This particular circumlocution began when I heard a radio advertisement for Rain, a Beatles tribute band. You know the drill: The members dress in Beatles stage dress from different stages of the Fab Four’s career, and play Beatles hits note for note, inflection for inflection – essentially trying to replicate the experience of watching the band at live, except that it’s audible because the legions of screaming girls are grown and gone.

            And then there’s the band that’s playing Crosby, Stills & Nash’s seminal Déjà Vu album note for note on stage. And the Pink Floyd tribute band coming to town. Tribute bands exist, too, for lesser lights in the firmament, from Metallica to Judas Priest to the Foo Fighters.

            Part of me recognizes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and therefore slavish, excruciatingly exact imitation is the flatterest. Maybe tribute bands are the ultimate form of fandom for the musicians, and as well for the listeners, for whom even an approximation of their band is better than a night with none of it.

            That’s the optimistic view.

            The downside suspicion is that tribute bands are a way to avoid the shock of the new, the way classic-rock radio stations pretty much promise never to play a song you haven’t heard before. If you’ve found the music you like, why go anywhere else? Why not recycle it endlessly, even to the point of seeing it visually re-created? It’s safe and likable, a sure bet – two scoops of vanilla at Baskin-Robbins.

            What do you think?

            Huh! you say.

            I’ll prove it to you.

            “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” says Yahweh in the traditional English version of the Decalogue. Which is kind of like the old riddle: I have two coins totaling 30 cents, and one of them is not a nickel. What are the coins? Answer: a quarter and a nickel. (The quarter, of course, is not a nickel.)

            So Yahweh, contrary to what he says elsewhere, is, in the Ten Commandments, not a jealous god. He acknowledges tacitly that human beings will recognize and relate to other gods.

            Jesus goes him one better, though. “No one can serve two masters,” he says in Matthew 6. “Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” And so for Jesus the issue is not one God or many, it’s: Whom will you serve? Whom will you recognize as Master of your life? As Bob Dylan says, You’ve got to serve somebody. And as Geddy Lee says, If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose your master, or the world will impose its mastership upon you.

            Jesus goes on to pinpoint the choice we so often face. “You cannot serve both God and money,” he says.

            As in, money can be a god as well. And God – THE God – is OK with that. But serving – that’s a different story.

            The newspapers and airwaves are full today of commentators wrestling with how to remember the Penn State football coach. Many are pointing out the incredible loyalty and appreciation present on the Penn State campus for this man who did so much for the institution. It wasn’t just football, they say. He donated lots of money; he was all about the academics; his walking-to-work humility set an inspiring example.

            And yet … and yet …

            It’s not for me to judge Paterno’s tepid response to the sexual abuse allegedly committed by his good friend. The abuse stories are heartbreaking, sickening; my heart just aches for these young victims, and burns against the grown-ups who could have stopped it but, through inaction or denial, chose not to.

            How do we judge a life? By weighing the totality of one’s actions, harmful against helpful? Or by assessing the integrity with which one lived?

More importantly, how does God judge a life? And what is the real authority of grace in that calculus – God’s bias toward compassion and forgiveness, and Christ’s saving sacrifice for all of us?

By all accounts, Joe Paterno was driven to the wall by these accusations. I wonder how he could have slept at all after his firing, and what toll anguish and self-blame might have taken on his 85-year-old body. Lung cancer pretty much always wins, but physical and mental stress can make the defeat that much quicker.

De mortuis nihil nisi bene, the old saying goes – Say nothing but good of the dead. And so we are left with only this: deep, deep sadness. For the victims. For the coach and his family. And for this reminder that life can turn damnably tragic in an instant.

            The endorsement, which came on the third ballot, lends Santorum the imprimatur of such prominent evangelicals as Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins. But even in highly Christian South Carolina – where one town hall meeting attendee asked Mitt Romney (eek! a Mormon!) to his face, “Do you believe in the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ?” – a plug by influential Christians doesn’t pull much weight.

            You could see that as a moral failing, I guess – don’t these salt-of-the-earth Christians invest church leaders with much authority? – or a question of priorities. Social issues, after all, are a far-distant second on the concerns list in this campaign; the economy is tops for voters and candidates alike. Except for Santorum, who has hitched his wagon to social issues, including his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

            What a difference three decades makes. It was in 1979 that the Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the lobbying group called the Moral Majority (remember them?) and struck fear into the hearts of politicians of all stripes. The Southern Baptist preacher wielded great influence in American political life, and his Moral Majority (despite a dissenting bumper sticker that said “The Moral Majority is neither”) is credited with delivering two-thirds of the white evangelical Christian vote to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. Falwell and his minions consistently stumped for Republican candidates and pushed them further to the right, so that the party of Lincoln tilted in a scarily theocratic way. Billy Graham, himself no stranger to power politics, even scolded Falwell for “sermonizing” about political issues that lacked a moral element.

