"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy." (Matthew 5:7)

In the 1983 film Tender Mercies, there are two main female characters who live vastly different lives. Dixie is a successful country music star who performs in glittering outfits to crowded rooms full of adoring fans. Rosa Lee, on the other hand, lives a modest life as the proprietor of a gas station and motel in the middle of the Texas prairie. Tying these two women together is Mac Sledge, a former country singer battling his addiction to alcohol.

Dixie was deeply hurt by her early marriage to Mac. He was an angry drunk who beat her in front of their only daughter. Unable to forgive Mac or herself, she ends the film confined to her luxurious bed with sorrow, when their daughter marries an alcoholic and then dies for her choice in a car accident. However, Rosa Lee encounters Mac later in his life when he's at his lowest point. As he climbs toward sobriety, and even baptism, the two grow closer, marry and heal as Mac begins writing songs again and becomes a father to Rosa Lee's boy, Sonny.

As the title indicates, Tender Mercies has much to do with the nature and practice of mercy, and the story is useful for exploring tonight's beatitude: "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy."

Let's start with what mercy is not. In the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, a master begins calling in debts from his slaves. When one slave who owes a large sum is unable to pay, the master determines that the slave and his family and his possessions should be sold into in order to recover the debt. However, the debtor begs the master to be patient, and the master not only consents, but forgives the debt entirely. Immensely relieved, the slave leaves the master's presence only to encounter another slave who owes him a small sum, and he chokes and threatens his debtor. The other slave begs for his lender's patience, but the first slave, rather than show the mercy he's been shown, has the debtor thrown into prison until he can pay. Hearing of this, the master sends the forgiven slave to be torture until he too can pay off his debt.

This story reveals that mercy is not the same as fair judgment. The master would have been well within his rights to sell the slave with his family and possessions; even agreeing to be patient while the slave paid off the debt would have represented a compassionate response. Likewise, the slave was within his rights to send his debtor to prison; he had no legal obligation to be patient. However, mercy is not legal "fairness." It is not even a simple kind of forgiveness that calls it even and lets it go. Rather, mercy is extravagant compassion that overflows out of the recognition that we ourselves have received mercy. And when the mercy stops with us, we condemn ourselves to the torture of isolation and greed.

The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant also reveals that receiving mercy is not relative to what we do or don't do. The slave doesn't receive his master's mercy for being an exceptionally hard worker, just as Jesus doesn't heal the lepers because of their generosity, or cause the blind man to see because he observes the law of Moses to the letter. Mercy is also forgiveness in the sense that it forsakes blame. In recent months, Rick and Kay Warren of Saddleback Church in California, have begun emphasizing not just the renewal of the Church in the U.S. through their "purpose-driven" series, but also through the Church's obligation to address the AIDS crisis in Africa. At a recent conference at their church, Kay observed, "Jesus never asked anyone how he or she got sick—only the Pharisees did...If your compassion level goes up when you know it wasn't someone's fault, then there is something wrong." She speaks to the fact that we all know AIDS is often transmitted through consensual sexual activity. While our instinct may be to blame those who become sick as a result of careless sex, a merciful response forgets to place blame while remembering to show boundless compassion in meeting a person's deepest immediate needs. Again, mercy defies our demands for fair judgment and emerges regardless of a person's responsibility for his or her situation.

Mercy is not fair judgment and neither is it sacrifice. Twice in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reminds his hearers of Hosea 6:6: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." Where sacrifice motivates us out of a quantifiable obligation, mercy emerges from a love that burns like an eternal flame in the core of our beings and motivates us to conduct that warmth to others. With an attitude of sacrifice, we give to others only to see the hole left in our lives by the sacrifice of time or money or possessions. With an attitude of mercy, we give to others out of an infinitely replenishable love that empowers us to give more and more mercy.

But where does this mercy, come from? I think that perhaps that question is a little like the one most of us have heard or asked: Where do babies come from? Before you think this is going to turn into a sex education session, bear with me. Neil Douglas-Klotz, in his book Prayers of the Cosmos, explains that

the key [Aramaic] words lamrahmane and rahme both come from a root later translated as "mercy" from the Greek. The ancient root meant "womb" or an inner motion extending from the center or depths of the body and radiating heat and ardor…. The association of the womb and compassion leads to the image of "birthing mercy."

