Mystic Believer Priest

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2009-12-01T16:53:00.000-08:00

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Clod

2009-11-23T14:56:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get worn away. Do you know the feeling? Every once in awhile I think, Oh please. Please. Oh no! Not again. Not that idea again.

I feel like dirt. Like a clod of dirt in the monsoon. Here comes the rain, all glad and everything. Happy to be bringing the possibility of life to the dry ground. To the dirt in this particular part of the world. And here I am, melting. Disintegrating. In the sudden torrent.

Have you ever felt like, Oh no. Not that funky idea again? Not my friends. No. They don’t give that funky idea the time of day, do they? Do they really? Have they really invited it into their homes and actually made it comfortable there? Allowed it to play with their children? Their defenseless children? Have they really given it a place in the family circle, where it sits like a toad, smiling like an idiot, belching, self-satisfied, wet-land smelling, balding, and rotund in the deep and brightly-upholstered chair by the fire, with a footstool and a warm glass of milk! And a platter of homemade chocolate chip cookies by its side! With a look on its face like, Ah! This is the life! This is more like it!

And it turns out they have. They do. They do think the idea that you think is funky is actually quite illuminating. Quite eye-opening. Quite insightful. Quite unfunky. And if it isn’t brilliant, at least it’s interesting.

And all you want to do is to run. All you want to do is to cover your head and find a place of shelter out of this rain that comes down hard as bits of metal from as far up as the moon.

I find all of us Christians have funky ideas.

Well, no. That isn’t exactly correct.

What I find is that all Christians outside the Bible except for me have funky ideas. I only have excellent and well-founded and well-thought-out and God-breathed ideas. Ideas that Jesus and the Apostle Paul and the Apostle Peter and the Apostle John and Moses and Elijah and Abraham would certainly agree with.

Because of course I consult with these seven on a routine basis and receive all of my ideas and inspirations from them. We have our own mountain hut, with a fire of our own. It’s really more of a lodge than a hut. Comfortable. Well stocked. Roomy. Arts & Crafts décor. Arts & Crafts style furniture, upholstered with leather. Wool throws everywhere with Native American designs. Plank floors. Tall ceilings. Monumental log walls. Wrought iron chandeliers. A boulder-fashioned fireplace you could drive a Ford F-150 pickup truck into, and the truck would seem small. Kind of like a toy.

Our lodge is somewhere between here and heaven. Up on a mountain side, at about seven thousand feet. Giant Sequoias tower over us. As the sun begins to set, we frequently gather here from our solitary walks among the huge, sweet-smelling, winter trees. As the cabin-size logs in the fireplace turn from red to lavender, and our faces brighten with the heat of the fire and the warmth of the conversation, they share their ideas. We discuss them back and forth. I play Socrates. I ask my questions. We discourse about their ideas like so many famous holy people enjoying one another’s company.

Finally, when they have proved the worth of any particular idea to my satisfaction, they then mystically transport me back to the actual world, and I convey the idea to you. My reader and my friend. That way you will get only the real gems. The real potentially sparkly items. Even though sometimes they’ll appear a little dull and dirty with what looks maybe like. Well, I don’t know what. Wet. Warty. Deceptively like a clod. That kind of thing.

Practicing

2009-11-02T06:57:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while one hears something. One reads something. Or one finds oneself saying something that strikes one. Well. Like a ninety-mile-per-hour baseball. Smack dab into the forehead. Wow, that hurts.

This happened the other day. It echoed others. It may have been original once but was no longer original. It has become in certain circles a commonplace. And so I heard it reverberate in the hollow place between my ears. I heard it join with other similar statements I have heard from others and read in books. I heard it resonate and magnify.

And it was said by someone who does not normally indulge in commonplaces. So it was odd.

It went something like this, or I thought it did: We are practicing for heaven. Practicing for what we will be doing perfectly in heaven. We Christians. In expecting the Holy Spirit. In concert with the Holy Spirit. In doing what we think the Holy Spirit wants us to do. In trying to do this, even though we know that sometimes we’ll look a little foolish. A little silly. The important thing here is to be faithful. To do our best to respond faithfully to the leading of the Holy Spirit.

And so. Well. This idea of practicing. Oh. I guess I’m not. Maybe others are, but I am not. No. I’m not practicing for anything. Maybe I should be, but I’m not. Maybe I’d get better if I practiced, but I’m not.

Maybe, you’re thinking. Maybe this person meant practicing as a doctor practices medicine. Maybe practicing Christianity is like practicing medicine. One isn’t rehearsing. One is doing what one is asked to do. Taught to do. Employed to do. One isn’t looking forward to the day when one will do the thing. Perform the thing. One is doing this now. Just a different meaning of the word, and I misunderstood.

Maybe. Maybe I did misunderstand. Maybe what I heard was what I’d heard before several times and read several times because that is what was said before. Written before. But this time the person in question might have said something different. Something very different.

Ah, well. Could be. I make mistakes. And so I could have heard it wrong.

Maybe I did not hear what the person really said. Maybe what the person really said is that we are practitioners of our belief. We are practitioners of our Christian art, our Christian learning, our Christian discernment. We are healers, really. Or we bring the Holy Spirit’s own healing to a mistaken world. To an ailing world. To a diseased world.

I like that hearing better. The Kingdom is a place where we are all healers. Where we can all hope to be healers as John Woolman was a healer. Bringing the Holy Spirit forward to mend all that is broken here and now. Coming forward in the Spirit to create the Kingdom. Not later. No. Something that we can get fairly good at now. Not something that we are rehearsing. No. Something that we are doing for real. For keeps. Both seeking God and doing what he asks. Now. And now. And now, again.

Something like that. Maybe that is what I could have heard. Or might have heard. Or should have heard. But I don’t know.

The Pure Opening

2009-10-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

One reads. One lives. One writes one’s life as well as one may. And periodically something happens. One is transported. Lifted. Transformed. Translated. Inspired. And one is no longer oneself. One feels. Oh. Infused, maybe. One senses that one’s quotidian self has been set aside. Has been left behind. As a chrysalis is left behind. As the chaff is left behind by the germinating wheat. As the egg-shell is discarded by the new hatched Great Northern Loon.

But no. These are misleading. More like the wind. It rises. It falls. There is periodic stillness. Periodic storm. Not so much like the spring, but something like the spring. Not regular, so much. Not predictable so much. Not time sensitive so much. Sometimes, The Pure Opening comes when one asks. Sometimes not. Sometimes when one is looking, looking. And the leaves do stir. The new-made leaves do dance. Sometimes not.

John Woolman writes about being purified. About purification. About the Holy Spirit changing him. Changing us. In some fundamental way. Oh, there is something both true and not true in this, don’t you think? To the extent he means a permanence, he seems less accurate. To the extent he means a momentary change that one remembers and builds one’s life on, he seems more accurate.

The Holy Spirit comes and goes. As difficult to predict as the wind. As impermanent out here on the prairie as the wind. Oh, in places here, wind may be found that is dependable enough to plant a wind farm in, many millions of dollars worth of windmills. But we are dealing with probabilities, aren’t we. And probabilities have a habit of shifting around. Chaotic processes have a habit of surprising people, even those with advanced degrees in probability theory.

You find a person comes along every once in a while like John Woolman. A lovely man, from all accounts. A Holy Spirit inspired man, if ever there was one. But he is, after all, still a man. Still only a man. And he must work at it, mustn’t he? At opening himself to the work of the Holy Spirit. Opening himself purely. Momently. Every moment a new opening. To its work.

And he must allow it to work its will. Otherwise, what’s the point? A momentary thrill. A momentary rush of joy and gratitude and humility and vitality. And then what? And then where does one set oneself down? In what geography? What topography? What spiritual place? Will it be the Beautiful Land? Will it be the City of God? Or will it be Cleveland? Detroit?

One seeks Heaven, does one not? One seeks a Heaven here and now. One meekly tries to do one’s part in the Making. In God’s Making. But so much intrudes. So much distracts. And there is so much dirt and banality and sorrow and betrayal and death and cruelty and despair and anger and spitefulness and pride and arrogance and rottenness. There is so much that is at odds with one’s model. One’s desire. One’s God.

So much in one’s actual life.

And so. The Pure Opening is periodic. It is like so many words that come streaming from beneath God’s throne—crystalline, refractory, pellucid, sun-lit, moon-lit, lovely words. Words that are like Living Water. Ephemeral water. Water that when it comes refreshes, buoying us up, quenching our thirst, but then it also goes. Disappears from one’s own particular plot in the topography.

Our great blessing, however, is Scripture. This is indeed the Beautiful Land. Here the Living Water is created in abundance. When one is thirsty. When one’s life has slowed to a trickle of words. Has become a dry sandy place where the Living Water once ran strongly. One may travel to this first and last resort for the poor in spirit. This vast watershed where at the center is an inland sea. A sweet-water sea. And around the periphery are enormous rivers dropping in from high places and sun-dazzle down. And one may douse one’s head again. One may dive and submerge one’s entire being again. One may cannon-ball into God again and float as long as one likes, drink one’s fill of this Living Water as one bathes. As one washes oneself clean. Inside and out. Once again.

So for Example, Take John Woolman

2009-10-26T06:32:00.000-07:00

So for example, take John Woolman. Born 1720. Died 1772. His Journal of John Woolman included in the Harvard Classics. Longest-published book in the history of North America, except for the Bible.

So who is this guy, you may ask. So who is this narcissist who writes about himself. Who makes so much of his own life that he thinks others must read about him. Makes so much of the importance of a single pseudo-random human life that others must need read of it to satisfy themselves. To vicariously partake of it. Make sense of it. Make it sensible to themselves. And perhaps draw themselves through Brother John closer to God.

And so it begins, thus: “I have often felt a motion of love to leave some hints in writing of my experience of the goodness of God, and now, in the thirty-sixth of my age, I begin this work.”

And it continues, thus: “From an inward purifying, and steadfast abiding under it springs a lively operative desire for the good of others. All the faithful are not called to the public ministry; but whoever are, are called to minister of that which they have tasted and handled spiritually. The outward modes of worship are various; but whenever any are true ministers of Jesus Christ, it is from the operation of his Spirit upon their hearts, first purifying them, and thus giving them a just sense of the conditions of others. This truth was early fixed in my mind, and I was taught to watch the pure opening, and to take heed lest, while I was standing to speak, my own will should get uppermost, and cause me to utter words from worldly wisdom, and depart from the channel of the true gospel ministry.”

