Thirty-three years later, my weight reached 199 pounds. I had to face the fact that I had gradually become a fat man in pretty poor physical shape.

A year earlier, in the aftermath of her father’s slow deterioration and death from Alzheimer’s, my wife, Claire, began running. She certainly didn’t need to lose any weight–she sill fits easily into her wedding dress–but read that physical exercise into old age helps keep a person’s mind sharp. After watching her get out and run faithfully for a year, even in snow and rain, I was finally shamed into joining her.

On February 18, 2009, I pushed myself to “run” a mile. I changed my diet too, dropping to two meals a day, one light and the other heavy. I started losing about a pound a week and feeling more comfortable during my runs. By April 26, Claire and I felt fit enough to try to a five kilometer (3.1 mile) road race. All kinds of people ran–thin, heavy, young–and even some pushing strollers. We finished 262nd and 302nd out of 500. She ran it in 32 minutes and I came in a minute faster. I was delighted. From then on, I became hooked on running.

I signed up for other races and began meeting people. I started attending a weekly race in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which my older all-around athletic brother Michael and his friends run regularly. Those friends were very encouraging. Harry Haywood coached me in ways to get faster and avoid injury. After each race, we enjoyed a couple beers and had a lot of laughs.

Meanwhile, back in Worcester, Claire and I discovered a weekly run starting at An Cu Liath (the Greyhound), an Irish Pub in Kelley Square, a place where six streets meet without a traffic light. This three-mile race is free and ends with a pot luck at the pub. Although somewhat standoffish at first, the members of the Central Mass Striders club who sponsor the race have become as pleasant to hang out with as the folks in Holyoke. You couldn’t find friendlier people than Beth, Tracy, Sue, Karen, Dave, Mike, Tom, Eddie, J.J., and Sanjay.

Worcester, 6:30PM Mondays: An Cu Liath City Run Monday 3 miler. An Cu Liath Pub (The Grey Hound), 11 Kelley Sq (Bring your watch!! Freebie self timed race through the Canal District). This event is part of a weekly 52 part series. Contact: Scott (CMS member), USA, 01602. 1-508-951-5324 anculiathcityrun@charter.net

And ace runners like John Pajer, Thaddeus Bell, and Carol Hurley always share the secrets of their speed. Another standout, John Colucci, will tell you he runs to honor a son who was brutally murdered. Quite a few runners are parents or grandparents. Many, like Thaddeus, used to be quite heavy. Some, like the affable bar owners Cyndy and Paul Curley, go no faster than 10 minutes a mile. And yet, Cyndy ran the Bay State Marathon and is planning to run another in Ireland come April. Unlike my high school, where athletes were so focused on individual achievement, these runners keep things in perspective. Nobody is boastful. Folks who have run dozens of marathons wear those achievements lightly.

Nonetheless, friendly rivalries have developed between me, “Iron Man” Al Barrera, and “Flash” Jack Goolsky. We race every Monday night at 6:30. In the winter, reflective vests alert drivers that we will be darting across streets. Just before Christmas, we ran as a group in and out of the atrium of the Worcester Medical Center led by a fellow in a Santa Claus suit. We also stopped at K.J. Baarron’s Fine Wines and Spirits for a free whiskey toast.

And, to my surprise, I got faster. I now finish in the top third of most races. I even won a race for my age group. My time has dropped almost ten minutes in the 5k. In my first year, I ran 79 races and am looking forward to attempting the Worcester Half Marathon on June 13. My weight is stable at 154 pounds. My co-worker Ken says I’ve become obsessed and warns that I will pack on all the pounds again eventually. But I don’t think so because I am not just dieting and exercising. I am having terrific fun. I love the competition and the comraderie. On a week when he beat me soundly, Scott Stevens, a Central Mass Striders board member who posts online results of the pub races, razzed me with the entry “Scott Schaeffer-Duffy beatdown”. He included a photo of a traffic sign depicting a child running and the word SLOW. His caption read, “Signs erected for the safety of Scott Schaeffer-Duffy.” I laughed my head off when I saw it.

