My wife told me as I was coming down the stairs of our home.

Benazir Bhutto had been shot. It numbed me — not quite as personal as news of a family member's death. But close. Close to the feeling I had when I heard Princess Di had been killed in that tunnel. I'd known it was coming. I'd sensed these were women on the edge, in danger, so close to the end.

Perhaps only in death do we really know people. This woman who could so mobilize a nation's passions was a kind of political household word in halls of power around the world. News of her death headlined instantly in online newspapers in Jerusalem, London, New York, Singapore, and — of course — Karachi. She had been put under house arrest for a time. She had been attacked in just such a motorcade only ten weeks earlier. The Times of London appeared to have background slide shows and written material on the shelf ready to roll. They knew.

Bhutto seemed a woman capable of leadership in her region of the world — a region where women aren't commonly seen in positions of authority. But as news of her death circled the planet, word came also of just how divisive a woman of intellect and passion could be to a nation trapped in chains of fear.

Bhutto had impressive educational credentials — Harvard, Oxford, and the pop-culture education of one who knew New York, vacationed in Switzerland, and sat at the feet of political discussion from her earliest life. Yet when she had campaigned for election in recent months, she had struggled to pronounce words in Urdu.

Bhutto had sought to be a human bridge between the optimism of the democratic world and the cynicism of those regions where those in power considered the greater populace unfit to govern themselves. Bhutto's passion for change had about it an aroma of death that she couldn't shake. In the end, it overcame her words, her ideas, her logic.

Bhutto had seen her father just before he was hanged and as she looked in those eyes, probably gained an education few in this country will ever know. She was no stranger to the specter of violence and the terrorist ethos of those for whom hate was a way of life.

Details are sketchy, but on the day she died, police in Karachi and those onlookers willing to talk to the press said Bhutto died waving.

She was on the way to safety, driving away from a rally that was full of the political rhetoric that enfuriated her enemies. She was retreating and probably would have been safely with friends or family soon. But she had a tradition of giving back — letting her supporters know they mattered to her.

She poked her head and arms out of the car just far enough to give love to the crowds who were always wanting just a glimpse, a touch if possible.

That's when the shots rang out. It didn't take many. She was as frail as the elegant robes she wore, as vulnerable as a flower. She collapsed into the car, bleeding from one side of her face. Within seconds the suicide bomber's explosion rocked the car.

Medical experts on the scene said she never regained consciousness after falling from her position of farewell gesture. Her heart failed and could not be resuscitated.

And though she was beyond knowing it, the violence she had rallied to stop erupted in the streets of Karachi with new vengeance.

The world suffered a loss it will take months, even years to unravel. But part of the unraveling was a letter she wrote to a Washington Post journalist. She'd told him to keep it under wraps until the day she was assassinated — almost a "when" rather than an "if" about it.

Why is Christmas something so many just endure?

Maybe it's because we've created so many fictions about it. One of them is that Christmas is a feeling -- a passion that goes deep and fills us up somehow.

How sad the worship we create for something as fleeting as an emotional moment.

No, Christmas is painful because we just do it. And even when we're around others, too often it's still a solitary experience. We do it for ourselves and include others (if they fit who we are, or think we are.)

Unwrap the commercialism, the numbing blasts of glib, syruppy marketing hype. Turn off the TV. Get off the web sites that lie to you in converged ways. Christmas is not there.

Turn to someone near you and, if you can bear it, look for more than an instant into their eyes.

The connection that happens at that point of visual contact is a tiny glimpse of what God did when He sent His Son, God in human form, to the earth as a baby.

It was God saying, in a very personal way -- as personal as a gaze into your eyes -- "I know you. I love you. I'm here to be with you."

Even if you don't believe in God, He believes in you. He wired you to know Him, and to know others.

Someone has said that we all live lives of quiet desperation.

That desperation is felt most potently when we experience it alone.

The thing that sustains us in this journey is something intangible, yet as real as a firm handshake (one that comes from two hands), that hug clasping us tight and not letting go for a moment. It's the jolt in our inner recesses as we see a smile on the face of one we love.

All of that is an illustration, a subtle invitation to the kind of spiritual experience that only comes when we know God.

Pity the person who says they don't believe in God because they can't see Him. He is there. And as Francis Schaeffer said, He is not silent.

He told us, when He was leaving this earth that if He did not go away, the comforter would not come.

And that comforter has been mistaken for many things -- angels, demons, the force of the cosmos, the chemicals we put in our body to numb an emptiness we're born with.

The comforter enters our souls when we believe in who Christ said He is.

But the paradox is that though He's within us, we can't really know Him fully until we meet Him in the company of others who also know the One who said "I am with you." That coming together is community.

We so disdain that word, so misunderstand it, so neglect its intended meaning. (And how sad the inverse proportion between familiarity and our attention to the things we think we know.)