And thus: “My mind, through the power of truth, was in a good degree weaned from the desire of outward greatness, and I was learning to be content with real conveniences, that were not costly, so that a way of life free from much entanglement appeared best for me, though the income might be small. I had several offers of business that appeared profitable, but I did not see my way clear to accept of them, believing they would be attended with more outward care and cumber than was required of me to engage in. I saw that an humble man, with the blessing of the Lord, might live on a little, and that where the heart was set on greatness, success in business did not satisfy the craving; but that commonly with an increase of wealth the desire of wealth increased. There was a care on my mind so to pass my time that nothing might hinder me from the most steady attention to the voice of the true Shepherd.”

And thus: “The prospect of a way being open to the same degeneracy, in some parts of this newly settled land of America, in respect to our conduct towards the negroes, hath deeply bowed my mind in this journey, and though briefly to relate how these people are treated is no agreeable work yet, after often reading over the notes I made as I travelled, I find my mind engaged to preserve them. Many of the white people in those provinces take little or no care of negro marriages; and when negroes marry after their own way, some make so little account of those marriages that with views of outward interest they often part men from their wives by selling them, far asunder, which is common when estates are sold by executors at vendue. Many whose labor is heavy being followed at their business in the field by a man with a whip, hired for that purpose, have in common little else allowed but one peck of Indian corn and some salt, for one week, with a few potatoes; the potatoes they commonly raise by their labor on the first day of the week. The correction ensuing on their disobedience to overseers, or slothfulness in business, is often very severe, and sometimes desperate.”

And thus: “Men and women have many times scarcely clothes sufficient to hide their nakedness, and boys and girls ten and twelve years old are often quite naked amongst their master's children. Some of our Society, and some of the society called Newlights, use some endeavors to instruct those they have in reading; but in common this is not only neglected, but disapproved. These are the people by whose labor the other inhabitants are in a great measure supported, and many of them in the luxuries of life. These are the people who have made no agreement to serve us, and who have not forfeited their liberty that we know of. These are the souls for whom Christ died, and for our conduct towards them we must answer before Him who is no respecter of persons. They who know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent, and are thus acquainted with the merciful, benevolent, gospel spirit, will therein perceive that the indignation of God is kindled against oppression and cruelty, and in beholding the great distress of so numerous a people will find cause for mourning.”

And thus: “Many Friends appeared to be deeply bowed under the weight of the work, and manifested much firmness in their love to the cause of truth and universal righteousness on the earth. And though none did openly justify the practice of slave-keeping in general, yet some appeared concerned lest the meeting should go into such measures as might give uneasiness to many brethren, alleging that if Friends patiently continued under the exercise the Lord in his time might open a way for the deliverance of these people. Finding an engagement to speak, I said, ‘My mind is often led to consider the purity of the Divine Being, and the justice of his judgments; and herein my soul is covered with awfulness. I cannot omit to hint of some cases where people have not been treated with the purity of justice, and the event hath been lamentable. Many slaves on this continent are oppressed, and their cries have reached the ears of the Most High. Such are the purity and certainty of his judgments, that he cannot be partial in our favor. In infinite love and goodness he hath opened our understanding from one time to another concerning our duty towards this people, and it is not a time for delay. Should we now be sensible of what he requires of us, and through a respect to the private interest of some persons, or through a regard to some friendships which do not stand on an immutable foundation, neglect to do our duty in firmness and constancy, still waiting for some extraordinary means to bring about their deliverance, God may by terrible things in righteousness answer us in this matter.’”

And thus: “Many faithful brethren labored with great firmness, and the love of truth in a good degree prevailed. Several who had negroes expressed their desire that a rule might be made to deal with such Friends as offenders who bought slaves in future. To this it was answered that the root of this evil would never be effectually struck at until a thorough search was made in the circumstances of such Friends as kept negroes, with respect to the righteousness of their motives in keeping them, that impartial justice might be administered throughout. Several Friends expressed their desire that a visit might be made to such Friends as kept slaves, and many others said that they believed liberty was the negro's right; to which, at length, no opposition was publicly made. A minute was made more full on that subject than any heretofore; and the names of several Friends entered who were free to join in a visit to such as kept slaves.”

And thus: “The natural man loveth eloquence, and many love to hear eloquent orations, and if there be not a careful attention to the gift, men who have once labored in the pure gospel ministry, growing weary of suffering, and ashamed of appearing weak, may kindle a fire, compass themselves about with sparks, and walk in the light, not of Christ, who is under suffering, but of that fire which they in departing from the gift have kindled, in order that those hearers who have left the meek, suffering state for worldly wisdom may be warmed with this fire and speak highly of their labors. That which is of God gathers to God, and that which is of the world is owned by the world.”

And it finally ends, thus: “In this journey a labor hath attended my mind, that the ministers among us may be preserved in the meek, feeling life of truth, where we may have no desire but to follow Christ and to be with him, that when he is under suffering, we may suffer with him, and never desire to rise up in dominion, but as he, by the virtue of his own spirit, may raise us.”

I Boast of My Immaturity

2009-10-16T10:36:00.000-07:00

So now I boast of my immaturity. I boast of how young I am in this. I boast of my lack of probity. My lack of deliberateness. My ineptitude in judging. My complete astonishment and bewilderment in the courthouse. In the courtroom. In the jury room. In the judge’s chambers. In the prosecuting attorney’s office. On the judge’s bench. In the judge’s skin.

Now I congratulate myself on my bewilderment. On my confusion. On my stupidity before the question of who is in and who is out. Who is culpable and who is not. Who is evil and who is good. Who is suspect and who is blameless. Who is guilty and who is innocent. Who belongs and who does not. Who has been called and who has not. Who will go to heaven and who will go to hell. Whom God loves and whom God hates. Who is the greater sinner and who is the lesser sinner.

I boast that I do not know how God will judge when he chooses to put on his robe. I boast that I do not know what God’s own justice will be. Or is. Or has been. I boast that I am weak in mind and moral judgment. I boast that I have no convictions in these matters. That I convict no one in these matters. I boast that I have no zeal in the application of the law. That I have no facility with courtroom procedures.

I boast that I am a fumbler. A bumbler. That I have no particular insight. That I cannot be relied upon. That I am no leader of men and women. I boast that my moral sense is underdeveloped. I boast that I am a sinner through and through. I boast that I am a sheep, baaaing bathetically in the wilderland. I boast that I do not know my way. I boast that I do not have a plan. I boast that I am in control of nothing. I boast that I am dust, a bit of nothing with no consequence.

I boast that I am young in my faith. That I have no idea what it means. I boast that my moral sense is flawed. That my moral sense is deceptive. I boast that my moral compass spins and spins. I boast that I am lost and without direction. I boast that I whine and moan. I boast that I am a sniveling child in everything. I boast that I am an abject incompetent. An abject loser. An abject dependent. Infantile, really. A toddler who has no idea which end is up and which end is down. Who must be instructed. Who must be comforted and led. Whose nose must be wiped. Whose drool must be wiped.

Who thinks of nothing but play, really. Nothing but gamboling about. Under the great, wide universe of light. And dark. Under the great wide sky.

Immaturity

2009-10-12T06:53:00.000-07:00

And so I think that immaturity is a blessing. A kind of blessing. Emotional immaturity. Intellectual immaturity. Moral immaturity. Because. Well. What does maturity mean, exactly? Doesn’t it mean probity? Doesn’t it mean deliberateness? Doesn’t it mean a measured approach to things? An unemotional, plodding, precise approach to questions of various kinds? Doesn’t it mean old men sitting around in leather chairs drinking brandy and smoking cigars? Doesn’t it mean old women sitting around in quiet rooms drinking tea, for example, and maybe doing embroidery or needlepoint? Maybe munching on some cookies?

And isn’t this sitting around business…. Isn’t this listening to some ponderous windup clock somewhere down the hall tick off the seconds, minutes, and hours. Isn’t this careful consideration of all things…. The floor creaking occasionally. Well. Isn’t this a moral dead-end? Isn’t this an emotional dead-end? Isn’t this an intellectual dead-end?

Don’t we mean judgment when we talk about mature Christians, for example? Don’t we mean that they make good judgments of people’s moral character? Don’t we mean that mature Christians are in the habit of judging others? Are in the habit of grinding forward like so many huge earth-moving machines that demolish mountains one scoop at a time? That demolish someone’s goodness one judgment at a time? Someone’s possibly good name one word at a time?

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m over-reacting. Maybe I’m hyperbolic. Maybe I have a hyperbolic personality disorder. But sometimes I think I’d rather be immature than mature. Sometimes I think I’d rather have no idea what is going on. Whether what someone is doing is good or evil. Whether what someone is thinking is good or evil. Whether what someone is feeling is for good or evil. Whether what someone is saying or writing will tilt the world in one direction or another.

Because in the white light of eternity, I have no idea. I don’t live there. In the white light of eternity. No. I live here. On this particular planet in a particular galaxy. In this particular corner of the universe. So I don’t know. I don’t have the mind of God. I barely have my own mind, and I must say, this particular mind is not much to write home about. No sir. No way. No m’am. Very limited, you see. Very odd. For example, my wife calls me a moron. A lunatic. An idiot. And she knows my mind much better than I do, because she stands outside it. She has a better. A more comprehensive. A less involved. A less parochial. View of it. Than I do.

No. If maturity means judgment. If maturity means you sit around all day in some creaky place weighing the goodness or meanness of others. If maturity means becoming better and better at weighing very small things on very sensitive scales. Measuring grains of sand differences. And deciding who’s in and who’s out. What’s up and what’s not. Who wins and who doesn’t.

When I was still a teenager, still in boarding school, I remember thinking, “We all judge. Every single one of us. Old or young, rich or poor, smart or dumb, well read or illiterate, admitted to the club or excluded from the club. We all judge. The trick is to judge well. The trick is to judge correctly. I’ll be putting all my effort into doing that from now on.”

Ah but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.

The Conundrum of the Coconuts

2009-09-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

I think coconuts are very interesting. I like coconuts especially when they are immature. I once visited the island of Dominica and was fed a fresh, immature coconut off the back of a poor truck. Well, the truck wasn’t poor. The man who drove the truck was poor. At least, he appeared poor. The truck was ramshackle. Hurdy gurdy. Reminded me of a hurdy gurdy. Neither this nor that, altogether. Neither here nor there. Ontologically tenuous but carrying a goodly Godly freight. A whole large load of immature coconuts that the man had taken off their trees and driven down from the mountains early that morning, when it was still mostly dark.

The man hacked off the husk of the coconut and cracked the thing open. He spooned out the white and translucent jelly-like substance, and oh. Oh my. This was a revelation. This was an experience. It was, I believe now, an example of what people call general revelation. What philosophical theologians or theological philosophers or apologists call general revelation. Maybe it should be capitalized. I don’t know. To contain the presence of God. Or point to the presence of God. To mean God’s presence.