You may wonder why this article is included in The Catholic Radical. [Ed.: Or Pie and Coffee, for that matter.] It’s not only because I’m excited about the topic, but also because one of our readers recently wrote that, even though he liked our paper, it was “not merry.” His comment reminds me how important it is not only to expose injustice, but also to celebrate goodness.

In his marvelous book Born to Run, Christopher McDougall, a former war correspondent for the Associated Press who is now a long distance runner, describes a revelation he had during an ultra-marathon. When McDougall fell to the back of the pack, a world class runner relinquished his chance at victory and jogged alongside the writer to encourage him. McDougall learned from this athlete that “the reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other . . . but to be with each other.”

No matter what your income, age, skill level, or weight, runners will welcome you into their offbeat family. They have taught me joyful lessons about genuine community.

This article was originally published in the April/May 2010 issue of The Catholic Radical.

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If you want to get involved with the effort to bring Google Fiber to Worcester, you can get started with this map.

Mike recommends the Central Mass Striders weekly 5k. Meet 8:30am Saturdays inside the Worcester State College gym.

The School Committee raised the CFO’s salary to some controversy. School Committee Member Tracy Novick went direct about her “yes” vote.

Worcester Magazine has a cover story about bloggers this week. We have mixed feelings about it.

Finally, Brendan talks about ice hockey and ice bocce.

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Today’s topics are union activity at Clark, and trends in campus crime.

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This week, Mike and Brendan begin with a recap of city government’s efforts to bring Google Fiber to Worcester. The Whiskerite charity beard competition raised almost $1000. Check out the video.

We have learned of the origins of the “Right Place, Right Time” song. (Video here, too.) Anyone have a copy of Worcester’s 1972 theme?

CSX wants to expand their Worcester rail yard. We are planning to learn about Worcester’s position on the Opioid Overdose Prevention program.

Worcester’s metalheads are awesome. We may as well link to Juggalo News.

Mike is enthusiastic about the Free Store at the Holden Recycling Center, and Coinstar.

We don’t like Worcester’s proposed pit bull ordinance. Mike recommends a Malcolm Gladwell article on the subject.

Finally, Holmes Wilson had a beautiful wedding in the Midtown Mall.

As I mentioned earlier, I went to a talk by Dr Sándor Fülöp, Hungarian Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations, at the British Ministry of Justice headquarters on Thursday evening (2010-02-25). Here are some notes I took. Any inaccuracies are mine.

The Commissioner is one of four ombudspersons in Hungary, appointed by a two-thirds supermajority by Parliament for a 6-year term (good), eligible for reappointment (not so good). It is the only such commissioner for sustainability in the world. The legal basis is the Ombudsman Act, passed only a couple of years ago.

The name is poetic, but really the job description as provided in the Act is that of an environmental ombudsman – a complaints officer. It would be unwise to reopen the Act to include socio-economic concerns of future generations, for fear of industrial lobbying that would erode the environmental focus.

The main duties and powers of the Ombudsman:

• enforcement of constitutional rights re environment
• mediation with administration/government
• access to parliament (even the plenary) and constitutional court with expediency
• some scientific capability in the science unit
• examine policy – even European Union measures and international treaties
• power of suspension and remedy from operators
• litigation, intervenor (amicus curiæ)
• safeguarding the interests of future generations
• access to environmental information
• climate change and the sustainability of local communities (resilience)
• access to confidential documents, even commercial and military ones (an important power)

The Commissioner’s Office has only been with full staff in post for 14 months. So far, some 600 cases have been submitted, 400 dismissed, leaving about 200 valid cases. Among these, 70 has been decided and there are 130 live investigations.