The relationship of the word "mercy" with the image of a womb ties in nicely with the image we have of the Church as the Bride of Christ. Mercy originates with God, revealed in Jesus Christ. Christ, in a sense, "impregnates" the Church with the experience of mercy and the charge to make that experience fruitful. In this sense, mercy is an act of creation that begets mercy.

Just as there is an element of mystery to the process of conception and birth, there is also an element of mystery to the creation of mercy. Simplistically interpreted, our beatitude for this evening could lead us to believe that works of mercy occur in a one-to-one ratio. If I show you mercy, then you will show me mercy some day. If I show enough mercy to others, I will become worthy of God's mercy. But however much we desire a mathematically accurate path to salvation, the balance of mercy is infinitely more complex than this. Just as we create children who eventually become independent of us, works of mercy create a culture of blessing that has effects beyond what we can control or see. When we are merciful, we change the world and create life against the forces that exist even within our very own hearts that seek to create death. And it is in the merciful transformation of the culture around us, motivated by our experience of God's perfect mercy, that mercy comes to be received by us, less like an even trade, but more like the air we breathe.

In closing, let's return to Tender Mercies. At the beginning of this meditation, I set up a contrast between Dixie, a successful woman who was unable to create a culture of mercy around her, and Rosa Lee, a humble woman who birthed mercy to the extent that it changed her world and the world of those around her. Where Dixie is left asking, "Why has God done this to me?", Rosa Lee is left thanking God for all of the tender mercies that she has received, in spite of the pain of losing her husband at the age of 18. Though their life situations are vastly different, Rosa Lee embodies an ability to desire mercy, not sacrifice. When Mac Sledge lands in her hotel, hung over and penniless, she lets him work off his bill and stay on to grow into a good husband, good father and good mentor. Mac, in turn, learns how to show mercy through his relationship with a young, struggling band. Motivated by the mercy she has received, Rosa Lee changes the world and sets into motion a movement of mercy that goes rippling right over the edges of the film.

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy" is not a tit-for-tat prescription for good spiritual health, but a description of God's Kingdom coming into being here and now. Rather than creating a reward system whereby one earns mercy from God and others by being merciful, this beatitude refers to the creation of a culture of mercy, in which the giving and the receiving of mercy are as ubiquitous as air and as natural as breathing. God—Ultimate Reality—is merciful and we welcome that reality when we embody it as a nurturing mother produces new life. In doing so, mercy becomes and lives to transform people and communities. When we are "fruitful and multiply" mercy, the reality in the Kingdom is that we will experience it ourselves, for "blessed are those who, from their inner wombs, birth mercy; they shall feel its warm arms embrace them."

Our Lenten series at St. John's is focusing on the Beatitudes, with a different speaker and topic each Wednesday evening. I'll be speaking on March 22 on, "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy," which appealed to me because of my fascination with Dorothy Day, who often talked about "acts of mercy." The following are some of my notes for getting my bearings.

• Neil Douglas-Klotz writes in Prayers of the Cosmos that there is a connection in Aramaic between the word translated as "mercy" and the word for "womb". This leads me to think about how mercy is a creative act, requiring relationship, as well as (usually) pain and sacrifice that are well worth it for the effects they produce beyond ourselves.


• We can learn about mercy by contrasting it with judgment. A quote from a recent issue of Sojourners comes to mind:
  

  
  Jesus never asked anyone how he or she got sick--only the Pharisees did...If your compassion level goes up when you know it wasn't someone's fault, then there is something wrong. [from Kay Warren in the context of her work with her husband Rick to address the AIDS crisis in Africa]
  

  
  ...which also makes me think of Portia's speech in The Merchant of Venice.


• It seems as though, while "acts" of mercy and "disposition" of mercy can be distinguished from one another, they inform and reinforce one another. This brings to mind C.S. Lewis' idea that if we don't love someone, acting as though we do will lead to the emotion of love. If we don't feel merciful toward others, will acting merciful lead to the disposition of mercy?


