I still remember the day I discovered that salvation was neither guaranteed nor permanent.  It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, a little like discovering that you don’t really own the house you just finished paying off.  Only, okay, a much bigger deal.

What helped me to make peace with this tenet of my church’s theology was the realization that ultimately what you believe is only important insofar as it affects what you do.  Take a guy who prays the sinner’s prayer and then goes on to live the rest of his life as — well — a sinner.  He figures he’s okay because he did what he had to do to ensure salvation.  But whether the “sinner’s prayer” phase lasts five minutes or five years, his conversion clearly wasn’t sincere, because it didn’t change him.

Now if you want to split hairs and talk about whether salvation comes from the act of the prayer or from the life that follows it, whether the prayer itself is even necessary or a mere formality that prefaces a much more deep and lasting commitment to a life of spiritual growth, whether the belief is the important thing or the actions that prove it heartfelt — well, fine, I’ll buy you a coffee and we can hash it out.  But ultimately it doesn’t matter.  What we do on this earth matters.  What we do in our hearts, with our neighbors, to our enemies — all of this matters.  All of this determines whether we will be saved.

This is why LOST is the most shockingly meaningful and significant series I have ever seen, the reason I haven’t watched much of anything else since it started, and the reason why I can’t get excited about much else on television.  It’s about the big stuff: about how we live, how the fallen seek and find redemption, how our lives and souls are shaped by those with whom we keep company — for better or worse, by choice or chance.

The trope of the antihero, the conman / prostitute / killer with the heart of gold, can be a morally-ambiguous cliche, implying that actions are meaningless and only “heart” matters.  (Remember Pretty Woman?  We’re supposed to pull for the protagonist because, despite her choice of a deplorable occupation, she has a soft spot for her attractive and wealthy rescuer.)  But in LOST, we see people whose sins are real and damaging: torturers who are haunted by their cruelty, murderers who are always running, children who are paralyzed (literally and figuratively) by their inability to forgive their parents.  They can’t just sweep those crimes off their proverbial slates; they have to reckon with them, to seek closure and possibly judgment, before they can even begin to heal.

Each person comes to the island, as a character says in one of the final episodes, broken.  They all have demons to wrestle, and they do so with nowhere to hide.  They become part of a community, literally in communion with one another; they love and fight with and learn from each other.  In the finale, one of the main characters explains it this way: “The most important time of your life was when you were with with these people.  That’s why you are all here.  No one does it alone.”  The heartbreak, the persecution and violence and pervading confusion that made the show famous — no one fully understood the complex mythology, maybe not even the show’s creators, who are wont to shrug and say, “no, we never intended to explain that” — all of that was simply a means to an end, a way for them to learn how to remember what was important and let go of what wasn’t.

So, ultimately, the hair-splitting is irrelevant.  Sure, I’d like to know the mechanics of the monster, the back stories of some of the minor characters, and the prelude and postlude to the short time frame that’s chronicled in the series.  I’d love to buy you lunch (coffee wouldn’t quite cover this) and debate about that just for argument’s sake.  But kudos to the show’s writers for refusing, in the end, to get caught up in the nit-picky intricacies of plot and setting.  What made the show great was its focus on the universals of death, love, forgiveness and deception — the human experiences and ideals we’ve all lived and suffered through.

And really (okay, stop reading here if you might someday want to be surprised by the ending) it also doesn’t matter whether the alternate reality depicted in the final season is called purgatory, or karmic reincarnation, or heaven.  The point is that each person in that church made a decision to live an honest and selfless life, and they were rewarded with a chance to right the wrongs they had committed, and to enter into the afterlife as purer, more whole human beings — free from the corrupting influence of mankind that extended even to their island paradise.

You know how I know it’s an amazing series?  I can’t wait to watch the whole thing all over again.  Starting tonight.  Who wants a Dharma beer?

Me: Um, no.  Why in the world would you think that?

Student: I saw it in a cartoon one time.

One more reason to ban television, I guess.