In the advocacy work, 50 Bills in Parliament have been analyzed, such as

1. reform of the Administrative Code re access to information and public participation
2. deletion of the budgetary item for seed/gene bank is against the interests of future generations
3. Kyoto carbon-trading units scandal – wrongful spending of ringfenced state funds

The largest case was that of a straw-based powerplant as large as 50 MW; too big. It would draw straws from a radius of 150 km with 200 trucks arriving per day. Worse, it would be located next to a World Heritage Site. The landscape would be changed into one dominated by the biofuel ‘weed’. The Unesco World Heritage treaty had not been transposed into Hungarian national law. The environmental impact assessment was done by the investors themselves. The Ombudsman’s final report had recommendations to all parties.

The smallest case concerned the noise of a late-evening café in downtown Budapest. Various areas of law could be involved and the complainant was given a menu of options to take the matter further.

Conclusion. These might seem like piecemeal work in a planet approaching (or even going beyond) its ecological boundaries. But this builds up a network of knowledge. The environment inspectorates in Hungary have low prestige, and do not apply the ‘finality principle’: only pushing files rather than dealing with environmental problems.

Questions and answers. Networking with churches and environmental industries are being explored.

The political atmosphere was fortunate when the Bill passed the Parliament: without consensus-forming work from the civil society, neither the governing party nor the opposition would have been able to create the new post. It so happened that the Speaker of the Parliament and the President of the Republic were both environmentalists. In preparation for this, an NGO worked for 7 years on the Ombudsman Bill, mocked up an ombudsman’s office and worked with it – similar to the success of the Friends of the Earth’s Big Ask campaign on a Climate Change Bill here in the United Kingdom. The most vociferous opponents of the new post were existing ombudspersons (for example, that for human rights).

The Ombudsman was not reluctant to say that his post is not impartial: it is victim-centred. The variety of possible norms, mandates, and conflicts for the post are philosophical questions he was not prepared to answer. There might well be a distinction to be made between a supposedly-impartial ombudsman and a biased public advocate; perhaps the commissioner is more the latter. He likened his office to a state NGO (quango?).

My questions for further consideration. How would a British sustainability ombudsperson/commission work with the existing Sustainable Development Commission and Climate Change Committee? Can we learn from the experience of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and its predecessors? Which Montesquian branch of the State would it belong to, if any? It would serve us well to study the Hungarian Ombudsman Act carefully.

Thanks to the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development and the United Kingdom Environmental Law Association for organizing the event, and to the Hungarian Embassy in London for facilitating it and providing the excellent wines.

In the past 5 years or so, I have heard from time to time impatient proponents of a Green Senate, a committee for sustainability, a parliamentary chamber with a built-in long-term view and overriding power in favour of measures for sustainability. Famous proponents include Norman Myers, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and (most recently, this past Tuesday) John Strickland. I do not think such a constitutional arrangement would work.

First, who would we appoint to this Senate? Would they be 70-year-olds, having accumulated years of experiences and (one hopes) accompanying wisdom? Or would they be 20-year-olds, or even teenagers, who have a stake, with realistic interests, in the future? Or a mixture thereof? Then, what about the midlifers? Are they totally disinterested, and should only be shoved around by the young and the old?

And quickly you can foresee the second question: How would we appoint them? By popular election with pre-screening? By lot? Very soon I come to my main point, and I hope the reader gets it before I tell. With more than one person in the world, there inevitably comes politics. As much as we would like God to send edicts which we all equally receive with equal clarity, that is not the case.

Either we engage with politics, or we get apathetic and let others (the Pope, the King, the Prime Minister, the political class, etc.) run our lives for us. Politics cannot be circumvented or transcended. Or rather, the only way to transcend politics is to engage. There is no Enabling Act, no Guardian Council, no Workers Vanguard, that can deliver the Final Solution without real politics. There is no such thing as a system so perfect that people do not need to be good.

That means the only way to ensure sustainability is for those who care about sustainability to engage, to talk progressive talk with neighbours, to vote, to go to hustings and meetings, to agitate–educate–organize, to listen and learn, to run for political office and lose (sometimes), to win a few offices and use the power for good ends.