• What does it mean to "receive mercy"? I think that rather than creating a "reward system" whereby one earns mercy from God and others by being merciful, this refers to the cultivation of an economy of mercy. Our actions and attitudes live and have the power to change people and communities. God--Ultimate Reality--is merciful and we welcome that reality when we embody it. This is another way of talking about cultivating the Kingdom. From Thomas G. Long's commentary on Matthew:
  

  
  The Beatitudes proclaim what is, in the light of the kingdom of heaven, unassailably true. They describe the purpose of every holy law, the foundation of every custom, the aim of every practice of this new society, this colony of the kingdom, the church called and instructed by Jesus.
  

  
  This comes back again to the notion of mercy as a creative act. When we cultivate mercy, it becomes, it lives. So when we are "fruitful and multiply" mercy, the reality (not the reason) in the Kingdom is that we will experience it ourselves.

That's all for now...

Lectionary Texts for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

In a recent discussion with a friend of mine who's very familiar with the lectionary, he explained that one of the things he doesn't like about the lectionary is its tendency to undermine the mystery and meaning of stories in the Hebrew scriptures by making New Testament connections that lead to overly simplistic interpretations of the older texts. I think there is certainly value in making these connections toward understanding the arc of the bilibcal narrative, but he's right in that we don't often live fully into earlier texts because there's a subtle impression that the gospels trump the Hebrew scriptures. Something worth considering, even as I proceed to display my own inability to let this Sunday's Numbers text "stand on its own."

I was immediately fascinated by the Numbers text and so I'd like to look at the story more closely. If Lent is intended to follow Jesus' model of spending forty days in the desert of suffering and self-examination, then a story that comes out of Israel's time in the desert should have something to offer us in this context.

The Israelites have come to view their situation not as a journey toward promise full of the Lord's providence, but a burdensome, compulsory, never-ending journey on which they have no food or water...or, at least, they don't have anything they like to eat. Just when they think it can't get any worse, poisonous snakes invade their camp and start killing them off.

I don't like to think of God as killing people off just as a lesson against self-pity. And in fact I can't reconcile the image of a mysterious, loving, just, wise God with one who says, "Oh, yeah, you think you're in a bad situation now--well, take this!" It seems awfully childish, but it resonates with C.S. Lewis' general contention that we don't in fact know if death is really a bad thing. We objectify death as a bad thing to be feared; however, we also have the interpretation that death is merely a transformation into our final state. Anyway, this is sort of a tangent to say that I don't think this story is about God playing a juvenile trick on the whining Israelites.

in response to the snakes, the Israelites cry out to God for mercy--or more specifically, they ask Moses to talk to God for them (junior high recess, anyone?). Moses concedes and God's response is so complex and perfect. Rather than take the snakes away from them entirely, God enables Moses to construct a means by which people who are bitten can live.

And here is where the text speaks to a larger issue than just that of self-pity. God is teaching us how to suffer--or rather, God seems to be teaching us where to look when we suffer. God doesn't take away all agents of suffering, but mercy lies in the reality that we are saved even in our suffering. And of course the bronze serpent is an image that is recalled later in linear time when God will literally show us the way through suffering to eternal life.

We shouldn't diminish the reality of suffering by saying that the serpent is ultimately alluding to what's really real on the other side of death. That interpretation leads to an escapist idolatry of death. Rather, I think the image of the serpent and its connection to the cross assure us that reality is both our suffering on this side of death and our release from suffering in eternal life. God is present to us in the desert and we discover this presence when we are watchful. What are the symbols that remind us this is true? We do well to be attentive, particularly when we feel as though the suffering has become too much to bear. God may be in the last place we expect to meet Him, as He was in the image of a fiery serpent.

For several years now, Rob and I have been living willingly below the poverty line as a [hopefully] temporary sacrifice toward the goal of establishing two non-profit organizations. But we find ourselves having more and more conversations lately about how we know when we've hit bottom financially and have to make some difficult decisions.

For two and a half years after we moved to Three Rivers--a result of not being able to afford our apartment in Indiana any more--I worked at St. John's Lutheran Church as the office manager. Last year, after Rob graduated from Goshen, we felt it was time to take the risk once again of attempting *cino work full time. Thanks to being hired to teach a one-credit course at Calvin last fall, we subsisted for a while, but by Christmas, our financial situation had begun to look pretty grim again and we still are finding ourselves struggling to get by. In fact, this may be the worst it's been so far. I find myself worrying about how we're going to afford basic things like laundry detergent, because rent and credit card bills are so far out of reach I can only worry about them in a very abstract way.