Because that was what happened when I tasted that coconut jelly. I experienced such a rushing beauty. Such an improbable impossible altogether immense sweetness and richness and depth and height and breadth of sensation that I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know if the world hadn’t fundamentally changed. Didn’t know if the kingdom of heaven hadn’t suddenly supplanted the quotidian world. The world of improbably poor trucks and men. I didn’t know for a moment whether I hadn’t been swept up in the hands of God and blessed by him directly.

And these coconuts, see. They’re huge things. Even the immature ones. I mean the husk and then the shell on them is big. Really big. The husk is oh. I don’t know. Like maybe the size of a galaxy compared to the black hole at its center. Like maybe the size of the human body compared to the size of its soul.

In any event, that one experience is what I think about when I think about God and coconuts. I think about the coconut having the exquisite part. The general revelation part. The God infused or God inspired or God informed or God associated part. And then I think of the waste part. The part that will go into the coconut husk heap. The Dominican Ghenna, if you will.

And sometimes I think that we are like coconuts. Sometimes I think there is the huge not-so-pretty part that will get thrown away. The part in which sin and anger and the need for justice and hate and selfishness and cruelty reside. And then I think there is the sweet part. The immature part. The part that God is in. The part that will last forever.

God's Own Justice

2009-09-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

I think we mistake God. I think we take our own ideas of justice for God’s. This is the way we think about justice, we think. Therefore this is the way God thinks about justice. We think the concept of justice is fixed for all of us, God included. So our concept of justice is the concept of justice. God can’t have another concept of justice because there is only the one, the one we work with.

For us, justice is punishment. Justice is what happens to criminals who are convicted. Justice is what happens to terrible people or to middle of the road people who have done something wrong and need to be taught a lesson. Need to experience a dollop of pain and suffering for what they did. After all, we think. The transgressor has caused someone else pain or humiliation or suffering; so the transgressor deserves pain or humiliation or suffering or all three in return.

This is David’s idea when he hears Nathan’s story about the rich man with all the sheep and the cattle and the poor man with the one ewe who he raises like a daughter. Who he treats like a member of the family. And then of course the man takes the ewe from the poor man, slaughters it, and feeds it to the traveler.

David says the rich man deserves to die. But he doesn’t see the parallel. It is easy for David and for most of the rest of us, I think, to see the error in someone else but not so easy to see it in oneself.

In any event, David’s idea of justice is that the rich man should die. Why? Oh because he is unfair, is greedy, is cruel, because he has no pity. Because he kills something precious to someone else. Because he inflicts suffering on a man who is already suffering enough because of his poverty.

So David’s idea of justice is that the rich man should die.

But now let us turn to Jesus. The story of Jesus. The Gospels. For our sins, what is our justice? What punishment does God inflict upon us for our sins? He inflicts suffering and death upon his son. Upon himself. Or he allows others, who have a retributive and punitive and torment-oriented sense of justice, to inflict suffering and death upon his son. A man who has not sinned. This is God’s justice. Allowing the Sanhedrin and the crowd to kill Jesus. Giving them freedom. The freedom to become angry and to kill.

Odd. His idea of justice is to take away the reason for justice. His idea of justice is freedom and forgiveness. His idea of justice is to love us in the face of our sin. His idea of justice is to suspend punishment. Withhold punishment. Eliminate the possibility of punishment. And to substitute love.

What about those who will as Jesus says be burnt up in the fire. Be thrown onto Ghenna. Or into Ghenna. What about them?

What is God’s attitude toward these people, who he will throw into the fire. Who will be burned up and disappear? Does he love them or hate them? Is God really capable of hate? Which of us will end up in the fire and for what offenses? We don’t know. This is a mystery.

How can God love us? All of us. And throw some of us into the fire. We don’t know. This is a mystery.

When God throws—or more accurately, if God were throw (subjunctive)—some of us into the fire, is this just? (And I point out the use of the subjunctive here because it is not at all a sure thing that God will do this.) Is this God’s justice? I don’t think this is God’s justice. The Gospels suggest otherwise. Jesus suggests otherwise. God’s justice is forgiveness. Is love. Is freedom. This looks like something else.

Maybe its like coconuts. You get a coconut. You crack it open. You enjoy the inside. Maybe you share it with your friends. You put the shell in the garbage. This isn’t punishment. This isn’t revenge. This doesn’t teach the shell a lesson. You put the shell in the garbage to get rid of it, since it isn’t what you are after. It has served its purpose and now its purpose has been fulfilled. It has carried the coconut meat into our home, and it now needs to be disposed of. Is incinerated, maybe. And its ash and gases rise into the heavens.

Or maybe it’s like carbon dioxide. Maybe those who might be thrown into the fire are like carbon dioxide. Maybe they are a by-product of something else. Maybe when God breathes, he breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide, metaphorically speaking. Maybe he breathes some of us in—allowing us to enter his kingdom—and expels those of us who end up. Well. Being recycled in some sense. As carbon dioxide is recycled, say, by plants. As carbon dioxide is transformed into oxygen again. Let’s say. Through the mystical process of photosynthesis.

But let’s face it. This is a mystery. A conundrum. Only God knows.

This Desire for Blood

2009-09-08T06:47:00.000-07:00

Where does this desire for blood and death come from, I wonder. This rage for slaughter. Is it merely us? Merely who we are? Merely how we were designed and made?

This idea that when we kill. When we offer our violence up to God. In war, for example. That we are doing something right. That we are righteous when we do this. Where does this idea come from?

And when we harm someone. When we do an evil to someone else. And we say to ourselves that the person deserves it. Had it coming. Is better off for it. Where do we get this odd idea?

Had it coming? The person, we think, had it coming, as though, what? As though we were God? As though we were the very instrument of God’s justice? As though we were God’s own intimates on the ways of his justice?

I was reading Psalm 51 the other day. A Psalm that has fascinated me for years. The Miserere or the Miserere Mei. The Psalm in which David asks God for mercy for what he has done—committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed in battle.

Nathan, the prophet, has come to David and told him a story about a rich man with many sheep and a poor man, who only has one little lamb. A traveler visits the rich man. The rich man entertains the man and takes the lamb from the poor man for the traveler’s dinner. In response, David says, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die. He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.”

Nathan is of course teaching David something about how to live by telling him a little story. At first, David doesn’t recognize the parallels between his own life and the story, but Nathan helps him to understand. David is the rich man. The rich man who in David’s own words “deserves to die.” But of course God does not kill David. God does not insist upon a justice that David would have insisted on.

And so, recognizing his guilt and the horror of what he has done, David asks God for mercy. He asks him to wash away his sin. But of course the source of his sin cannot be washed away. It remains with him. In him. It can only be forgiven.

David asks God to create a pure heart in him. Which is of course impossible. But he also asks God to not cast him from God’s presence and not to take his Holy Spirit from him. He asks for the joy of his salvation to be restored and a willing spirit.

He asks to be saved from his bloodguilt. From the evil that is in him and has been from birth.

And then comes the really interesting part. As if momentarily touched by divine inspiration, David says, “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;/you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.”

And then David says, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;/a broken and contrite heart,/O God, you will not despise.”

As if blood sacrifices of all kinds are not what God is after. As if human justice that involves killing is not what God is after at all. As if what God is after—and he is willing to suspend his own judgment and punishment and justice to get it—is humility and recognition of one’s own sinfulness and contrition and grief over what one has done. Over who one is without God. As if what God is after is our understanding of how lost we are without God’s forgiveness and his participation in our lives.

It’s almost as if the evil that is in us is there by design. It’s almost as if God wants us to understand him and to seek him and the means for our coming to this is the evil that is in us. An evil that we cannot deal with on our own. An evil that requires us to find God.

Rage & Righteousness

2009-09-01T09:31:00.000-07:00

Odd, isn’t it, how rage and righteousness fit so neatly together. How alliterative, we think. How just. The aesthetics of it really weaken me behind the knees. The two together have a terrible, a fearful symmetry.

The rightness. The sense of perfect justification. The sense that one has in oneself both the aggrieved and the aggrieved’s hero. The person who was wronged and simultaneously the person who will right the wrong through justice. Through punishment. Through the speaking. The enacting of one’s rage. Through the delivery of justice. Justice itself!

The sense that one is suddenly raised out of one’s quotidian moral quagmire into the mountain heights of purity of suffering, purity of humiliation, purity of oppression, purity of purpose, purity of motive, clarity of moral vision. As the adrenaline rushes through one’s body, one has the sense that one has achieved a momentary and somewhat rare oneness with God. Oneness with the One who is purity himself. Justice himself. One speaks. One acts. In such a heightened state of being. And one wants to finish each statement and action completed in this frame of mind with the phrase, “Thus sayeth the Lord.”

A phrase that is like the sudden slowness of Errol Flynn’s rapier penetrating and then being withdrawn from a pirate’s torso, for example. Like God sending a plague or a thunderbolt. “There, now. Have that, you miserable sinner! Take that, you contemptible swine!”

Thus sayeth the Lord.

Many of us live for moments like these. We are truly alive when events conspire to make us pure victims of someone else’s evil or witnesses to the pure evil of someone else’s actions on someone else. Moments when we have it in our power to respond. When we at least have the opportunity to speak and perhaps to be heard by those perpetrating the evil.

I’m thinking for the moment about the news clips throughout the month of August. News clips capturing the contorted, blood-engorged faces of people at town meetings held by members of Congress. I’m thinking about what rage and righteousness those people possessed.

Oh, and I’m thinking about the many times. The nearly infinite instances in my life in which rage and righteousness came together. What delight! What transcendence! What holiness I felt then. What satisfaction! What justification. What redemption. I knew then.

Anger, Rage, & Wrath

2009-08-31T09:04:00.000-07:00

Speaking of exile. Speaking of wandering. Traveling. Speaking of the themes of exile, wandering, and traveling, of plots that treat these subjects. Recently, a friend has been blogging about anger, and he has got me thinking. This is always dangerous for everyone around me, because. Well. Thinking itself is dangerous, and it is particularly so in the undisciplined. Someone such as me. A person generally unrestrained by the discipline of orthodoxy.

It’s odd, isn’t it, that Christians—American Christians—are among the most angry people one comes across? How is that so, I wonder? I mean, Jesus didn’t command us to be angry. In fact, you’d almost think he told us to be the opposite. So what gives? Why all the anger? Why is it okay and maybe even preferred for Christians to be angry?

I say preferred because I get the idea from some of them that to be angry is a sign that they are good Christians. And that the angrier they are, the better they are as Christians. Oh, I don’t want to push this idea very hard. It isn’t ubiquitous. It isn’t determinative. But there is that vein. That way of thinking. That way of feeling. That one detects now and again among Christians one encounters here and there.