Community is like good water. Got it? You don't think about it. Don't have it? It's all you think about.

Community means we cannot exist alone and be fully human, fully ourselves. We are part of others, others are part of us. And when we know God, He puts an extra something -- something we crave -- in that encounter with others. It's a spark, even a roaring blaze, of His power that can transform us into what we never thought we could be.

Community can be messy, annoying, inopportune, frustrating. It can hurt. But it can also be a balm, a place of healing, a sloshing cool refreshment to a parched throat.

We need it. We need each other.

And Christmas is one of the darkest times of the year in the United States (and many Western countries) because it is the time when Jesus (whose name, one of many, is "God with us") reminds us that we are so alone without Him. Somehow, Christmas points out, too, how much isolation we build into our lives in pursuit of the stuff that we think is making us happy. Christmas, experienced without Christ and apart from others in any meaningful way, is torture.

But it need not be so.

The Beatles weren't prophets, but they occasionally stumbled onto concepts that have had lasting value.

Come together, as a phrase, has stuck with us (well, some of us.)

May we revisit it this Christmas with the meaning God can infuse it with.

Fire.

It's been said you should never yell that word in a crowded theater. It's a word we fear so much that it constitutes speech that First Amendment scholars say is too powerful to be allowed in careless usage.

Smoke is in the air today, as it was yesterday. California is peppered with fires being driven by Santa Ana winds that seem relentless -- a surging sea of invisible gasoline on the dry landscape of this piece of land by the ocean.

I heard someone say today in an NPR interview that drought, the dryness of the land, is the Rodney Dangerfield of natural disasters. We're now giving natural disasters personalities and a sense of self-image.

How far we've come.

Marvin Olasky, shrewd and attentive historian that he is, has pointed out that there was a time in this country when journalists (and the rest of us who read journalism) looked at the tragedies of life -- ones we can neither predict nor avoid -- as acts of God, incidents with special eternal purpose.

Too many journalists today would look at that earlier era with a sneer. Act of God indeed. There's got to be somebody down here to blame. We'll just keep looking.

If neglect or intentionality -- malice aforethought -- caused these fires, may that truth come to light and justice be done.

But should the cause never be pinned down (and perhaps even if it is), we are wise to
re-think the nature of life and its fragility. So, too, should we realize that all this stuff we accumulate, the stuff we find we can leave behind as we run from the path of the burning embers, is after all not as important as our lives make them appear to be.

On our knees, helpless before the forces of nature, we find the place of real peace.

And our God, the one who stilled the waves with a word, is our only refuge.

Maybe Larry Craig is guilty.

The truth in his case is difficult to know.

But what is fascinating is the reaction of those in his party who would rather he just fall on his sword.

The Republican Party has a lot to worry about right now, and the fight of one senator to clear his name isn't worth their time. They haven't got much of that left. November, 2008 is closing in and the skies are darkening.

Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), the Senate Minority Leader, told the New York Times Wednesday that Craig was correct in indicating he would resign. Then he told the Press he wanted to talk about something else — anything else.

In McConnell's mind, there's not a whole lot to say, at least not officially. McConnell and other Republican leaders removed Craig from leadership on three Senate committees last week — a move aimed at shuttling the Idaho senator out of the spotlight and into the shadows. Damage control in fast-forward. Abandonment on speed dial.

Loyalty in Washington is an amorphous thing — a kind of vapor. When there's enough of it, one can seem to float in it like a thick fog. When it dissipates, one can be left standing alone in a place one wouldn't have expected.

But Craig's not all alone. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa), last Sunday, appeared on Fox News telling the nation — and Craig, if he was watching (he was) — that this case was winnable. Disorderly conduct is not an impeachable offense in the U.S. Senate. And the stuff Craig is accused of doesn't meet the qualifications of lewd behavior. If anything, the man was first stupid, then arrogant. But neither are what would count for removal of a member of Congress. (If they were, we'd have an immense number of special elections coming up soon.)

Robert Novak, in the Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday, noted that Specter, ranking Republican member of the Judiciary Committee is a man who remembers a favor. Craig once pulled for him when the Senate leadership wanted Specter out of the running for Judiary Commitee chair.

Specter has been fairly silent this week about what Craig should do now — silence Novak says came after Republican leadership pulled him aside and reminded him who he worked for (and they didn't mean the people who elected him.)

Sen. Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agreed with Specter.

Courage is a tough thing to find on Capitol Hill. Maybe what the country needs is to see a Republican get up off the mat and keep slugging rather than throw in the towel.

My son graduated today.

His older brother graduated about a year earlier, so this might seem anticlimactic.

Neither were the kind of graduation that involves robes, tassels or folding chairs.

But it mattered to Matt, the younger of my two sons. Just like it had mattered to Ben a year earlier. And it mattered to me, because I'm their Dad. And little moments are what make up the fabric of our lives.