Rent is the big thing. I don't enjoy telling nameless credit card people that we can't pay our bills, but I don't feel any guilt about it. However, our "landlords" are our dear friends and housemates, who have been very patient with us so far, but I feel like my integrity in our relationship is all tangled up with our ability to be faithful to our commitment.

And so we're coming to the question about once a week now: How do we know when to do something different? Our current work with *cino and World Fare, at this level of income, is not sustainable. And if we want to continue to get somewhere with those organizations, taking on a part time job is not an option. Rob is already swamped with side jobs (which are nice, but not sufficient to pay our bills at this point in the downward spiral), in addition to all of the web and print design and miscellaneous work he has on his plate for *cino. And my work definitely suffered while I maintained 20 hours per week at the church.

This work has always been full of ups and down, but it feels lately as if the extremes are getting more extreme and more frequent. The ups are euphoric--we feel like we've turned a corner with *cino. Our last conference was wonderful, as we had an excellent display with worthwhile resources and we felt like we were finally learning how to talk about what we do. The downs are full of anger, resentment, frustration and hopelessness. We are so far in the hole that even selling CDs and books and anything else "extra" isn't worth the effort. I struggle with a martyr complex, selfishly asking myself, "Why should we work ourselve to death to improve the quality of life for other people when we can't afford to have any sort of quality of life ourselves?" I realize that true quality of life doesn't take a lot of money, but I selfishly feel myself resenting our inability to take a simple, inexpensive vacation or go out in the evening for a beer. What happens when we can't sleep this feeling off any more? An end to this financial drought is perhaps in sight, but what if we can't survive that long?

Our discipline this year for Lent is, somewhat ironically, to stop working at 7pm. However, what is supposed to be a time to rejuvenate ourselves in the evening with a film or a book is quickly becoming a time with nothing to distract us from our financial failure. We have truly entered the wilderness.

I write this here at the risk of making people feel sorry for us. But this is a big part of our story right now that we've been hiding for just that reason: we don't want people to contribute to our organizations because they pity poor Rob and Kirstin. That's not sustainable, either. However, the only way we can endure this period of time is in community. The further we separate ourselves, the less we're in a position to determine whether the work we're doing is really significant for anyone.

And so I ask for prayer: we need to avoid (or at least survive) the traps of self-pity, of self-loathing, of despair. We need to rediscover resolve, resources and joy, either to continue or to move on. And I ask for encouragement: if something we do has value to you, please let us know. Send us an e-mail, write us a letter, give us a call, make a financial contribution of any size or get involved in some other way. All of these things have value to us, though admittedly the area in which we're struggling most right now is finances.

If we're going to continue on this road, we need people to walk with us, not fifty yards away on a parallel path, but right beside us, holding our hands. We simply are not emotionally fit to be organizational leaders without the support of those around us.

Texts:

• Genesis 2:4-9 (KJV)


• Mark 1:9-15 (NRSV)

---

Perhaps you remember singing the nursery rhyme as a child, "Ring Around the Rosy." We held hands and danced in a circle, shouting at the tops of our lungs:

Ring around the rosy,
Pockets full of posey,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down!

It's a strange childhood game when we consider the rhyme's origins. In the 17th century, England was hit by the Bubonic Plague. "A ring around the rosy" or a red circular rash was the first sign of infection. Believing that the disease was transferred by smell, but also to counteract the literal stench of death, people carried sweet-smelling herbs or "posey" in their pockets. Unfortunately, before the great fire of 1666 killed the rats who were carrying the disease, the plague caused the deaths of 3 out of 5 people, and their bodies literally fell down into ashes. Or rather, if we understand God's creation of humanity out of dust and breath, their bodies returned to ashes.

I begin this morning at the beginning—the beginning of human life and the beginning of Jesus' ministry as a human being—in the hope that we can discover what these stories may have to offer us as people at the beginning of this year's Lenten journey.