American Christians. And you’d think that poor Christians. Poor Christians in poor nations would be angry. Would be the angriest Christians, to the extent Christians are an angry people. But no. Apparently not so. The angriest Christians appear to be American Christians. Americans. The richest, most privileged people in the world. Odd.

So, to repeat: Why is it okay and maybe even preferred for Christians—American Christians in particular—to be angry? I don’t know. Its one of the starry night sky of questions I don’t. One of the billions upon billions of questions I don’t have an answer to. A propositional truth to offer. But I do have a couple of stories that I’d like to discuss.

The first is the Iliad. Which begins with the Greek word for wrath or rage or anger. And it’s the particular wrath of Achilles. The Greek hero. Who has acted haughtily with his king, Agamemnon, who has in retribution taken one of his concubines—one of Achilles’s concubines—for his own use. Achilles withdraws from battle, in anger (he pouts), humiliated by his king, and asks the gods to make things go badly for the Greeks. To punish his king and his friends. And so things go badly for the Greeks. So they are punished. His friends die.

Achilles’s colleague, Patroclus, dresses in Achilles’s armor and leads Achilles’s warriors, the Myrmidons, into battle against the Trojans, led by Hector, who have breached the walled Greek camp by the sea. The wine-dark sea. Hector kills Patroclus, Achilles’s good friend, thinking that he is Achilles. Achilles becomes even more angry. Sad first. Angry second. He reconciles with Agamemnon.

Then he returns to battle, finds Hector, kills him, and drags his corpse around for awhile, spending his anger on Hector’s dead body. Spending his wrath on Hector’s dead body. What an odd concept. I wonder why anyone would ever do such a thing. Sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? What would be the point? Pointless, as far as I can tell. Except for the venting.

And as I say “venting,” I’m thinking of something like a tea kettle. Boiling water. The steam needs to be vented. Otherwise the device explodes.

So anger makes us crazy, to some extent. We become subject to unreason when we give ourselves over to anger. To prevent ourselves from exploding, we do things that are crazy, if Achilles is any indication.

The other story is about Cain and Abel. The first and second sons of Adam and Eve. Cain is a farmer. Abel is a shepherd. Both offer sacrifices to God. God favors Abel’s sacrifices above those of Cain. Or is this only Cain’s perception? Is this objectively true or subjectively true? The writer doesn’t say. Cain gets angry. But Cain can’t do anything against God. That would be futile. So Cain murders Abel. God sentences Cain to a life of wandering in the land of Nod. Or something like that. Somewhere like that. If recollection serves.

So in both stories, the protagonist is wandering already (Achilles) far from home or is sentenced to wander (Cain) far from home. In both stories, anger plays a significant role. Or rage. Or wrath. In both, anger is involved in determining a permanent wandering outcome.

In the Iliad, Achilles has a choice. He can either get great glory for himself in battle and die shortly, never to return home (forever a wanderer), or he can get less glory for himself in battle and return home, where he will die much later. These two outcomes are open to him. He chooses great glory and an early death. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain can either endure God’s apparent preference for Abel’s sacrifice, setting his pride aside, and live in God’s general favor, or he can give full expression to his hurt feelings and kill his brother, since killing God isn’t possible.

Not that killing Abel will change God’s mind about the two brothers’ sacrifices. Not that God will like Cain better. He won’t. Killing Abel will do nothing good for Cain’s relationship with God. It’s crazy. Killing Abel is silly. But Cain does it anyway.

Isn’t it interesting that the logical consequence of wrath—of uncontrolled anger—is killing? At some point anger gets to be so great that someone has to die.

By the way, it has always struck me that Abel’s being a literal shepherd and Jesus’s reference to himself as a metaphorical shepherd is probably a meaningful symmetry or parallelism. The wrath of the Pharisees results in Jesus’s death, just as the wrath of Cain results in Abel’s death.

Are the Pharisees the descendents of Cain? The actual or metaphorical descendents of Cain? How about us? How about American Christians? Are we implicated anywhere here? I don’t know. But I do know one thing. Wrath is a form of insanity. When anger is allowed to grow, is encouraged to grow, it may become a monster. One does risk murder and mayhem. Literal and figurative.

Third story now. I’m thinking of a guy I knew. Married. Little children. Angry all the time. I don’t know why. He didn’t know why. Except his father was always angry. He learned early and long that to be a man means that you are angry. And so he was angry, particularly with his family. Venting. Yelling at the children. Yelling at the wife. Christian, mind you. Christian. Until one day, the marriage was dead. He had killed it. He had killed the love that she had for him. That he had for her. That they once had in one another. And so. She left him for someone else. And he was left with his anger. Or the ragged ends of it.

Literal or figurative. One way or another. Where wrath wants to go is death. That pure. That simple. Wrath wants something or someone to die.

The Kingdom by the Sea

2009-08-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Paul Theroux’s The Kingdom by the Sea that notice something fundamental about why we continue, why we keep leaving our houses or apartments and travel out, wander out, blast ourselves out of where and who we are and into the unknown:

“The woods were full of singing birds, warblers and thrushes; and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a cuckoo, which was as clear as a clock, striking fifteen. The sun was strong, the gradient was easy, the bees were buzzing, there was a soft breeze; and I thought: This is what I was looking for when I set out this morning—though I had no idea I would find it here

“All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself was a sort of optimism in action. I always went along thinking: I’ll be all right, I’ll be interested, I’ll discover something, I won’t break a leg or get robbed, and at the end of the day I’ll find a nice old place to sleep. Everything is going to be fine, and even if it isn’t, it will be worthy of note—worth leaving home for.”

It isn’t every day that we get to discover a cuckoo singing in bright sun, in a soft breeze, among warblers and thrushes. But the days we do find beauty or gentleness or truth or grace or lyricism or something quite blessed suddenly in front of us or all around us or partially revealed are the days that make us. Days that define us.

“Worthy of note,” he says. “Worth leaving home for.”

Well, yes. Yes indeed.

I’m thinking of my nephew as I write this. A young man who just completed a 340 mile paddle-sport race on the Missouri river a couple of weeks ago. I say paddle-sport because there were canoes and kayaks and things that were neither. He finished fourth, by the way, in the one-person-per-boat category. Day after day. Night after night. My hero! I just heard from his mother that he plans to do it again next year. Can you imagine?

My son just came back from a mission trip to Mexico with the youth group at his church. Remarkable experiences. Remarkable and wonderful changes in the young people who he helped to supervise.

My daughter just came back from a holiday in Puerto Rico. Had a lovely time frolicking in the sun and waves.

And I. Well I just came back from pulling weeds from my yard. A few sweaty hours of that. The earthworms clinging to the weedy sod. Smelling of. Well. As I knocked the worms and the clods from the weed-roots, the earth smelled like something I’d badly missed and now, like some weird olfactory gourmet, was deeply glad to smell again.

We’re all travel writers, in a sense, I think. Taking note. Discovering what chooses to reveal itself to us, which turns out more often than not, quite miraculously, to be what we were looking for.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

2009-08-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

Weeeel! Then of course we have Joseph Campbell and his famous book, a book first published in 1949 and revised by him in 1968. (Shortly after this is when I entered the movie. I mean, I was born in 1950, but I read the book for the first time shortly after the 1968 publication and became aware of a certain. Oh. Pattern to things. A set of common story elements. A sequence. A quality of expectation. A resonance to experience. A familiar plot line.) A third edition was printed in 2008.

So here is Campbell’s brief overview of a story line that is repeated over and over throughout world literature:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

In fact, you might with justification say this story outline underlies millions upon millions of stories, perhaps billions upon billions, with each of us (or many of us) living or attempting to live out variants of it. Variants in which the variations and the particulars obscure the paradigm as the outer mantle of the earth obscures the molten core.

The movement is comedic. The boons are restorative. They tend to be salvific. Redemptive.

The plot requires travel, usually. Travel in the usual sense—moving across the earth. But variants can include metaphorical travel.

Classic examples of the plot are the stories of Osiris, Prometheus, Buddha, Moses, Christ, Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, George Bailey, Neo, and perhaps Oskar Schindler.

Do we all want to be a hero? No, I don’t think so. But we maybe all would like know heroes have existed and do exist. Some of us—maybe most of us—would like to claim that our stories have a kind of participation in the hero’s story. Or the hero’s story has a kind of participation in ours.

The Pilgrimage

2009-08-20T06:27:00.000-07:00

Then there’s the pilgrimage, in particular. In general. The going out. The traveling out and away from the familiar. The known. Into the unknown. To do what? To find God, of course. To find his presence or his evidence or his very being. To know him. To know him better by finding him out. Finding him somewhere other than home. Other than in the familiar places that seem.

That seem. Oh. To no longer be capable of containing him, maybe? That seem so familiar that mystery and magnificence and knee-knocking beauty have been driven out of them by experience. By the quotidian. By the grimness of the day-after-day-after-dayness of our ordinary lives.

And so we launch ourselves out onto what? Onto the road or the trail or the path or the river or the ocean sea that will we hope take us beyond the known world. Beyond the world we do not see any longer because it is too often seen and heard and lived in and into the world of the possibly strange. The possibly Other. The possibly sacred with his presence. Full of the light and magnificence of his presence.

And so the pilgrimage becomes a mode of literature. Becomes a kind of story we tell one another. A story that organizes our experience or our possible experience. And of course the quest is a particularly interesting variant of this. The true adventure. Where we are expected to blunder off the beaten path. Off the normal and expected pilgrimage routes. To find what? Why to find the wild God. The unexpected God. The God who can be almost anything. Who is not confined to the expected relics. The pile of expected bones or cloth or stone.

Or it becomes a visit to the Holy Man or the Holy Woman. Becomes a search for the one human or one of the few humans who speak directly with God or to whom God regularly speaks directly and who may or may not teach us how to Be. How to Be like him or her. So that we may be able to find God with us always. Immanuel himself.

But in any event, the pilgrimage becomes a story we can walk out into ourselves. Becomes a story we can make also for ourselves or of ourselves. And so we do this. Many of us. By the millions. The tens and hundreds of millions. And even the atheists and agnostics pick this up. Pick this genre up. And walk out into their own morphed pilgrimage. They hike up into the mountains. They hike out into the desert. They take the tour bus to the Grand Canyon rim or the cruise ship to the Alaskan coast or the cruise ship to Antarctica or to the Galapagos Islands.