            I’m with brother Billy. There’s something queasy-making about political machinations by church leaders claiming to represent millions of Christians. It’s as if the flock has declined to think for itself, instead investing slick preachers with the right to think and speak for them. We’re used to a creative diversity of opinion in the United Church of Christ, but I would bet even a seeming monolith like the Southern Baptists carries multitudes within it.

Despite the 23^rd Psalm and Jesus’ metaphors in the Gospel of John, God didn’t create us to be sheep. At least, not sheep so stupid as to be led easily to the voting booth.

            It’s all that people are talking about (and thank goodness for that distraction from the Republican presidential primary race!). Not, as Mark Twain pointed out, that we can do anything about it.

            But winter has always been the price we pay for the gorgeous summers here in Western New York. Now we’ve got a little bit of heaven on this side of the year’s calendar, heaven being defined in relative terms as dry, nothing to shovel, and enough breaks in the clouds to make intervals of sunshine a mostly-present possibility. Oh, and it’s warm, by which I mean warm for a Buffalo winter, flirting with the mid-40s some days. Heck, Florida has had winter days like we’ve had recently.

            Of course, lots of people are distressed by this turn of the weather wheel of fortune. Skiers, of course. Snowmobilers. Sledders. One parent said to me that when it turns muddy, not snowy, winter is harder than ever, because the kids are stuck inside.

            But for me, as I pass the days of the season as is my habit, watching for the hours of daylight to pass the 10-hour mark (today: 9 hours, 13 minutes; tomorrow it actually stays light past 5 p.m.), every day is one more day closer to May.

            I’ve been walking Lola in the Meadow at Delaware Park on many afternoons, which makes her dog Id happy because she can run herself silly and sometimes finds a dead mouse to play with. It may not be strictly within the rules (although I think I understand that once the golf course is closed, the Meadow is fair game for everyone), but it makes me nostalgic-by-imagination for the glory days of the park, before the Scajaquada Expressway cut it in two and the golfers took over most of the open space. In the Meadow you can walk and walk, pocket the occasional stray golf ball, and howl at the winter sun. All of this makes me happy it’s January.

            I love Ecclesiastes and its companion in the wisdom literature, Proverbs. Maybe it’s the distillation factor – the knowledge that these books represent the best wisdom drawn from generations of human beings living their lives. It’s like the self-help section of the bookstore with all the specious advice culled out.

            Ecclesiastes also appeals to me in those times when I’m despairing that things, broadly, will ever get better. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” says the speaker, variously called Qoheleth, the Teacher or the Preacher. “All things are wearisome; more than one can express.” No prematurely cynical teenager ever said it better.

            And yet Qoheleth finds some places of refuge from this cynicism: in the pleasures of work, in eating and drinking; and, at the last, in the deeper meaning of life that lies in things “above the sun” rather than the “nothing new under the sun” that is the currency of our daily round.

            Tom Wolfe, the great novelist, said of this book: “Of all I have ever seen or learned, this book seems to me the noblest, the wisest and the most powerful expression of man’s life upon this earth – and also the highest flower of poetry, eloquence and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.”

            Who am I to disagree?

            I come now not to bury Hitchens, but to praise him.

            I disagreed with a lot of what he wrote. His support for the Iraq war and his characterization of the core beliefs of Islam as violent didn’t make much sense to me. And, famously, his militant atheism goes against my deep belief in God and Jesus Christ. But I suppose it’s a mark of a good writer that he’s eminently readable even when his positions make your blood boil.

            I read Hitchens mostly in the columns he wrote for Slate, the online magazine of the Washington Post. He did things like voluntarily undergo waterboarding to test whether it’s torture (he concluded that it is); that was for Vanity Fair. He read broadly and had a near-photographic memory, giving him a jewel box of references with which to lard his tart arguments. And, say those who worked with him, he was a consummate pro as a journalist, never missing a deadline, fact-checking rigorously, and turning in copy so bright and clean that his editor could take the afternoon off.

            He mentored young people; he encouraged new writers; he loved America and became a citizen (British by birth); and he was a legendary bon vivant, drinking, smoking and hobnobbing late into the night. In that last he was like Dylan Thomas; and like Thomas, it was a life that spiraled toward self-destruction. The great Welsh poet was only 39 when he drank himself to death in 1953; Hitchens was 62 at his death, but in our day that’s still shockingly young.

            If you haven’t read Hitchens, here’s a quick-hit sample from his review of Andrew Morton’s biography of Princess Diana: “The British public, renowned for its kindness to animals, apparently insists on the regular sacrifice of a human family. At least once every generation, a young princeling or princess is kept, like any Aztec or Inca monarch, in a gilded cage from which the only release is death.”

He was truly one of a kind.

            This coming Sunday, in the Spotlight section of The Buffalo News, I’ll have a piece that I called “Better Not to Know.” (The editors may write a different headline.) It’s about things that you’re better off not knowing, even in an age when you can know pretty much anything you want and find instant gratification that way.