If you do not like the people running the system, aim to replace them. If you do not like the system, change it. But do not expect these to be once-and-for-all, straightforward, and clean. As much as there is no silver bullet, no single technological fix in environmental problems, the same applies to politics. It requires a collective change of mind, which will be messy and will take longer than we would like.

In the words of the prophet Bob Marley: ‘So you think you’ve found the solution, | but it’s just another illusion. | (So before you check out this tide,) | don’t leave another cornerstone | standing there behind. | We’ve got to face the day; | come what may: | We the street people talking; | yeah, we the people struggling.’ (So much trouble in the world)

And on the way, there will be setbacks, losses, defeats, wastage, betrayal, assassinations. (Though I hope the latter ones do not ever visit the present incumbent of the Presidency of the United States of America.) And what is the Christian response but to take these on with courage and hope? (Holy Martyrs, pray for us.) Was that not the way Jesus showed?

‘For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.’ (Romans 8:24,25 KJV)

There are no easy solutions: one can only go out to knock on doors and canvass. With this note, I relied heavily on the thinking of my friend Rupert Read, who taught that theoretical social studies in economics and politics are useless on their own except in praxis. He also demonstrated this brilliantly with his own life. ¡Hasta la victoria siempre!

Amendment after discussing with Rupert:

Yes, I think I should moderate my position.

To speak for the motion, a sustainability commissioner or committee only elevates the idea of sustainability in our constitutional architecture to the level that human rights already occupy. This is long overdue. To expand on the human rights mechanism: a minister certifies each Bill as compatible with the Human Rights Act; then there are enforcement mechanisms through domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights to induce revision of incompatible Acts of Parliament.

Then we might think what are the norms of sustainability to be enumerated? How do we articulate the remit of the Green Senate, the mandate for our commissioner? The bare ‘whether they like it and think it is sustainable’ may not be enough. For human rights, there is the European Convention etc.; this is along the same lines.

Even if we introduce such a commissioner or committee, we should still reserve the right to criticize it. We should stay vigilant and political. Our interlocutors would have no qualms hijacking a ‘Green Senate’, so we should feel free to criticize it if it becomes mere greenwash for expedient projects. I think I am preaching to the converted, as you, Rupert, are the leading critic of liberal neutrality! (A recent example of such a lapse has been pointed out by Chris Goodall: The Committee on Climate Change shouldn’t have answered the question it was asked [about Heathrow expansion].)

The best thing about entering a charity beard competition is telling people with a straight face: “I have entered a charity beard competition.”

Thanks to the organizers for raising money for the Worcester County Food Bank and giving us an excuse to stop shaving!

WINNERS: Burly Man – Derek Ring; Facial Topiary – Mike Benedetti; Fan Fav – Peter Mascitelli; Best in Show – Duncan Arsenault.

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Inspired by Jeremy’s Worcester Magazine cover story “Selling Worcester: Who will take the lead to market our city?”, we discuss the rich oral tradition around Worcester’s many slogans, including the long-lost “Right Place, Right Time” and Bruce Russell’s “This City Should Be Destroyed”. Worcester even had a No Slogan Day. In the ad industry, slogans have fallen from favor.

Mike mentions that you can buy Ethiopian/Eritrean foods at Fresh Farm in Worcester, across the street from Lincoln Plaza. This Saturday is the Whiskerite fundraiser, Distant Castle anniversary party, Q arts fundraiser, and Pecha Kucha IV Haiti fundraiser.

Jen tells us about Clark students and alumni uniting to help Clark food service workers unionize.

The ongoing Venerini Academy story is starting to make sense as we learn their fundraiser has left a “trail of lies”.

Mike didn’t like the AP article in the T&G about Wal-Mart’s financial situation; he thought the NYT article was better.

Worcester: Right Place, Right Time

Matt Feinstein performs “Right Place, Right Time” on 508 #100

Worcester: Paris of the 80s, Port Au Prince of the 90s (via WCCA)

L’Osservatore Romano did not like Avatar, some suspected due to alleged pantheism. But the philosophy therein was not really pantheism, but can be more accurately described as panentheism (as my friend Dr George Zachariah of the Mar Thoma Church taught): finding God in everything; finding the image of the divine in everyone. I would have to struggle if I had to deny this as Christian.