The nature of human life commonly understood since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers is that we are composed of two parts: a body and a soul. According to this philosophy, the soul is the higher part of ourselves that we must seek to nurture and gratify, while the desires of the body are to be contained and despised. However, the story of God's creation of Adam provides a very different model from this body/soul dichotomy—one that I believe is closer to what we know about ourselves from our experience as human beings. The equation in Genesis is not body + soul = human; rather, the equation is dust + breath = soul[1]. To know fully who we were created to be, we must reconcile ourselves with both our dust and breath qualities, and we'll explore each of these in turn.

The ritual of Ash Wednesday—placing a cross of ashes on the forehead—reminds us of our dusty origins. The imposition of ashes is accompanied by a sobering reminder: "From dust you were created; to dust you shall return." In this ritual, we remember one of our names, that of finite mammal destined to die. A Byzantine funeral liturgy connects the imagery of ashes and dust with death with the words:

Come, brothers and sisters, let us consider the dust and ashes of which we were formed. What is the reality of our present life and what shall we become tomorrow? In death where is the poor and where the rich? Where is the slave and the master? They are all ashes.[2]

The ritual reminder of Ash Wednesday initiates the season of Lent, forty days in the wilderness of self-examination, stripping away illusions until we rediscover the core of who we are in God. With this process comes the risk of pain and doubt—we have to face the darkest, scariest parts of who we are in order to engage the things that turn our faces away from God.

The discipline of Lent, like Jesus' fast in the wilderness, would crush our spirits if our dust contained no breath. Thankfully, our "breath" heritage is named in another ritual of the Church: baptism. Baptism names our identity as beings who receive the breath of life from God, the first Parent of all humanity. In baptism, we acknowledge our identity as beloved children of God. We claim our spirit-filled nature. And it is this knowing ourselves as beloved children of God that empowers us to examine the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves during Lent or during any period of intense isolation and suffering.

It is appropriate that Mark's account of Jesus' time in the wilderness is preceded by an account of his baptism. What we hear the voice of the Eternal revealing to Jesus here is the same assurance we receive as heirs of the Kingdom: "You are my [child], the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased." It pleased God to claim Christ and it pleases God to claim us. This pronouncement empowers us for what comes next.

Even with that glorious baptism, the Spirit was not finished preparing Jesus for ministry. Imagine Jesus rising out of the waters of the Jordan River, affirmed in his identity as the beloved child of God and soaking wet. Immediately, without warning, the Spirit "[drives] him out into the wilderness"—from the hospitable environment of the dove to the hostile environment of the scorpion, from the life-giving waters to the dry isolation of the desert. It's as if Jesus must learn, now that he's assured of his identity as God's son, how to wrestle with his identity as a human being who is vulnerable to temptation. He must face his own darkness before engaging in the task of calling others to repentance.

As the Spirit was not satisfied to send Jesus straight from baptism into proclaiming the good news, neither should we be satisfied to claim our breath identity without wrestling with our dust. We must follow Jesus into the desert to discover our mortality, our temptations, our drought. Though this process can be uncomfortable and painful, it is necessary, and we enter in the hope that God will "attend to" us there. We tend to experience the most growth during these painful desert moments of our lives because, in fully confronting our weakness, we are most open to change.

While such self-examination should be, and often is, a part of daily life, Lent allows time for a special focus on this task and we model Jesus' fast in the desert in various ways. The answer to the question of what is usurping our primary identity is different for all of us. For my husband and I, the answer this year is work. We have committed not to work after 7 at night during the forty days of Lent, because we needed space to remember and embody the fact that good work goes on in the world without us. We need to re-discover our identity as Sabbath people. I've talked with others who are engaging in such disciplines as refraining from cynicism or creating a funeral plan. One friend is even giving up Lent for Lent, which reflects a realization of her limitations during a period of both busyness and sorrow in her life.

This year, I'm coming to understand the ways in which Lent is actually permission-granting, rather than permission-restricting. Lent frees us to look at ourselves with clarity and begin to understand the secondary identities that have eclipsed our knowledge of ourselves as breath and dust. Hence, my decision to not work after 7pm takes on the character of something I have the freedom and privilege to do, rather than something I must do out of obligation. Father James Martin explained on a recent radio program[3] that

Lent isn't simply about sacrifice. It is primarily a time to spiritually prepare one's self for Easter. And this may have less to do with not doing something than with doing something.