First, the Baltimore Sun’s Anne Arundel County section featured a front-page shot of my husband, along with some other parishioners.  I was just to the left of the lens, in the choir.  (I was actually worried they might use one of the shots they took of me chanting — my posture was terrible and I’m sure I would have caught some flack from my voice teacher about that!)

Both Rob and I are quoted extensively in the article.  I spoke for several hours with the reporter, both on the phone and in person after Vespers, and I think there was just too much information for him to put together a coherent narrative.  He also misspells my middle name (anyone who has gotten a personal e-mail from me knows that) and makes it sound like I’m a different person from Emily Lowe. But whaaaatever.  I’m happy to promote my church in any context.

Second, we got front-page billing (next to the giant headline about the slots) in the Maryland Gazette.  The online version doesn’t show the photo, which is also great.  My husband’s godfather is quoted in this one, but neither of us were there (it was the only Holy Week service I missed, actually — trying to save my voice for the marathon weekend.)

That’s all, unless you missed the TV spot last year, filmed on Lazarus Saturday; here’s the post and the video.

It’s so interesting, as a writer and an Orthodox Christian, to watch people try to make logical and journalistic sense of such a complex and mysterious faith.  The thing is, though I’m glad for the publicity and hope it drives seekers to investigate Orthodoxy, you just can’t understand what we’re all about by spending five minutes reading or watching a news blip.  Any issue worth debating can’t be covered accurately and quickly, I suppose, but Orthodoxy is particularly visceral; a paragraph, photo or even video can’t convey what the experience is like.  That’s why the experience is one worth having.

I blame parents.

Easy to say for one who is not a parent!  But I have heard too many caregivers lament that their child “will only eat” macaroni and cheese or hot dogs.  As one of my classmates points out, when given the choice, any child (or human, if allowed to act on his basest impulses) will gravitate toward the sweeter, more calorie-dense food.  It’s our instinct, derived from the days when such foods were very hard to come by — restricted to finding a patch of berries or a hive of honey.  Today, as others have already stated, such foods are actually cheaper (with externalized costs, of course) than nutritious foods, and they are certainly easier to serve.  But since when do we allow a child’s preference to govern his rules for living?  We don’t let him choose whether or not to brush his teeth, go to school, or say his prayers.  Why would we let him choose what’s on the dinner menu, beyond such reasonable choices as “green beans or broccoli?”

Many of you have indicated causes of childhood obesity with which I can’t argue: working parents, busy schedules, child-centered advertising.  I think there is one more vastly important factor: the demise of home cooking.  Statistics show unilaterally that fewer and fewer people cook for themselves — even when “cooking” is widened to mean putting together a sandwich from purchased ingredients.  Children are not learning how to come home from school, cut up carrot sticks and peel an orange — and, at a later age, to saute onions and garlic for a sauce or set bread to rise in a warm place.  They certainly are not learning where the carrots and onions come from, when to plant them and how long to wait before pulling them up.  I was lucky enough to be raised by parents who did everything themselves, but I constantly meet people my age and older who say they can’t (or just don’t) cook, and that number seems to rise exponentially as age decreases.

At this point I’d like to surrender my point of view to two gentlemen who are far more convincing and knowledgeable than I.  One is Michael Pollan, who has already been referenced several times on this board.  Please do read all of his books; they are wonderful.  However, this article (it’s long, but worth it) from the New York Times Magazine last year reinforces my argument by illuminating one of the strangest dichotomies in modern times: the huge popularity of cooking shows on television and the dearth of skilled home cooks.  We spend untold amounts of time and money watching Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray and Emeril, but we are less and less likely to translate that enthusiasm into our own kitchens and dining rooms, mostly because we haven’t seen and modeled that behavior from a young age.

However, on that note, the second reference I want to make is to this excellent lecture (about 20 minutes) by Jamie Oliver.  Yes, Jamie Oliver, the English chef / television personality.  It turns out he’s also a compassionate, dedicated humanitarian who is shocked and pained by the current crisis in child obesity, and determined to do all he can to alleviate it.  For me, the most moving moment in the film is when he confronts an obese mother with a dining-room table covered with pizza, corn dogs and sodas — all the food she typically feeds her two (also obese) children in a week.  “You are killing your children,” Oliver says simply.  It cuts like a knife, but it’s absolutely true.  This mother, by failing to pass on the skill set she never learned herself — how to make nutritious, satisfying, diverse meals — is setting her children up for severe health problems and an early death.  Sobering, but verifiable fact.