[...] Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries [...]

– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The scene was indicative, where the scientist Dr Grace Augustine presented her results about the synaptic nature of the biosphere on the planet Pandora, and the businessman Parker Selfridge dismissed her thus: ‘what have you been smoking!’ Science is only accepted when it conveniently serves the imperial–rationalist exploitation: at all other times it is dismissed. As Dr Lawson pointed out (and echoed by the Reverend Dick Wolff), this has been going on in the climate-change debate: ‘If you are a committed free market fundamentalist, you will never accept the climate change facts, as they are incompatible with your ideology.’

I will be going to the Conference of the Green Party of England and Wales this Saturday; expecting Green hugs.

Luke 15:11–32 (Prodigal Son).

May I speak in the name of God: Creator, Christ, and Comforter. Amen.

A few years ago, I went to the National Theatre in London, to see Bertolt Brecht’s play The Life of Galileo, in a version by David Hare. With 20th-century hindsight, the German playwright Brecht retold the life-story of the 17th-century scientist Galileo Galilei. Today, on this Ash Wednesday, I want to talk about the nature and motivation of scientific pursuit: this play happens to provide some hooks for my thinking. So, at the risk of substituting a theatre review in the place of a sermon, here I go.

If you recall, Galileo championed the theory of Copernicus that the Earth orbits the Sun. The Church forced him to recant this view. The famous British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says, ‘Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.’ Is this modern science a good thing in the round? Was the Church right to slow Galileo down after all? Galileo’s 17th-century contemporaries did not have the benefit of hindsight and retrospection: They were riding the wave of the Renaissance, pregnant with the prospect of rationalism’s triumph in the 19th and 20th centuries.

But now, a few decades after Brecht, no one in our times can be so sure of the liberating promises of rational progress anymore. It appears we are about to destroy many of the existing species in our biosphere, and make life more difficult for most of our own species, through man-made climate change. We may soon run out of cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, leaving a large fraction of us too unskilled to cope with fuel poverty.

The longest-living legacy of the human species is likely to be our radioactive waste. It would be good if a few pieces of paper in the desert and some stone carvings survive this. But that looks unlikely; even if that is the case, those that survive would be the so-called ‘atomic-heritage’ manuals, teaching those to come how to safely manage the radioactivity. (Yes, some scientists are actually planning for this.) This is not the worst case scenario actually. But these manuals are not as interesting as the works of Dante Alighieri, depicted in one of the chapel windows.

There are two survival strategies open to us, the Homo sapiens species. The first is advocated by the so-called transhumanist extropians. These are people trying to live in gated communities, walled countries, with large arsenals of arms to keep everybody else out. These are people trying to preserve their bodily selves – or rather, their (near-)dead bodies – in cryogenic suites. (But who is going to keep them plugged in and frozen when our energy runs out?) These are people planning to colonize the Moon and Mars. This is rationalist thought, carried to its logical conclusion.

The second strategy is that of (what we now call) ‘the poor’ and the ‘hippies’. These are resourceful people who are self-sufficient and resilient, who have not been too-absorbed into the globalized monetary economy. They are of all sorts, and more likely to emerge from (what we now call) the global South. ‘All sorts’ are the keywords here: ‘all sorts’.

Let me return to Brecht’s depiction of the dynamics between Galileo the scientist and the Church of his times. The conventional, rationalist wisdom blames the Church for trying to limit the progress of science, and counts it fortunate (or, inevitable) that reason’s march cannot be halted, if paused by the ‘martyrdom’ of Copernicus and the forced recantation of Galileo. ‘Traitor of science!’ they cry, against Galileo.