            Here’s how it begins:

“Mom and Dad,” says the grown child home for Christmas, “remember that night when I was 15 and me and Pat went out and I didn’t get home till 4 in the morning?”

            “Pat and I.”

            “Whatever. Remember you got in the car the next morning and there was that smell? I’ve been thinking about it, and I want to tell you what really happened that night.”

            Mom and Dad, this is your moment of truth. Because you do not want to know.

            Now, this is not autobiographical. Our two sons, now grown and gone, have been wise in most ways in their growing-up decision-making, and wise in keeping to themselves the less salutary moments. But as I argue in the piece, it’s smart for a parent to put on some blinders once the past is past. It enables you to go forward in building a relationship with your grown children, one relatively unencumbered by the baggage car of an imperfect past.

            I hope you’ll read the piece in the News, and I’ll be interested in hearing your responses.

            I suppose you’d get different answers from different religious sorts. The guy named Don, for example, who sent me an e-mail on Friday (subject line: “sodomites”) saying that any church that does not condemn homosexuals is a tool of Satan – he sounds like someone who takes his beliefs very seriously. I doubt he’s laughing much about anything.

            But as the famous image of the laughing Jesus reminds us, God calls us into a relationship not about grim, grinding religious duty, but about joy. If you’ve ever created anything, you’ve tasted the kind of joy I’m talking about – the sheer absorbing lost-to-the-world pleasure of immersing yourself in the act of creation. That’s God’s original Spirit, the creative Spirit, at work, and when we get a little piece of that, it’s golden.

            I’ve been thinking about this question after having reviewed David Javerbaum’s spoof God memoir The Last Testament. Javerbaum used to write for the Onion (one gem: “World largest metaphor hits iceberg”) and executive-produce The Daily Show, so he knows a thing or two about mining the absurd for humor.

            The book speaks in the voice of God (what? The prophets did it, didn’t they?) and becomes a kind of revisionist gloss on the Bible, with a whole bunch of subject-matter commentary thrown in. For example, here’s God on sports:

            “Many times have I heard athletes pray for victory before the contest; and many times have I heard them thank me for victory afterward. Many times have I heard partisans beseech me to aid their side; and many times have I heard them beseech me to afflict the other side. And many times I have heard reasonable-minded commentators denounce those athletes and fans for believing I would care about something as frivolous as the Raiders-Broncos game. Lo, as a matter of fact, I do care about something as frivolous as the Raiders-Broncos game, Bob Friggin’ Costas. For dozens of human beings are putting their hearts and souls and passion and sweat into that game. And while it is true that, simultaneous to that game unfolding, hundreds of millions of other human beings are putting just as much heart and soul and passion and sweat into far more vital human activities like manufacturing, or child-rearing, or staying alive; unlike the Raiders-Broncos game, I find all those activities very boring to watch. Understand me: it is not that I do not care about those people; it is that I do not care about what they are doing.”

            Well, that’s a little different from the God whose “eye is on the sparrow,” isn’t it? And those for whom faith is a deadly serious proposition I think are likely get their knickers in a knot about it – “That’s not how God is! How dare he?”

            Well, duh. Of course that’s not how God is. Or maybe it is – God’s ways are so far from our ways that anyone who claims to understand them perfectly has to be on the far side of delusion. As I say to our confirmation students, if anyone comes before you in absolute certainty about faith, run the other way.

            Really, when we laugh at God, we laugh at ourselves, at our own limited understanding and blindered imagination of the divine. It keeps us humble. And that’s something God wants, isn’t it?

            At noontime on Thanksgiving, we broke routine: I took her to the park and we walked around twice. This in an attempt to de-ya-ya her because we had guests coming for Thanksgiving dinner.

            And maybe it was the day, but I spent that long walk feeling grateful and happy about life in Buffalo.

            The park, of course, was beautiful; it’s almost litter-free, an oasis that way where other places in the city are kind of trashy. Lola chased squirrels and we sneaked out onto the Meadow; you’re not supposed to go there unless you’re a golfer, but except for what looked like an annual Thanksgiving best-ball group, it was almost deserted. It’s good for a dog to run free sometimes.

            We met a beautiful little puppy named Griffin, half yellow Lab and half golden retriever. He and the 2-year-old in his family were both working off their energy.

            And we saw a raucous football game that again looked like a Turkey Day ritual, punctuated by doughnuts and Bud Light.

            One of the unsung benefits of dog ownership is that when you’re walking the dog, you have a purpose for being wherever you are. An unaccompanied walker peering at the park denizens could be construed as creepy, but in the company of a dog, you’re understood to be safe. Passers-by pet the dog; you talk; you build a tiny little bit of community. And then you stretch your legs some more, look at the statue of the Indian Hunter, see if the bison are outside at the zoo, and go home hungry and happy.

            Maybe Lola doesn’t know how good that is. I sure do.