Or they become scientists. They become wildlife biologists or marine biologists or geologists or climatologists or whatever, and they make their field work their pilgrimages. Their research becomes their own personal search for the Beautiful or the Wild or the Other, which are all forms of course of God. God in the world. God out away from the quotidian. The every day. The humdrum.

And so this pilgrimage genre becomes mighty among us, does it not? It becomes a way we organize and live our lives, as though we are characters in a pilgrimage story. As though we may understand ourselves and others around us and the physical objects and ideas of the world we inhabit in the context of this. And so some of us set out on our pilgrimages and live much of our lives in this genre, even though we could not tell you that this is what we are doing.

Exile and Return

2009-08-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

Of course one of the traveling stories. One of the traveling away from home motifs. Is the exile and return.

Or maybe just exile, in some stories. Just exile, and the story ends there.

Or just return. And the story ends there.

And so the Bible begins in this way. In Genesis. Adam and Eve exiled from Eden.

Or take the story of Cain, for example.

Abraham told by God to leave the country of his home and go elsewhere.

Or take the story of Ishmael in the Bible and in Moby Dick.

Moses leading Abraham’s descendants out of Egypt and into the desert, there remaining for many years.

The Babylonian conquest and the Diaspora. Then the return.

The return of the younger brother.

The return of Jesus to life. Then his departure for Heaven.

The return of Odysseus.

The self-exile of. Oh. Let’s pick one. Oedipus. Or some. Medea. Einstein. Lenin. Gertrude Stein. Charlie Chaplin. Huck Finn. Joseph Conrad. Nabokov. And so on.

The pilgrimage. Traveling out and away from one’s home to find. To find what? Meaning? God? Peace? Beauty? Freedom? Oneself? So the traveling out and away, in the case of a pilgrimage, is a kind of return, a kind of traveling home. The exile is the return, in a sense.

And so all traveling becomes either a going out and away from or a returning or both. Sometimes self-motivated. Sometimes coerced. Sometimes motivated by the hand of God. Sometimes by one’s own hand.

And so the younger brother imposes exile on himself but then changes his mind. Ambivalence itself. And returns home.

And the older brother becomes alienated in his own home. Becomes a stranger in his own home, alienated by feelings of jealousy, betrayal, anger, resentment, spitefulness. Alienated by his own selfishness. His own sinfulness. Alienated from his father and younger brother by something in himself. A thoroughly modern protagonist. An exile in his own home.

Away

2009-08-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

Oh, someone asked me the other day how my life is going. You know, just a kind of conversation opener. We hadn’t seen one another all summer. And so it was like, Who are you now? Who have you become? Are you the same person I knew before the summer, when we used to see one another regularly? Has anything important changed? Have you traveled? What have you learned? How does the universe look to you now?

But of course we don’t ask most of these questions out loud, usually. They are implied. They stand in back of the voiced question. The voiced concerns or comments. The voiced conversation openers.

So we have illustrated for ourselves here the apparent versus the real. The surface versus the depths. The seen and heard versus the unseen and the unheard.

When one is gone. When one leaves home and is either temporarily or permanently away, one does change. One does not like to admit to profound change, but it nevertheless happens. Happens all the time. To all of us.

We leave to go on vacation. We play by the lakeside. We take a hike through the woods. We kayak for an hour or drink a beer or dandle a grand-niece on one’s knee. Or we visit a relative. Or we make a telephone call. Or we look upon mountains we’ve never seen before. And we are changed.

Something shifts. It’s not always clear what. Usually not. But something has happened. We become different people. Upon our return, we experience our lives as if we were different people.

Being away is supposed to be good for one. I suppose it is. Or can be. Vacations are said to prolong lives. Reduce the stress. And so forth. And I suppose they must, with all the research that’s been done.

Time away from those one cares about also changes one. Changes the relation. Puts the relation in a different topography now. Puts it into a strange terrain.

And it’s like that with God, too. I think. One gets irritated with the other. One feels the stress of the relation from time to time. And so one takes a vacation. One leaves the other to his own devices. And takes some time away.

And when one returns to the other. Well. There seems to be so much that for a long time is left unsaid. Seems better left that way.

Home

2009-08-04T11:54:00.000-07:00

Just finished the novel Home, by Marilynne Robinson. A fine novel. But of course I think novels are our philosophy and theology and poetry and cosmology and meaning in large measure these days. Along maybe with movies, which one might think of as light-weight novels. Or novels for the light-footed or light-headed or light-hearted.

In any event, as I have said in an earlier post, narratives of whatever kind can be all these things—our philosophy, our poetry, our cosmology, our meaning—altogether, if well done. And often if they are poorly done also. They help us understand our place and time and being and living by giving us characters somewhat like ourselves. And placing these substitutes—these simulacra—in worlds that are kind of like our own. By doing this, they help us imagine what our own stories are really getting at. Where they may come from and where they are headed. What they are about. Maybe.

Home does all this and is, as I say, well done. Very well done. It plays quite directly with the idea that we live in stories that are much greater than our own, larger stories that may help explain our own particular stories. Stories from the Bible, especially.

The Biblical story that resonates throughout Home is the story of David and Bathsheba. Jack Boughton, son of a Christian minister in Gilhead, Iowa, (who has isolated himself from his birth family for 20 years as the novel begins) is from his earliest memories estranged from his family and community. He steals. He causes mischief of various kinds. He wonders off by himself. He rarely participates fully in the life of the Boughton family. He is almost always gone. Out of the house and who knows where.

Jack in his estrangement struggles to understand himself. His embarrassing and self-destructive and self-isolating behavior. Well into the novel, he brings this up with his father, Robert Boughton, who is dying. And with his father’s old friend, John Ames, also a Christian minister. He tries to get them to help him sort out the Old Testament understanding of God versus the New Testament understanding of God and how God acts in the world.

He suspects that he—Jack Boughton—in himself might be a curse on his father and his father’s religion. Just as Absalom—in his rebellion against his father—appeared to be a curse on King David for David’s sins of sexual immorality and murder. He appears to wonder whether his father and other leaders of American Christianity haven’t been apologists for slavery and racial discrimination. He seems to wonder whether this isn’t their sin and whether he isn’t his father’s punishment for this.

And he seems to wonder whether the child that he fathered as a teenager, out of wedlock, didn’t die (as a toddler of an infection) as his own punishment, for his sexual immorality, his thievery, his torment of his father and the rest of his family.

Jack is married to a black woman, but he does not tell his father or his father’s friend John Ames. But he does ask them questions about the story of David and Bathsheba and about predestination. He seems to regard himself as someone whom God has created to play a role in his father’s story. Perhaps he has been created simply to be destroyed, after his usefulness as a torment for his father is at an end.

Jack isn’t a Christian. He knows Scripture quite well, but he is not persuaded. He takes what appears to be an Old Testament view—that God punishes his people—and attempts to understand his world and his experience using this view of God. He attempts to get confirmation from his father and John Ames, but they are ambivalent. Equivocal. Neither marches in with the New Testament story, either—with the unmitigated joy of salvation and redemption. Which is of course odd. Given that these two are, as I say, Christian ministers, and Jack is their inexplicable favorite. They love him deeply but are also quite. Well. Hostile toward him as well. Aren’t human beings odd? Even in novels? Particularly good ones?

Full of contradictions. Full of ambivalence. Paradox.

And so this idea that the story of our lives may be understood in light of other stories—particularly the stories of the Bible—comes up again in this novel. Comes up faithfully again and again throughout the history of literature. Sometimes explicitly, as in Marilynne Robinson’s Home, and sometimes implicitly, as for example, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (communion of the saints—1 Corinthians:12). One might almost think of all of the works of western literature as being so many footnotes to the Bible and footnotes to one another. And if one did, one might begin to see a bit—and only to a depth of about one eighth of an inch or so—into the world-wide sea of our stories and how they may well all intersect and work together somehow like so many elements of one ecosystem to make us who and place us where we are. Which can be—like the characters in the novel Home—at the bottom of the sea sometimes, struggling for air.

Or We Time Travel

2009-07-03T06:47:00.000-07:00

Time travel. Always fascinating. Always interesting. Often because time itself is kind of loopy. Kind of mystical. Paradoxical. Mysterious. And openly so. Openly full of possibility. Full of the present, certainly. But also full of the past. Heavy with the history of everything. The story of everything that has happened. And bright. Infinitely bright. With the immediacy of now. The raw power of now. The immense and awful and incomprehensible now. And of course the beauty. The extraordinary beauty of what is about to unfold. About to flower. About to open out like so many indeterminate and surprising petals of a new flower. A flower no one has ever seen before.

So living. Just plain slim-milk living. Straight-ahead normal put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other living. Is the gathering of the past into the present, is it not? And this on a continuum. On a moving diorama, rolling the past up into the present. The recollection of many pasts into the present. A past that is the accumulation of uncountable choices and random processes. A present that is the accumulation of uncountable choices and random processes. Or pseudo-random processes, if you really must put a fine point on it. Pseudo-random processes. Think about that! Apparent randomness. A randomness that is merely apparent, because there is directionality, is there not? Directionality, then? Built into the very stuff of existence?

And then the present. The present itself. Anything is possible here. Anything may happen. One has infinite freedom. God has infinite freedom and access. He may appear anywhere. In anything. In anyone. In any circumstance or event or process or. Well, you get the idea. And he does. The present is vibrant because of him. With him. Through him. The present is infinite with him. In him. Touch the world. Touch another. The Other. And anything may happen. It’s ridiculous, I know. It’s absurd. Like I say, it’s loopy. This Kingdom business. This Kingdom presence everywhere around us here. In us here. Among us here.

Because what are we doing here, anyway? Aren’t we making? Participants in the making? In the transformation of time? The remaking of time? The reformation of time from fixed and measurable intervals. Mechanical counting of intervals. Into the infinite expanse of God’s own participation? God’s own expansion and metamorphosis of time?

Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes I think we are not just time travelers. Sometimes I think we are time writers. That we have been asked to open time up. To expand time. To discover in what seems like ordinary time, extraordinary time. What is a practically boundless experience of time. A time that is not countable. That has no intervals. That is continuous. Or discontinuous. That is extensive into regions I personally have little idea of but that are characterized everywhere by the feeling that God. Well. Is everywhere there. Or here, I should say.

Or We Travel

2009-06-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

Story after story. Stories we travel through that. Well. Take us places we haven’t been. Or perhaps we have. But now. This time. It is different. Or it may be different. Stories that begin with the beginning of the world, some of them. Or begin in the middle of things. In the middle of the action. Stories that are as much about place as character. Or about character as much as place. Or about one character’s view of place. Or one place’s view of character.

