This past week has been Consumed By Influenza. First Mrs. Lamech picked up a bug that turned very quickly into an Overpowering Cough a week ago. I took Noah to our sunday school class' lunch without her and she was very much missed. By the time we were heading back home she said she couldn't take any more and we had to see a doctor. So I dropped Noah off at his grandparents and took her to the ER. The whole experience from checking in to driving away took about 4 hours and set me back nearly a weeks' pay, but it was worth it since she turned out to have pneumonia. We got some big painkillers and a big antibiotic. I stayed home from work so she could rest while I dealt with Noah. Then it got weird.

I went into work Tuesday not feeling too hot. Before I thought I had gotten a touch of some bug on Friday and had passed it onto Mrs. Lamech, who for some reason just had much worse symptoms than me. How wrong I was. Cranked out my big meeting agenda email and headed back home. Mrs. Lamech was actually feeling better and had taken Noah to school, so by this point I was thinking she was on the mend and would be taking care of me the next day.

Wrongo!

Next day we're *both* feeling horrible, coughing, feverish, achy. Only now Noah's got it too. We're going through various adult and children's NSAID preparations at a furious rate. Thursday I try going into work again, but it's pretty much the same deal as Tuesday: lots of coughing and my energy level craters around lunchtime. Then Mrs. Lamech calls me and says she's had an unbearable headache all day. Just for grins I do a quick google search on the name of her antibiotic. Turns out "Levoquin" is relatively new, very strong, and can cause hallucinations, nausea, headache, and other stuff, most of which she's had only 4 days into the 10 day regimen. Going home I try to hit the highway to make the trip faster, but a semi-trailer (hauling chocolate of all things) has overturned and shut it down in both directions for the whole afternoon.

Friday was I think my worst day. Slept some but mostly spent the whole day on the couch, barely able to move with the aching. Passed out around 7:30PM. But all of us were still coughing the evil, wheezing cough.

Friday was the day I determined to wake up and pray for relief instead of reaching for another Motrin first. I wasn't necessarily giving up on drugs, because the Motrin was the only thing getting in the way of our fevers. But I definitely felt at the breaking point emotionally. It felt awful to be unable to either work to bring money home, or to help take care of my wife and son while they were sick. I was tired of being sick of course, but I was tired of everything else too -- tired of TV, computers, sleeping, eating, reading -- TIRED.

Saturday Mrs. Lamech felt good enough to take Noah to a big kiddie event we had been planning on for some time. I was too achy to go, I knew. They came back 3.5 hours later completely exhausted. I think she strained half the muscles in her right arm and shoulder carrying Noah back to the car -- ahh, more pain! I trudged out into the night to pick up some Mexican food which as it turned out I could barely taste. When a 230-pound Texan is satisfied with eating one measly taco al pastor and leaves the second one untouched, there is a problem. I went to bed at 7:30 or so again and slept a full 12 hours.

Now today. I stayed home with the kiddo this time while Mrs. Lamech did church. She brought lunch home. I rubbed her shoulder and arm to bring a small amount of relief but it has been killing her all day. We're all still coughing although noticeably less often. I think today was my first full day with no fever. Today was also my third full day with no caffeine at all -- weird because I had become a 3-cup per day addict over the past 2 years. Also we listened to a lot of music today (a 1-hour pipe-organ show on the public station was awesome) instead of non-stop DVD and TV.

MOVIE: The Gospel Of John

Review links from MetaCritic.

Somewhat positive review: Hollywood Reporter

Mostly positive, with lots of background: LA Weekly:

Though I approached The Gospel of John with some trepidation, I’ve now seen the film twice and consider it to be an extraordinary achievement. Extraordinary for the way it casts its oft-told events in such a fresh light that they do not seem so familiar at all. Extraordinary for its simultaneously intimate and epic scale, eschewing the decorous pageantry customary to the genre in favor of small-scale, Vermeer-like scenes depicting the minutiae of everyday life at the dawn of recorded history. (Even the crucifixion scene is treated with a wholesale aversion to spectacle.) Extraordinary — most of all — for the way the very aesthetic limitations (the lengthy narration, the fidelity to the text) that would seem to stultify the film instead imbue it with a mesmerizing intensity.