Matt is 16. He's had his driver's license since shortly after his birthday in April.

He'd learned to drive on our Toyota Sienna — a mid-size van that's far too easy to drive. He passed his driver's test with few warnings.

But he got that license when I wasn't around. (He's always been good at working the angles.) He got his Mom to take him. The deal I'd set with him, and his brother, was that they wouldn't see the Department of Motor Vehicles until they'd proven to me they could drive a five-speed clutch (on my Corolla.)

That meant me in the driver's seat guiding them toward easing off the clutch and onto the gas at stop signs, stop lights, and in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There was a bit of bucking. Motorists either smiled or cursed — usually depending on if they were behind us or not.

So now it was August. School would begin soon for Matt, and I knew he needed to be competent on our second vehicle. We'd need his taxi services — for him and for his 13 year-old sister.

The day before, I'd told him he couldn't go to a pool party unless he drove the Corolla. Mom had the van and I made it his only option. But Mom showed up and bailed him out.

So today, Mom had the van again and Matt wanted to do another friends outing. I told him the Corolla was his only option.

Now Matt had been practicing with me several times with the clutch and basically had it down. What was missing was confidence. The barrier was in his head. And that barrier could only be removed by him, at the wheel, in traffic.

He asked if he should practice first — on the steep hill that runs through our subdivision. I told him to do that hill three times.

He came back a while later and said he was headed out to the mall.

The mall he had in mind was about 10 miles away and at the base of a fairly steep hill. I knew he'd do okay on the way there. But uphill would be a challenge.

Three hours later, he called me.

"I made it," he said. "I'm parking the car." The boy was calling me from the driveway. The Eagle had landed.

I went out and opened the garage door for him and told him to leave it in the driveway. I didn't want him to have to figure out backing into the single-bay opening. Our older son had sheared off the passenger-side mirror that way.

As he got out of the car, he said, "I can do it. Now I can drive this car whenever I want to." I didn't correct him. The title and insurance bill still had my name on them.

But he'd done it. He'd graduated.

I can't remember if I told him I was proud of him. But I did tell him congratulations — that I knew he could do it.

Like most graduations, it didn't last long. He promptly forgot it and went in the house.

The world around us moved on, most never knew it happened. But it did. And the second of my two sons had taken another step toward life preparation that can come in no other place than hard pavement.

Somebody stick a fork in it. We're done — at least for a while. The mercy of the academic calendar gives us a moment to step back and try to figure it all out.

Something is wrong with what we're doing in our colleges and universities in this country.

I'll admit it. And I'll say that evangelical Christian colleges and universities (I teach at one) aren't immune from missing the significance of moments like this. All of higher education is a journey — one we're frequently too busy to look at critically. Death among our students has a way of slowing us down.

At no time in recent memory was this more clear than the day — was it just weeks ago? — that an angry English major at Virginia Tech put a high-powered handgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Prior to that gun blast, this strangely quiet young man had systematically, calmly, silently killed fellow students and professors in ways that has put all of American higher education on notice. John Dewey was wrong. So was Walter Lippmann and others in the 1920s Progressive Movement who said the answer is our minds, not our souls.

Train up the children, Dewey believed. Do NOT depend on parents, and definitely avoid the influence of people like pastors or other clergy. No, train kids up to be thinking, reasoning adults — let them experiment, do not ever tell them they're wrong because they need to find that out themselves — and they will, ultimately choose well. They'll do the right thing because deep inside, they know what's good and their default is to choose what's best. (What's ironic is how many commencement speeches in the next couple weeks will have spouted this kind of drivel despite the looming clouds of Blacksburg behind them.) Where the whole thing falls apart, Dewey believed, was when moralistic adults step in and muck up the mix with admonitions about God's place in all these decisions.

Lewis P. Lipsitt, profesesor emeritus of psychology, medical science and human development at Brown University, last month in the Providence Journal reminded us again that there's just something about people — something deeply dark. He put it in terms perhaps only a biology-trained scientist would: "The human animal can be more destructive of its own species than and its living environment" than any other.

The truly frightening thing about Cho Seung-Hui was not his guns but his ego. This was a young man with the kind of mental focus necessary to plan a mass execution and time it in such a way that he layered his killing with ground-transport mail of his video, still-photo and written explanation for it all.

In an odd way, I look forward to the scholarly analyses of what happened in Blacksburg that snowy day. But what will be hard to take are those who will be claiming that this young man was a shy, unassuming person. No, he was an egotist
of a proportion that far surpasses those he called his egotistical persecutors — people he railed against for their wealth and self-love.

C.S. Lewis calls self-hate a kind of egotism that can be as destructive — perhaps more darkly forceful — as arrogant self-love.

"Deeply egotistic," Lewis says, "now with an inverted egotism, it uses the revealing argument, 'I don't spare myself" — with the implication "then a fortiori I need not spare others."