am to taking no
left turns. Actually its good advice. I remember talking to my mom
and dad about this many many years ago. They too lived to be in their
nineties. Have a great day! Bob

No Left Turns - Great Story!
By Michael Gartner

My father never drove a car.

Well, that's not quite right.

I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927,
when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926
Whippet.

"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car
you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet,
and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life
and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
"Oh, bull----!" she said. "He hit a horse."

"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The
neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941
Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the
Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to
work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the
streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three
blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and
sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but
we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain,
and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon
as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one."

It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my
parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts
department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white
model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since
my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but
it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years
old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby
cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and
where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The
cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in
the cemetery?" I remember him saying once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the
driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of
direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the
city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout
Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement
that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of
marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire
time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the
next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St.
Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and
he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two
priests was on duty that morning.

If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile
walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her
home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk
and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast"
and "Father Slow."

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother
whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If
she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or
go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine
running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. (In the
evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again.
The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on
first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.") If she
were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags
out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and
she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the
secret of a long life?" "I guess so," I said, knowing it probably
would be something bizarre.

"No left turns," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I
read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen
when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older,
your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it
said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."

"What?" I said again. "No left turns," he said. "Think about it.
Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we
always make three rights."

"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support.
"No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It
works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count." I
was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started
laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted, "that
sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven
rights, and you're okay again."

I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.

"No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it
a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put
off another day or another week."

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her
car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999,
when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died
the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved
into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years
later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny
bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died
then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he
paid for the house.) He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him
a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the
icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound
mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I
had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all
three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual
wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in
the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike,
the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At
one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm
probably not going to live much longer."

"You're probably right," I said.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with
him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one
point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to
make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet."

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: "I want you to know,"
he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very
comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth
could ever have." A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and
then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so
long. I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life.

Or because he quit taking left turns.

[Michael Gartner has been editor of newspapers large and small and
president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for
editorial writing.]