The Miracle Birth of Confucius

This is a complete reworking of a story I posted last year. The previous version was a simple rewrite of an old Sophia Fahs story, but I was not happy with the Fahs version for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. For this version, I did some additional research into myths surrounding the birth of Confucius, and I have provided footnotes (if you have corrections or comments, please leave a comment below). As with all myths and legends, there will be many different versions; I have tried to provide a story that is a reasonable compromise between the different versions I found. You may wish to know that traditionally Confucius’ birthday can be celebrated on September 28 (Quifen 27 in the Chinese lunar calendar).

Once again, my purpose was to come up with a story that would be suitable for use in a Unitarian Universalist worship service, to show that many great religious leaders and prophets have legends of miraculous births. I’ll be telling this story this Sunday at the Palo Alto Unitarian Universalist church, and wanted to share it here in case someone else might find it useful.

Introduction

At Christmas we like to remember the old story of the miraculous birth of Jesus of Nazareth. But did you know that there are other miraculous birth stories of other great religious leaders? Today I’m going to tell you about the miraculous birth of Confucius, a story with angels and wonderful animals and wise men. See if you think this story is at all like the story of Jesus’s birth.

The Birth of Confucius

Once upon a time, in a place called Tsou, there lived a man named Shu-liang Ho, who was also called K’ung Ho. He had been a soldier, now retired, and he was so tall that people said he was ten feet tall. He lived in China some two thousand five hundred years ago, at about the time when Gautama Buddha lived in India.

K’ung Ho was an older man, perhaps 70 years old. His first wife had died, and leaving him the father of nine daughters. But K’ung Ho also hoped to have a son. So he went to the head of the noble house of Yen, and asked for one of their daughters in marriage. The youngest daughter, Yen Ching-tsai, said that she would be willing to marry this older man. Continue reading →

Nonprofit Christmas shopping

For many nonprofit institutions, this is not going to be a very merry Christmas. Take Sing Out!, for example, a nonprofit devoted to supporting folk music, and to “making music a part of our everyday lives.” Over the years, Sing Out! has published songs from people like Woodie Guthrie, Pat Humphries, Emmylou Harris, Mississippi John Hurt, Cordelia’s Dad, Pete Seeger, etc., etc. Like Seeger, Sing Out! gives lots of emphasis to socially conscious songs and music. It’s a good organization. I want them to survive.

Well, I don’t have much money this year, but I always try to do some charitable giving at Christmas time — after I give money to Heifer Project, I’m thinking maybe I’ll give give some money to Sing Out!. I suppose if I were a Christmas-gift-giver, I could give subscriptions to Sing Out! magazine, or buy a few Rise Up Singing books to give as gifts.

I suppose the mall owners and the big box stores need us to shop there so they can pay their workers starvation wages. But I think maybe I’ll spend my small Christmas budget with nonprofit organizations instead.

Black Friday

Someone at church was telling me this morning about to the mall on Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving. “We got to the mall at 6 a.m.,” Ms. X said enthusiastically, “and already there were no parking places left!” To me, this sounds horrible, but to Ms. X it was all a big adventure. I’m a cheap New England Yankee, I think of shopping as a pragmatic, thrifty venture:– you shop only when it is efficient to do so, and you shop as little as possible in order to spend as little money as possible. I never go shopping on Black Friday because I don’t want to waste time in traffic, and I don’t want to be tempted into buying things I neither want nor need.

But I forget that for many Americans, shopping is an adventure, a hobby, and a sport combined;– and Black Friday is the Olympics, the Everest, the ultimate moment for the serious shopper — the moment you’ve been training for all year long. Judge not someone else’s hobby unless you want your own hobbies judged by them.

Walking in a winter delusion

Mr. Crankypants went to the grocery store yesterday. The piped-in music had a woman’s voice whining about dreaming of a white Christmas. On the drive home, Mr. Crankypants turned on a vapid classical music radio station. They were playing an overly cheerful recording of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” as performed by the Pops Orchestra of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. Later in the day, Mr. Crankypants walked down the street. Some store window displays featured bizarre-looking fake snow.

Apparently, Christmas consumerism in the San Francisco Bay area must include bizarre fantasies of cold weather, deep snow, sleighing, and other things that are extremely unlikely to happen in this climate. Mr. Crankypants believes that this is the strongest evidence yet that the Christmas consumer season has morphed from a marketing ploy into a full-blown psycho-pathological delusion.

As Ebeneezer Scrooge put it so eloquently: “Bah. Humbug. Christmas humbug psychosis.”

Happy Thanksgiving

Earlier today, we walked down to San Francisco Bay and saw Black-necked Stilts in the mudflats and the San Mateo Bridge in the distance. We sat around eating Spanish cheese and rice crackers, and Sue and Carol drank some chianti. Sue and Carol went to take a nap, and I walked over to Central Park in San Mateo to walk through the Japanese Garden.

Now I’m back home, about to do the final preparations for the Thanksgiving feast. The turkey is sitting on top of the oven to cool. The butternut squash has almost finished roasting in the oven. The mashed potatoes are cooked, the broccoli is about ready to be cooked. I’m about to set the table, and pretty soon we’ll be eating.

Hope you had a good Thanksgiving!

Day before a holiday

For me, one of the best things about a major holiday is going to work the day before that holiday. Take today, for example, which is the day before Thanksgiving. Everyone is a little more relaxed, so you tend to make a little more time to chat with people. “Hey, you all ready for the big day?” you say. “You starving yourself so you can eat more tomorrow?” Then you tell each other what you’re going to do for the holidays — staying home with just a couple of family members, driving to a big family gathering in another state, having relatives over to your house, whatever. Depending on who you’re talking with, one of you might mention that it’s going to be hard this year because someone died in the past year, and you can say that because you know the other person is thinking about the same thing because someone in their family died in the past year. And maybe you talk about your favorite Thanksgiving food, or whether or not you watch the football game, or the Macy’s parade on television. Then, if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get to go home an hour or so early — or if you’re like me and can’t leave work early, there is at least less pressure and you can take time off in the middle of the work day and write a short blog post about how much you like going to work the day before a major holiday.

How best to reach visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners

I promised Joe that I would post a link to this…. In an article on the American Federation of Teachers Web site, Daniel Willingham, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia, answers the question: “What does cognitive science tell us about the existence of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners and the best way to teach them?”

The short answer to this question: “What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his [or her] best modality doesn’t affect his [or her] educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality.” [Italics in original.]

For years, I’ve been teaching Sunday school teachers to be aware of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners, but on the basis of this article, I will be rethinking my training strategy. You can read the whole article online, and draw your own conclusions.

Opinions

According to a review of Stewart Brand’s new book Whole Earth Discipline, Brand says the following in the introduction:

My opinions are strongly stated and loosely held.

I’m probably not going to read Brand’s new book, but I like that one sentence; it nicely sums up an approach that has worked well for me.