But, as Oliver points out, this crisis is entirely preventable.  Children who couldn’t identify a beet or a tomato (watch the video, seriously) can be taught to.  Children who will only eat macaroni and cheese can be taught to love spinach (and not only, Mrs. Seinfeld, through trickery.)  They love to help in the garden or in the kitchen, and they are far more likely to try diverse foods (and thus to learn weight-management behavior) when they have participated in the entire process of harvesting and preparing food.  We can fix this, one household at a time.

I’m glad they didn’t, and I can forgive this display of mediocrity, but only because I know better.  Rob and I saw The Who live in 2002, a month after the original bassist died from a cocaine overdose.  (At 57.  These guys party hard.)  Daltrey’s voice was a little thinner than on their records, but the range was still there — he could perform most, if not all, of the vocal acrobatics for which he was known.  Townshend was as strong as ever, and both exuded an energy that sustained the crowd for a show that lasted more than two hours, with no breaks, and included every single hit we could remember.

The fun part: we brought my dad, who claims that at no time did “Who’s Next” ever cease to play on the record player in his college dormitory suite.  He knew all the songs by heart, of course, but was shocked that we did, too.  It was a little weird to be belting out power ballads (and occasionally smelling pot) with your dad, but my dad is comfortable with just about any crowd, so we all just enjoyed ourselves.  The memory of that concert is a lot bigger than the few pitiful minutes onscreen in Miami.

Unrelated rant about why else I hate football: at the end of the game, the Saints’ QB had his little baby on the field.  The child looked utterly bewildered and was wearing noise-canceling headphones, so undoubtedly missed this gem: one of the announcers said something like, “This is it.  This is THE most important and precious moment a father could possibly share with his son.”  Gales of laughter erupted from our living room at this, but I’m sure there were plenty of fans out there nodding in tearful agreement.  The same fans, I’m sure, who were touched by the earlier commercial in which the NFL thanked them for watching with open mouths and painted faces all season long.  People, please.  IT’S A GAME.

My response: “OMG.  Just, OMG.”

One of the great things about teaching high schoolers is that you never have any pretensions about being cool.  Being a TV personality, unfortunately, doesn’t come with that particular perk.

“I was shocked,” he says. “I thought, so, what do you DO all day?”

Now he takes more than a little pride in mentioning the fact that we also don’t own a television.  When we got married, my parents generously gave us their old one, but we never used it except for movies.  I refused to pay for cable, something I saw as a downward spiral ending in hundreds of dollars a month, so we only got a few channels.  My sister used to watch the Ravens games, which she said were blurry but at an acceptable level.  We may have turned the news on once or twice during a hurricane.

When we purchased a new computer, we discovered the screen was almost as big as the television we owned, so we gave away the television.  We continue to watch movies.  But television has crept back in, thanks to the Internet, where almost every show can be found for free, via legal means or otherwise.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.  For awhile, we only watched LOST, which I still maintain is the best show I’ve seen in a long time (and maybe ever.)  We’d go over to our friends’ house (or, more recently, my parents’ house, after converting them one summer) and watch, discuss, rail at the lack of answers and the plethora of questions.  I liked the fact that watching television became a planned social event, not just something to do to pass the time.

But then I started watching a few shows out of curiosity, mostly to keep up with my students.  Is Grey’s Anatomy really that wretched?  (It’s worse.  You have no idea.)  Is Desperate Housewives that vapid?  (Likewise.)  Is Scrubs that funny?  (No, but according to many of my friends, I haven’t given it enough of a chance.)  Is the Office?  (A resounding YES!)  For some reason, I’ve become totally hooked on The Mentalist; it’s not a groundbreaking show, but it’s funny and dramatic and I’m interested in the psychological aspects of the protagonist’s investigative technique.