Brecht, a socialist, cannot bring himself to totally demolish this rationalistic paradigm upfront, but he still questions it as any thinking person in the 20th century has to. The present production at the National Theatre had images from the Visible Earth project for the backdrop, but equally appropriate, if anachronistic and less subtle, there could have been a mushroom cloud, an utterly disappointing scene for gung-ho believers of absolute rationalism.

Following Brecht, I would also not go so far as to say that the Church had it right all along, but rationalism and blind progress certainly did not have it right all along. No, the Church definitely cannot smugly say ‘I told you so’. Perhaps the Church did not express herself in quite the right way? Can we, both as Christians and as scientists, learn from history?

‘What are we for?’, Brecht’s Galileo asks: Are we scientists to be ‘inventive dwarfs for hire’, working for the highest bidder? Or can we have ‘science in the service of humanity’ (as often attributed to Marie Curie)? ‘human-scale science’? Is it possible for the scientist to work, not for fame or profit, not even for the gratification of gratuitous ‘curiosity’, ‘Reason’ with a capital ‘R’, or ‘science for science’s sake’; but as a bird makes a nest, as a tree bears fruit, as a beaver builds a dam, as bees make honey? Or is this one of the human activities where it bound to be more complicated than that? Is it asking too much? or indeed, too little?

What I am trying to ask is: whether the scientific pursuit can be without the alienation of labour, as in the Marxian analysis – after Karl Marx; equally in the Christian sense, can it be a vocation. That is to say, can a scientist say nowadays: I am doing this neither for greed nor for fear? The Prodigal Son, in our reading this evening, was first bound … spellbound by greed for the imminent inheritance; then bound by the threat of poverty; before finally finding his home again, where he started. Can a scientist say: this my scientific pursuit is where my deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need: this is truly my calling?

These questions are even more poignant nowadays. Giles Fraser, a radical Christian cleric from St Paul’s Cathedral in London, wrote in the Church Times last month: ‘As modern science is so extremely expensive to conduct, often even too expensive for governments, it becomes something done by pharmaceutical companies and those manufacturing weapons. These days, it is in places such as these that most scientists work, and not in universities. This means that science is now done mostly by big business and to make money.’ Some present in this chapel know well that even the research and teaching done in universities are now driven by the profit motive, by the drive for commercialization, by the requirements of UK plc, rather than driven by curiosity and education.

[Story about freshers’ first physics tutorial in Oxford – ad lib.]

I ask again: Can we, both as Christians and as scientists, learn from history? Almost ten years into the new century, I am still trying to understand the last one. (Can one speak of ‘coming to terms’ with the 20th century?) It is as if humanity, or at least a large part of it, after learning how to read, write, and take the square root, has now graduated from school and reached adolescence. This young man (allow me to be gender specific here, which is not entirely inaccurate) – this young man, he then proceeds to squander the inheritance which his parents and ancestors stored up, all in a very short time, spending it in a self-destructive way, however instantly gratifying.

Does this sound familiar? Perhaps, one day he will find himself down with the pigs and suddenly change his mind (μετάνοια) – change his mind – repent. I just hope it won’t be too late to go back to his dad. What would his brother, living in the South, out in the farm, say? ‘Dad, I have always worked for you, but you never cooked a little young goat for me. This chap, he spent all his money at the brothel, but now you give him all this bling-bling and throw a big party for him!’ Me – after thinking this through, I now know slightly better how the Prodigal Son will feel, upon hearing this.

If you remember the two strategies open to our species I mentioned earlier: which one are we to choose? Bob Marley sings in his song ‘So much trouble in the world’: ♪ ‘You see men sailing on their ego trips | Blast off on their space ship | Million miles from reality | No care for you, no care for me.’ ♫ Prodigal endeavours, such as space exploration, only become a legitimate exercise once we learn how to live sustainably, within the bounds of a planet. Rather than engineering ourselves to get out of this planet post-haste, we should first try to engineer ourselves to be able to stay in comfortably.

Maybe the Prodigal Son will eventually settle down, have a small family, and start thinking for his children. One can only hope. Amen.