But they just keep coming, don’t they? Starting with. Well. I don’t know which of them begins it. In all likelihood there were many stories that preceded what we know of them. The written travel stories that we have passed down to us. Over the millennia. The many years. Unwritten stories that were born with language, maybe, and began as hunting stories. Stories about a hunt that might have lasted days and taken the hunting party far afield, so to say. To places the hunters had never been before.

And herding stories. Stories about herders taking their flocks to places they’d never been, in search of better pasture. Or stories about herds that led their shepherds to places they’d never gone, in search of better pasture.

And trading stories. Stories about men packing trade goods over the mountains or over the lip of the tundra to people they’d heard about and that may wish to barter. May wish to trade what they’ve made for something someone else has made. Wineskins for prayer wheels, for example. Or salt for cloth.

And war stories. Stories about men traveling great distances to kill one another and pillage one another’s tribe or settlement or village or city. Stories that involve heroic deeds. And terror. And death.

Our minds are full of these, aren’t they? Full of the events and the characters and the discoveries and the mishaps and the conflicts and the disappointments and the hope and the faith that drives the traveler to keep going in a strange place. Where there are strange people with strange speech and strange customs. Where even the earth itself seems strange. Hostile. Other.

And so we have the written stories that play themselves out like movies in our heads and hearts. That play against the backdrop of our lives. Or that are like drones. Drone notes. That underlie the melody of our lives.

And so we have the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example. The story of Adam and Eve. The story of Abraham. The story of Moses leading Israel out of Egypt and through the Sinai. The story of Jesus wandering about Israel and Galilee.

And so we have Herodotus’s The Histories. Virgil’s The Aneid. We have Beowulf. We have Boccaccio’s Decameron. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Melville’s Moby Dick. Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Joyce’s Ulysses. Kerouac’s On the Road. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways.

Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. And how to think of them? They rattle around in the mind as the stories of the Tanakh must have rattled around in the minds of first century Jews. First century Christians. First century writers of the New Testament. The great traveling stories.

And knowing these stories. Writing about Jesus and having these stories. These travelogues. Rattling around in their heads and in the heads of their readers. Certainly made all the difference. Didn’t it? This shared sense of what has happened. What the possibilities are. What may happen next. How meaning works.

How things go. What life is. What it feels like. The sense that it goes somewhere. That character is bound up with meaning. And movement. And God. How God is bound up with us. As we travel resolutely. Hesitatingly. Haltingly. Quickly. Deliberately. Uncertainly. Incompetently. Certainly. Forward into time and place. Into the great mystery. The enormous unknown of who we are and what we will be. What God may do. What will unfold and what it all may mean.

Or We Dive

2009-06-15T06:20:00.000-07:00

Or we dive into the sea of love. The billions of us. We play in the waves. We belly-ride the swells, which we catch at a great distance. At a distance so great that the shore is almost not visible. At a distance where there are maybe sharks, but we don’t care. Where the currents are perhaps swift, but we don’t care. Where the water is many times deeper than we can know. But we belly-ride the swells together until they become waves. Then we laugh and whoop, riding them. Losing them. Catching them. Alternately. It does not matter. This is something, this wave-riding. This sea-speed. This rushing in the wine-dark, sun-lighted, liquid road of love. And the most of us out here. Well, we’re all of us a little scared and a little happy, and no one knows what will happen.

Or at the edge of the sky of love, the billions of us run with our aluminum or carbon fiber structures and our nylon hanging limply. Limply over us and around us. Flapping as we run. Until the earth disappears suddenly from under our feet and we are floating. Until we are suspended on the mere air and wind and the blue and white and the clarity of the atmosphere. The buoyancy of nothing but moist clouds out here. Above a cliff of rock and earth that plunges just about straight down. Oh. Maybe a mile or two. Something like that. Down there, beneath our chests and feet, a river carries a silver sun. A dark and blinding river. And it is green all around. The green of Mountain Dogwood, Black Cottonwood, Sugar Pine, Black Oak, Incense Cedar, Ponderosa Pine, and Douglas Fir. And the smell here. It is. Oh. It is a living incense. Something like the smell one imagines exists only in paradise. And the quiet here is like no other sound on earth. A quiet that seems to go on and on. And there is freedom here! Oh, we are infinitely free! The sky is our element. We may go wherever we like.

Or at the edge of the poetry of love, the billions of us suddenly speak! And in our speaking, discover love. Discover words we never knew existed. Discover meanings—extraordinary meanings—that we didn’t know could exist on this particular ontological plane. We discover many ontological planes as we speak. As we discover the possible impossibilities of love. The ways of love. The infinite colors and shapes and curves and rushings and coastings and driftings and strivings and climbings of love. We speak and in our speaking find the holy resonating. We find ourselves saying words that have been said for centuries and have roots that go back millennia, reverberant in the mouths of tens of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of us extending back in time. Holy words. Reverberant words. Words, some of them, without any meaning but their own low, lost, fundamental sound. Saying our love to one another and to God in as wide and varied and low and high a voice as one may conceive. As one may say. A voice made of multitudes. A voice resonating with the voices of many only wishing love. Proclaiming love. Declaiming love. Projecting love. Creating love. We discover ourselves speaking in iambic pentameter. In alliterative verse. In rhymed couplets. In the form of sonnets and villanelles and sestinas. In the form of ballads. But while much of it is in forms, most of it is free verse. Most of it sounds like ordinary people speaking. But speaking poetry. Naturally. Natural poetry created of our souls and mouths and tongues and lungs and throats and blood and muscle and bone. Created of heaven itself. We are renewed and enlightened by the freshness of the words. The immediacy and honesty and originality of what we say. Or what is said through us. We are poets, we think! My God, we did not know this was possible!

Or at the edge of the wilderness of love, billions of us rush outward. Away from the cities. Our numbers mystically dwindle. Away from the concrete. Let the concrete rot! Let the glass and steel shatter and fall through the centuries of disuse and encroaching life. Life that swallows up the rigidities of man like an elephant swallows a peanut. Or like a gorilla swallows a grape. Or like a blue whale swallows krill. We live simply again. In small groups that care for one another. That fish and gather and make clothing and hold one another. Again. That make do with what they have. That warm one another in winter. That celebrate in summer. That fatten in summer and thin in winter. That inhabit a world of quiet and gentleness and orderliness that most of us and our ancestors hadn’t known for centuries. For millennia. We speak simply to one another, with care. But mostly we are quiet. We make room for the wind and the mountain and the valley and the finch and the sycamore and the river sounding the small pebbles and the pond reflecting the willow and the ocean crashing into the sand.

I Say Love

2009-06-14T06:29:00.000-07:00

At the edge of the sea of love, we walk about, gesticulating to the few in the water. To the few swimming and cavorting and bobbing in the waves. The shore is full of us. The sand is obscured by the billions of us on the beach. The many billions. Some stand, facing away from the sea, looking back toward the land. Ignoring the sea. Others face toward the sea, angrily speaking to it, yelling at it, or at one another, pointing toward the sea.

Or at the edge of the sky of love, here on earth, the many billions of us look up into the blue illusion. The blue medium. Where some small number dive, parachute, glide, and fly around for a time before they come back to earth. Come back to join us here in our less dangerous state. We are shocked. We are amazed. Why would anyone do such a dangerous thing, we wonder.

Or at the edge of the poetry of love, we pace, the many billions, in our prosaic fashion. Our clichéd speech. Our unthinking, unfeeling, monochrome idioms and formulas that keep us from ourselves and one another. Our linguistic narcotics. Our semantic alcohol. Our walls of inarticulate locution. While joyously a few speak truly to one another with the full depth and breadth of their meaning. The full color spectrum of their souls. With words and syntax that are strange. That seem opaque. That are merely so many strange sounds.

Or at the edge of conventionality and respectability we queue up on the prolific concrete in lines to do nothing. We stand in lines for hours. Days. Weeks. Months. Years. We mill about in crowds all our lives in the many cities. In the suburbs. We sit in traffic. While out in the woods and in the fields and in the mountains and valleys, a few live in the wilderness of love. Simply. With few possessions. Joyfully. Without worry. Without a thought of tomorrow.

And we. Well, we do not trust them, do we? These few lovers that we have seen from time to time. Heard from time to time. Heard about by word of mouth. Or read about in books. That we have met. We do not join them because. We hesitate to say it. It simply feels uncomfortable to contemplate. Doesn’t it? But then we examine this feeling. Wondering about it. We’re not sure about this. We do not know.

Jesus Anointed by a Sinful Woman

2009-06-08T15:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, submerged in the ocean of church and then of home fellowship, swimming about in Scripture. Or actually drifting through the deep blue light of the Gospels. The warm wine-dark water of the Gospels. And looking specifically at Luke 7:36-50.

Developing a sense of what may be going on. Listening to others. Listening to one’s mind. One’s heart. Entering the story. Entering into the presence of Jesus. Entering into the first century again. The radiant warmth of his presence again.

Jesus at the dinner party. The sinful woman at his feet weeping, wiping his feet with her tear-wetted hair. Then pouring perfume over them. Rubbing that in. With her hair. Weeping all the while.

The Pharisee—the host—thinking Jesus is grossly imprudent, allowing himself to be touched by a woman like this. A vile woman like this. Jesus discerning his thoughts—divining his thoughts, really. Then telling the Pharisee—Simon—a story of a moneylender and two men to whom he had loaned money. One he loaned 50 dinarii. The other he loaned 500 denarii. But neither could pay him back; so the man forgave their loans.

Who would love the moneylender more? Jesus wants to know. The one who owed the 500 denarii, the one with the larger debt, Simon says. And he’s correct, Jesus says.

Then Jesus turns to the woman but still speaks to Simon, pointing out how Simon has treated him badly over and over since his arrival but how the woman has treated him with gratitude. With love. Extravagant love.

Then Jesus says something very interesting to Simon and to the others: “Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”

Right in Simon’s face. In the rude host’s face.

This is another example, I think, of Jesus turning the world upside down on us. Of sounding a little like he is conveying conventional wisdom when he’s actually dispensing quite abruptly and finally with conventional wisdom. And proclaiming a new way of thinking about God and love and sin.

At first, I thought. Oh. If you sin a lot—have a large debt like the guy who owed 500 denarii—like the sinful woman, you can be forgiven as long as you love extravagantly. And if you don’t sin very much—have a small debt like the guy who owed 50 denarii—like Simon, you can be forgiven as long as you love a little. Love Jesus a little. Love others a little.

But this analogous way of looking for the meaning here. Well, it just doesn’t work, does it? I mean, who throughout the Gospels does Jesus accuse of not knowing him at all and of oppressing the people, of spiritual arrogance, of cruelty, of callousness? The Pharisees don’t even love him a little, do they? And what about Simon? What about him specifically?