What I’m starting to realize, though, is that I’m getting more tolerant.  I’ll sit through stuff I never would have before.  Last summer we watched several seasons of Weeds, which was funny at times but really not very high-quality and certainly didn’t affirm the kind of values we have.  This year Rob’s been watching Flash Forward, and I notice that I usually end up paying more attention to the crossword puzzle or my pile of vocabulary quizzes than to the screen.  I don’t want that.

So yes, we don’t have a television.  And yes, I brought the subject up myself, but not so I could brag about it.  Because I think in the end, it doesn’t matter.  More and more people will be following the Biltons’ lead and ditching TV for . . . TV.  In a different form.  I thank thee, Father, that I am not like other men.

He laughed, and although he was still frustrated, he now made a great show of throwing himself at the piano keys, knowing his mother and I would find it funny, instead of turning the frustration on himself.  Mission accomplished.  Carole would be proud.

I am able to successfully ignore most of the show (and honestly, I don’t mind cooking shows in general; they’re one of the reasons I occasionally wish we had a TV.)  But in between bouts of artery-clogging enthusiasm, the commercials assault me like angry darts, piercing the balloon of my thoughts: loud, ugly consumerism, pelting your ears with furious speed until the show picks up again.  There is no time to absorb the information, no time to think about what I just learned and what it means.

Yes, I realize this is a cooking show, not a Joyce novel.  But this constant input of information is something we encounter all the time, and a lack of think time almost always accompanies it.

As a disenfranchised Creative Writing teacher, I want to encourage my students to think beyond mere comprehension of what they read.  What do they think about the characters, the moral, the situations in which the authors place their creations?  How do these books matter to them?

At Michael’s last week, I found some pretty notebooks on sale and bought a dozen, one for each member of the class.  Somehow, this tiny personal expenditure transformed an assignment into a gift: the students clustered around them with squeals of approval, eagerly tearing off the plastic and inscribing their names on the covers.  I told them I wouldn’t grade them except for completion, and they’d have five or ten minutes to think and write just for themselves.  Sharing was optional.

The first day, I asked if anyone wanted to read a response to the question about a “secret life” they might lead or like to lead.  No takers.  But the second day, I asked if they’d ever been part of a relationship that was discouraged by their friends or family.

No hands for a couple of beats, and then a girl in the back shyly told us about a guy she’d dated whom everyone had told her was trouble.  Guess what?  He was trouble.  Several of her friends smiled in support of her — probably the same ones who had told her to stay away from him.

Then a girl in the front told a very different story.  She had been friends with another girl in middle school, one who was famous for arguing with authority figures and ignoring obligations.  After some time, she asked the girl why she was so intent on causing trouble, and gently suggested that if she tried respect first, she might find it would come back to her.

Over time, she said, her friend began to change.  And eventually she thanked her for that conversation — thanked her for being a good example as well as a friend.  My student’s voice grew thick as she it formed the words, and there were murmurs of approval from her classmates, who learned an important lesson: Sometimes the rest of the world is wrong.  Sometimes the light can overcome the darkness.

My ulterior motive for this project?  At the end of the year, I’ll have twelve pretty notebooks full of material for my literary magazine.  But I also hope, truly, that this exercise will give them time to think.

The show’s run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights.

The article goes on to blame the Bush administration (this is NPR, after all) for establishing such an attitude.  Personally, I think the NEA should have been disbanded years ago, and it’s absurd to continue the program in the face of the current economic stress.  Furthermore, it should not be television’s job to teach kids to read (or even to love reading, as the article claims.) That’s the domain of people like me.

Political invective aside, however, I have to say that the demise of the show makes me sad.  My family didn’t have cable TV until I was 13 (I remember this because they got cable WHILE I was away at summer camp.  The injustice!)  So I grew up on public television programming, for the most part.  Reading Rainbow was one of our favorites, and I doubt that anyone my age, even the ones who grew up with cable, wouldn’t be able to sing the theme song if prompted.  Remember?  “Butterfly in the skyyyyyyyy . . . ”

And now you have something to sing for the rest of the day.