Lent is not a time to will ourselves to righteousness or to engage in games of prohibition that ease our guilt about unmet goals; rather, it is a time to enter the darkness of our hearts in the hope that the light of God will come back into focus.

Our Lenten journey, like the journey of Jesus in the desert, is prompted by the Spirit. Jesus did not decide for himself that a forty-day fast was just what he needed. Rather, he responded to the movement of the Spirit, who "drove him out into the wilderness." And so we must ask ourselves, before setting our own arbitrary goals for Lenten observance, what the Spirit is prompting us to do. Even though an examination of individual self is central to Lenten discipline, the self is still a member of the whole body of believers and we do well to commune with the Spirit to determine what sort of discipline would be most appropriate. And if the Spirit is hidden, which is often the case, we can also turn to the trusted community around us. Father Martin tells of arguing in college about the validity of Lenten discipline with his Jewish roommates, who believed that choosing a discipline for one's self was too easy. His friends eventually resolved the dispute by determining that they should choose what Father Martin should give up for Lent. Twenty years later, he still receives a call every Ash Wednesday with a pronouncement about what the season's discipline will be. Silly as it may seem, Father Martin's story pinpoints the fact that engaging in a Lenten discipline is not an act of willpower, but an act of obedience.

In baptism, as in Ash Wednesday, we are named. Forty days in the desert helps us remember and reconcile our names—dusty, mortal child of earth and spirit-filled, eternal child of God—replenishing the soul for the Good News of Easter: that suffering will not last. Death will die. The repentance Jesus calls us to is not an act of willpower, but a turning toward a whole new understanding of who we are in God. Jesus could scarce proclaim such good news about the reality of being human in God without engaging his own vulnerability and darkness in the desert. Likewise, our own repentance and proclamation can only be approached through the desert of self-knowledge and suffering. If we say we have no desert to cross in our journey toward God, we are spiritual infants for whom the resurrection holds no real hope. For what need do we have of the transformative power of sacrificial love if we have no sense of needing transformation?

In closing, I offer a poem by Madeleine L'Engle. Listen for the journey she takes in these few lines through the broken and confessing experience of the desert to a transformed and reconciled Easter creation:

O God, within this strange and quickened dust
The beating heart controls the coursing blood
In discipline that holds in check the flood
But cannot stem corrosion and dark rust.
In flesh's solitude I count it blest
That only you, my Lord, can see my heart
With passion's desires tearing it apart
With storms of self, and tempests of unrest.
But your love breaks through blackness, bursts with light;
We separate ourselves, but you rebind
In Dayspring all our fragments; body, mind,
And spirit join, unite against the night.
Healed by your love, corruption and decay
Are turned, and whole, we greet the light of day. [4]

May the Spirit inspire courage within us during this season of Lent to enter into the deepest dusty wilderness of our own hearts to emerge from the desert thirsting for the mysterious refreshment of the resurrection. May we live into our identity as living souls of dust and breath, eager to be reconciled and transformed.

---

[1] Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (Pantheon, 1992), p. 106.

[2] J. Raya and J. de Vinck, "Verses During the Last Kiss: Funeral of the Dead" in Byzantine Daily Worship (Alleluia Press, 1988).

[3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5238122

[4] Glimpses of Grace (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 72.

I was just checking *cino web log statistics, as I am wont to do on occasion, and discovered that *culture is not optional sites surpassed 40,000 "unique visitors" in the month of February. The "unique visitor" stat is based on people who view more than one page during a visit, with less than 30 minutes between click-throughs to various pages within the site. So, for example, people who have catapult set as their home page (like me) aren't counted unless they click to another page within the catapultmagazine.com domain. Interestingly, because catapult is spread across two domains (catapultmagazine.com and cultureisnotoptional.com), these stats are a little more impressive than they might otherwise be. Why? Well, if someone were to visit catapult's homepage and, seeing an updated discussion topic, click over to the discussion board (hosted at cultureisnotoptional.com), they wouldn't be counted as a unique visitor on either site because they would have only visited one page on each domain. Hadn't thought of that before ...

While these kinds of statistics are obviously a little hazy, it's still encouraging to think that so many people have been finding their way to this part of the internet. Thanks!