I don’t detect a bit of love there at all, do you? A coldness, certainly. A discomfort. An attitude of let’s get this over with and get this possible prophet and his sinful female hanger-on out of here.

So now that the expected parallelism doesn’t hold up—now that reasoning by analogy isn’t exactly working for us—where do we go? How do we understand what Jesus says?

Well, let me ask you, who is the greater sinner in Jesus’s eyes at this dinner party? Is it the woman, or is it Simon, the Pharisee? This question is left hanging there, isn’t it? Unasked and therefore unanswered.

I recall what Jesus makes plain elsewhere. All the Law and the Prophets can be reduced to two commandments: love God, and love one another. Has Simon given evidence of being at all faithful to either? How about the woman?

Isn’t Jesus suggesting that much the greatest sin of all is not to love?

What Jesus doesn’t say hangs there in the silence, doesn’t it? And one of the things he doesn’t say is that he who is not forgiven at all loves not at all.

And what is love in this story? Is it repayment in any sense? Does it balance the scales, so to speak? Oh, no. No, this isn’t the woman’s motivation, is it? Balancing the scales? Seeking forgiveness? Something has come welling up out of her in response to Jesus. To his person. A something Simon doesn’t seem to have. Or won’t allow. Or doesn’t recognize for what it is. Or worse yet, he doesn’t recognize Jesus as the One to love.

And this welling up. There’s nothing calculated about this is there? Isn’t it reflexive? Isn’t it straight from the heart? And so the woman is not thinking that she’ll love Jesus and therefore be forgiven. She seems to have only. Only what? Only love for Jesus in her. Working powerfully in her. Through her. Out of her. Nothing calculating. Nothing Machiavellian. The opposite.

And Simon? Well as I say. I think he’d rather Jesus put an end to his embarrassment and leave. The last thing Simon wants is to be associated with a man who consorts with sinners. Even though he might be a prophet.

And so this dinner party. What is this? I mean, why would this Pharisee invite Jesus? An insurance policy, perhaps? This man might be a prophet, and if he is, wouldn’t it be wise to be on his good side? Maybe a chance to take a good look at him. A good look at him with both eyes and the eyes of all his friends. And if he isn’t, well. It’s only one evening wasted.

So for Jesus. This love business. Isn’t this everything? For him, isn’t love of God and love of one another the full meaning of this enterprise? This adventure? Is there anything else? Well maybe. There’s spreading the Gospel. There’s paying attention to the Holy Spirit. But these are redundant, aren’t they? Or intensives? Well maybe not. Maybe the Holy Spirit is the means of making real meaning possible. Real love possible. Real possible love. Now that Jesus is. Well. Sort of gone.

The World Itself and Time

2009-06-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

The sun shines on all equally. Indiscriminately. Promiscuously. Polymorphously. Perversely. Matter itself converted to energy and then in its streaming converting itself through life back into matter. Back into some solid seeming stuff that is more like a gas with particles suspended in it. Really. Than we’d like to think. The spaces between the denser bits much much greater than the bits themselves.

And the world! The actual substance that’s revealed! It’s all presentation and no discourse. It’s all object and event. Objects morphing into other objects, animate and inanimate. Bubbles of gas and suspended bits and color and texture and shape and movement and vigor in various degrees. Existing at various speeds. And then morphing into something else.

And I say objects, but what I mean is the semblance of objects, because as I say. There are no physical objects here. None to speak of, really. All only made of gas and energy and a few scattered bits that when you pare them down. When you get out your electron microscopes and other apparatuses. Other accoutrements. Appear to be more like. Oh. Bubbles. Or balls blown up. With nothing inside but. Well. Spin, for example. Or charge. Or wobble. Or even more metaphorically: tone. Or tonal sequence. Or tonal duration. Or tonal periodicity.

Presentation? You ask. Presentation? What can this possibly mean? And I think of the red wheelbarrow, for example. A bird in a palm tree, singing. A man wiping mud from his eyes, seeing for the first time. An empty tomb, with the grave clothes empty on the stone. The Buddha holding up a flower. Oh. For example a passion flower. A purple one. Twirling it gently. Endlessly. In the sun.

I say bubbles of gas. I mean bubbles of spirit. Bubbles of soul. Bubbles of being. Of animate being. The denser bits enlivened by something not strictly speaking of this world. Of the world of objects moving ceaselessly through fields of energy. Fields of light and gravity. Fields of gamma rays and x-rays and. Well. You get the idea.

I say idea. And what I mean is this imported stuff that makes discourse possible. And metametaphorical object making possible. Probable. Necessary. These abstracted objects. These objects that are even less objectifiable than the bits of bubbly matter that float about and that we call the world. That we call the material world. But isn’t.

And then of course there’s time. Time itself. A construct through which all this moves. All this drifts. All this sequences itself. All this arrives and does not arrive. All this is always arriving and is never arriving. All this is morphing always. Into something else. Driven to morph. Driven to be. And in its being changes. Changes ontologies. Changes states. Changes beings. Matter and spirit. Spirit and matter. Changing places and changing the nature of their beings. But not really.

Because what drives this. What inhabits this. What enlivens and lights and embodies and stands and moves and makes and in its making discovers itself is God. God at work in us. God at work in the world. Everywhere we look. God informing. God redeeming. God creating. Everything. All at once.

I Say Mellifluous

2009-05-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

I say mellifluous, but it is so only in the sense that the unsweet may attain to the mellifluous. Oh, I’m listening more. And more. Oh! This is dangerous. This singing. This singing that eschews sweetness. This singing that only modestly and carefully and in the most understated of ways will admit sweetness. Will admit melody into this medium of the profound.

Have you explored this? Have you submerged yourself? And, oh! I must say that my metaphor in the previous post was inept. Was mistaken. Oh, please understand that as you listen to the profound, you are. Well. You disintegrate. You don’t explode. No. You disburse. You discombobulate. You discompose. You discontinue. You discourse. You disencumber. You disabuse. You disjoin. You dislocate. You dismay. You dispense. You dissociate. You distort. You distribute yourself. Randomly. Everywhere.

Oh, these Gyuto Monks. How did God come up with these? How did he teach them their practice? What subtle nudges did he make and in their making make this? This subtle enormous unlikely improbable remarkable needle of light into the soul?

One is not floating on the surface any longer as one listens to this. No. One is matter and soul descending through a blue medium. A blue liquid. Filled. For now. With sun.

Listening to the Gyuto Monks

2009-05-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

Throat singing. Overtone singing. Various names for it, but. Listen. I’ve been listening all afternoon. Exploring the profound. The lowest lost human notes. And simultaneously, chorally, two tones and then three tones. Chanting. Praying.

I get the idea, as I’m sitting here. The feeling. That I’ve never been born. That I exist in a kind of liquid made entirely of sound. I’m closing my eyes, and I’m finding I’m empty and I’m full of this sound. The sound the ocean would make if it were human and there were no one around to hear. The ocean before people, singing a song it has been singing since the beginning of the world.

They are praying, but I do not know what they are saying. The words are in another language. One I don’t understand. And even those who understand the language say they cannot understand what is being prayed because of the distortion. The stretching and shortening and intoning and the guttural idiom into which the words have been transposed. The oceanic dialect into which the words have been submerged.

Chanting like the swells out in the ocean. Out away from the continental shelves. Out where the ocean is deep blue and black and wine-colored at midday. The sun. The infinite suns glistening on its surface. The cyclic swells coming and coming, sometimes deep. Sometimes shallow. But always underneath them a depth that is miles of strange. Miles of dark. Miles of creatures that swim slowly in a dance-like rhythm. Creatures that one can hardly imagine. Thick down there—a holy unholy presence that occasionally surfaces.

Occasionally the whale, for example. Occasionally the creature as large as an office building. Blowing. Leaping. Occasionally a pod of them. A pod of blue whales rising to blow and dive and surface and dive randomly all about one’s raft. One’s craft of sticks and rope and cloth. That may easily be smashed and randomized across the surface of the sea. But isn’t.

Or perhaps I’ve always existed. Perhaps I’ve always been floating like this. Undulating on the surface of the deep. Since before time itself. Listening to the sea chant in this way. Announcing joy. Articulating danger. Pronouncing order. Exploring chaos. Expressing gratitude down to the mellifluous base of its being.

But of Course Justice

2009-05-24T15:47:00.000-07:00

But of course justice with a lower case j is what the Isaiah Agenda is all about. Isn’t it? Justice as love. Justice as forgiveness. Justice as kindness and generosity and intercession. Justice as intervention. As tenderness. As care-giving. As self-sacrifice. As charity. As doing unto others. As redemption. As salvation. As Kingdom presence.

Part and parcel. One of the many Kingdom strands woven together at the beginning of the world. By Jesus. Through whom all things were made.

Justice as what drives us to do impossible things for one another. Improbable things for one another. Ridiculous sappy outrageous things for one another.

So what can this mean? This sense. That yes, justice is worthy. Justice is Jesus. Justice is what we are about as followers. And this idea, embedded within the other. That for ourselves this is poison. Seeking this for ourselves is. Well. It’s outrageous. It’s greedy. There is evil everywhere in the room of this meaning.

How does this work, exactly? This idea that for me, justice is something I do not deserve. Something that if sought for oneself, there is. Oh. A feeling that. Well.

But that for others, it’s a requirement. It’s necessary. It’s required now. Immediately. If not sooner. It’s a noble cause.

Inwardness and outwardness. The idea that justice changes depending on which direction it’s pointed. Like love. Like forgiveness. Like. Well, you get the idea.

The one idea. But it’s multifarious. Multidirectional. Multilateral. Multilocular. Multiloquent.

But further, there is also the sense that justice insisted on strenuously for others may become revolution. May become hatred. May become untold evil committed out of outrage. Out of the sense of real damage and pain. Out of maybe a numbness created by months or years or decades or centuries of cruelty and torture and killing and exploitation and denigration and unspeakable acts repeated until.

Well, you get the idea. So even the idea of justice directed outward. Directed toward the protection and nurturance of others can carry in it also great evil if allowed to evolve. Allowed to mature into something monstrous. Something full of outrage calling for punishment and retribution. Eradication. A blotting out. An erasure.

I think of soldiers. Some of whom I took care of when I was in the Army. Psychiatric ward. Viet Nam veterans. Oh, 1972 or so. These men. Some of whom had gone berserk. Their friends killed. Their lives threatened. Everything around them that breathed or lived threatened them. Their friends killed in horrible fashion. Men who. Well. Wanted justice. Nothing more. Nothing less. And then of course. They went crazy because of what they did. Some of them, anyway.