Official web site: http://www.gospelofjohnthefilm.com/ There, a 3-disc DVD set is already on sale for $40. After some research it seems that the high price may be due to the debt the production company, Visual Bible International, has already incurred. A couple of the film's producers also seem to have had some run-ins with financial regulators in the US and Canada (do a Google search on "Livent" and "scandal" to see some headlines).

A Mind That Grasped Both Heaven and Hell
By JOSEPH LOCONTE

Forty years ago today, as the world mourned the assassination of an American president, the passing of the 20th century's most influential Christian writer was hardly noticed: Clive Staples Lewis, professor of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, died on Nov. 22, 1963. In his ability to nurture the faithful, as well as seduce the skeptic, C. S. Lewis had no peer.

Lewis was an atheist for much of his adult life, an experience that may have helped immunize him from the religious cliché, the reluctance to ask hard questions, the self-righteousness of the zealot. "Mr. Lewis possesses the rare gift," according to an early reviewer, "of being able to make righteousness readable." Lewis was not a theologian, but he expressed even the most difficult religious concepts with bracing clarity. He was not a preacher, yet his essays and novels pierce the heart with their nobility and tenderness.

The lessons found within his writings continue to resonate today. In fact, it's hard to imagine a time when the need for sane thinking about religion was more momentous. Cite an act of terror, from the sniper shootings in Washington to the bombings in Baghdad and Istanbul, and faith is close at hand. Many are now tempted to equate piety with venality — or worse — and it's here that Lewis may have the most to teach us.

Born in 1898, Lewis reached maturity in the 1930's, when Europe was being convulsed by the rise of new tyrannies: communism in Russia and fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany. At the same time, trends in psychology and theology were discrediting Christian doctrines of sin and repentance. The "root causes" of international disorder were said to be social and political arrangements, like runaway capitalism or the flawed Treaty of Versailles. But Lewis, like his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, knew the trouble lay deeper, and marshaled his literary imagination to explore it.

In a harrowing scene from his science fiction novel "Perelandra," the protagonist, Prof. Elwin Ransom, battles a mad scientist horribly disfigured by his lust for power. Lewis writes: "What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument." The Christians, Lewis argued, were right: the mystery of evil was rooted in the tragedy of human nature. Pride, and the poisoned conscience it created, functioned as the engine of the world's woes. Unchallenged, it led to a "ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self, which is the mark of Hell."

Many modern liberals dismiss Lewis's concept of the diabolical as a "medieval" superstition. Yet many religious conservatives seem to make evil the brainchild of God himself. For them, all individual and social sin — including the terror of Sept. 11 — is the perfect will of a Divine Judge (as the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed at the time). Lewis disagreed: Evil is always man's doing, yet it is never his destiny. The power of choice makes evil possible, but it's also "the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."

While Oxford agnostics howled, Lewis gave BBC talks on theology that were a national sensation. Even his beloved children's stories, "The Chronicles of Narnia," ring with biblical themes of sin and redemption. No one did more to make "the repellent doctrines" of Christianity plausible to modern ears.

Nevertheless, Lewis acknowledged that religion easily becomes a device to exploit others — sometimes, as in the case of sexually abusive priests, at the very steps of the altar. The pretense of piety, he said, has left a record of violence that should shame every honest believer. "Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst," he wrote in "Reflections on the Psalms."

Yet, unlike the cynic, Lewis refused to blame the faith itself for the shortcomings of the church. Instead, his writings offer bright glimpses into the moral beauty of divine goodness, what Lewis called "the weight of glory." It is this vision of the Holy, he observed, that has produced many of the masterpieces of art and music. This same vision motivates the faithful to risk everything to relieve the world's suffering: caring for plague victims, defending the rights of children, guiding slaves to freedom, breaching war zones to feed the poor.

"If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next," he wrote in "Mere Christianity," one of his best-known works. "It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this." In an era when God himself seems to be on trial, that's a timely message — for the half-hearted pilgrim as well as the devoted doubter. Probably just what C. S. Lewis had in mind.


Joseph Loconte, religion fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is editor of the forthcoming "The End of Illusions: America's Churches and Hitler's Gathering Storm, 1938-41.''