Some thought they were Jesus. Some thought they were the devil. Some were catatonic. Some hallucinated terrible things. Some evolved fascinating theories that made no sense. Theories about DNA. About Japanese composers. About the meaning of everything.

Mrs. Dalloway, Again!

2009-05-18T06:47:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Justice. With a capital J. I finished Mrs. Dalloway, and what you may find interesting is that there is more about faith in this novel than most Christian novels one might pick up in a bookstore today.

That may not be saying much. But still. Oh, there is evil. Clearly identified evil. There is the communion of saints, although they are not identified as such. There is strong spiritual connection throughout, one character with another. As though the unconscious parts of the characters and some of the conscious parts of the characters all swam in the same spiritual medium. In the same ocean of spiritual meaning, spiritual being, spiritual struggle, spiritual vulnerability.

There is the persistent metaphor of the waves and the oceanic bringing the highly various sensibilities and personalities and perspectives together into one disparate community of experience and understanding and spiritual immediacy. It is as though the various characters have been created to live separated from one another bodily but to live together also, commingling in one homogenous substance. One linguistic or elemental or moral or emotional or cultural or kingdom construct.

There is one Christian that is identified as such. One unattractive, large, desperate woman. A woman who attempts to alienate Elizabeth from her mother, Clarissa Dalloway. The woman resents Clarissa. Resents people with money. Envy’s them. Is full of spite and anger and self-loathing. A woman who cries out for justice. Who is bitter because she feels the world has ignored her, may even despise her. Feels as though the world and those around her have been thoroughly unjust to her. And she has no means of escape.

She attempts to alienate Elizabeth from her mother but is not successful. And the narrative leaves her desolate, miserable, feeling acutely the injustice of her life. She knows her powerful feelings are not Christian. Her pastor calls her emotions and attitudes “of the flesh.” She knows that her hatred of the privileged is wrong, but she feels herself to be powerless to do anything against it.

Another character—Septimus Smith—a shell-shocked veteran of World War I commits suicide to avoid his evil doctors. Doctors who are in denial of the horror that exists in the world and that Septimus has seen and participated in. In denial of his real mental and spiritual terror. Doctors who pretend that evil does not really exist and who want Septimus to participate in this same delusion with them. This lie with them. And in his anguished state of mind. His tortured spiritual state. Septimus can think of no other way to escape them than to throw himself to his death.

These and many others are arranged in a kind of chorus of spiritual unfolding, of spiritual disrobing, of spiritual improvising. The narration moves from the stream of consciousness of one character to another and to another and through almost 20 altogether throughout one day in June, 1923. A day that precedes Clarissa Dalloway’s party. A party given for no particular reason. In the evening. Party-giving is Clarissa’s particular joy. Bringing together others who should be brought together in the flesh as they have somehow already been in a less apparent way. This is her contribution, she thinks. This ability and willingness to bring people together who ought to be together.

The Parable of the Perplexed Reader

2009-05-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

I happened to be reading “The Parable of the Persistent Widow” (Luke 18:1-8) the other day, and it struck me that something so simple would have to have a plain meaning. Would not have any semantic recalcitrance about it. And so I read it with this predisposition in mind. Here it is, for your reference.

“Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: ‘In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’

“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don't fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!’

“And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

The writer tells us what to think about what Jesus says in this parable. So this should be a piece of cake, is what I’m thinking when I start it. He tells us that Jesus tells the parable “…to show them [his disciples] that they should always pray and not give up.” Fine, I’m thinking. Piece of cake, then.

Then I actually read the thing, and I’m thinking, Now let’s see. Where else in the Gospels does Jesus emphasize justice? Where else is justice in this life the important thing in Jesus’s teaching? Oh, sure. Justice on the last day. Justice when Jesus comes back. That’s clear. But does justice in this life figure importantly in his teaching?

I don’t seem to find that. No, what I find is an emphasis on love. Improbable love. Possibly impossible love. On loving one’s enemies, for example. On turning the other cheek, for example. On seeking the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of God. In the midst of suffering and oppression. I see him providing an example of what? An example of justice-seeking for himself? Does he demonstrate in his own life that God can be expected to provide justice to us here, in this life? Doesn’t he ask us, for example, to bear our own crosses?

Is bearing our cross the same as justice in this life? Should we expect “troubles” and to bear our cross in this life, or should we expect justice?

And what do you make of the sudden shift Jesus makes in the last sentence of the parable? Here, he’s talking about a widow and an unjust judge. He’s encouraging his disciples to expect justice of God, soon. After all, if an unjust judge will dispense justice, can’t God be expected to dispense justice when the time comes? But then he shifts the subject to something else entirely. Or does he? He talks about faith.

Here, he’s been talking about justice, justice, justice. And now he talks about faith. Why? Is he trying to suggest something about those who obsess about justice? Who seek justice above all things? Who grind their teeth concerning the injustices that are perpetrated on them every day? Who can think about little else?

What about faith? he asks. In the midst of all this justice-seeking, is there room for faith?
Or maybe what he does mean is that we should just keep praying for justice to be done. Maybe what he does mean is that seeking justice persistently is a sign of faith.

Is there a chance he could mean all of this? Is there a chance he does not present this story for simple decoding? Is there a chance he wants us to meditate on this story rather than decode it and move on quickly to the next one? Is there a chance that the function of the parable in Jesus’s curriculum is not proverbial? What is the chance that many of Jesus’s parables are actually more like koans than they are like proverbs?

So when I say that ambivalence, ambiguity, and paradox may be an inextricable part of things. Of language. Of the Bible. I’m thinking of some of these parables. Some of these Jesus stories. That seem to be more like koans than they are like explications.

The Spirit Work of Creation

2009-05-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

What is The Spirit Work of Creation? Isn’t it first of all the revelation of God? Isn’t it first of all the movement of the Holy Spirit into us and through us and out into others? Isn’t it the building and upholding of a Holy Spirit light pipe between us and God and between us and one another?

Isn’t The Spirit Work of Creation like grape plants and the making of wine from them? Isn’t God, the Father, the root of us, and Jesus the trunk of us, and aren’t we the branches on which the grapes grow? And isn’t the Holy Spirit the flow of nutrients up from the roots, through Jesus, and into us and into the grapes that dangle from our lives? The Holy Spirit as the capillary action of the plant, through which we have our being? And aren’t the grapes that we produce—the good of us, of our lives, our relationships, of our making—to be crushed and fermented into a pleasant, complex, flavorful, enlivening, fortifying, joy-releasing wine?

And aren’t we also the wedding guests? Those who are drinking the wine that is the essence of the good making of our ancestors and our friends and our family—the community of saints everywhere throughout all time?

Isn’t this our purpose? Isn’t this our method? And to the extent we make linguistic objects, to the extent we say things to one another and in our saying discover and make the world—we mystic believer priests—shouldn’t these locutions, these constructs, these encouragements, these love poems, these speculative instruments, these comedies, these tropes, these blogs, these works, these explorations of the possible impossible, these imaginative leaps, these outpourings, these roarings, these blessings, these expositions of the beautiful, these pseudo-psalms be like grapes that can be crushed and made into wine for the wedding feast? Wine for the enjoyment of the wedding party and all the saints?

Mrs. Dalloway

2009-05-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

I began rereading Mrs. Dalloway, a novel by Virginia Woolf, yesterday. Oh, what a lovely novel! What a linguistic and cultural and epistemological and ontological and philosophical and theological adventure!

A novel by a supposed atheist about an atheist within whose sensibility we discover the world and human experience as largely a mystical continuum. A mystically connected, remarkably fluid, largely spiritual mode or place or dance.

We inhabit the minds of many characters as Clarissa Dalloway makes her way through her day, but always come back to her experience, her purpose, her place, her history, her sense of things as the center, as our principal agency of knowing in the novel.

And as I made my way again through the beginning of the novel, I was delighted to dive deeply into this remarkable author and swim about in her imagination. Swim about in a world she has made for us from which we can look out into and re-experience the world.

And as I read, it occurred to me that the semantic recalcitrance that we experience in texts, in linguistic objects, begins with the semantic recalcitrance of the world itself. Of the world we partly experience and partly create or make in the experiencing of it. The world we make in the linguistic constructs we create in the act of our experiencing it.

A world in which events are both trivial and momentous. In which the real events of note are our experiences of the visible or auditory. Of the olfactory or tactile. Of the recordable events we all believe we should be able to agree on. Events such as a smoking airplane writing an advertisement for toffee in the sky, or a man hearing the birds sing, or people noticing a car carrying someone important as it makes its way through the crowded street.

As I began this extraordinary experience again, it occurred to me that each of these characters were spirit-beings through which all kinds of intangible things were passing. History. Emotion. Ideas. Perceptions. Urgencies. Purposes. Opacities. Good intentions. Conflicts. Grief. Love. Civilizations. Evil. Incomprehension. Ignorance. Imperfect understanding. Meaning.

And it seemed like these characters. These simulacra of real people. Were more like elements in the vast hydrodynamics of a planet than they were discrete individuals. As if they played the role of sentient nodes in the enormous spirit-work of creation.

Sentient and self-creating nodes, to some extent. But created nodes also. Nodes created by someone else. Some other agency that is largely secret and imperfectly known. Only hinted at in the confines of this particular infinity. This particular linguistic object.

So who is Mrs. Dalloway? Well, that is of course the question provoked by the title. Along the way we are given a number of answers. Partial answers. Here is one: "She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. . . .far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."

And here is another: ". . . at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved . . . quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots . . ."

And here is something specifically about the opacity of things or the finality or perhaps fatality of things in the mind of Clarissa Dalloway: "So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body . . . says too, That is all."

This last passage is most interesting, isn’t it? It is to me. The heart. The human heart. In the sounds and the rhythms it makes. Is a metaphor for ocean waves building and falling. Or are the waves a metaphor for the heart?

Or are the waves—an emergent reality created by the interaction between water and wind, the largely substantial and the largely insubstantial—more a metaphor for the human heart taken figuratively? Taken as an element of the soul?

What goes on here? Isn’t there an admixture of figure and ground? Isn’t there a confusion of the literal ground of the metaphor with the thing (substantial or insubstantial) being illuminated? What is human sentience? That half created, half made up sense of who we are and where we are and what we are about and what is happening to us and what we are doing that gives us our uniqueness? Our personhood? Our being?

Semantic Recalcitrance

2009-05-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

Wallace Stevens makes a vocation of semantic recalcitrance, but he did not invent it. Oh, take for example this poem by John Donne, a 17th century English poet, a poem called “Batter My Heart,” oddly enough:

Batter my heart, three personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captivated and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

So what is the poet saying here? Is he saying that he wants God to take him by force, against his will, his reason? Is he saying that he wants God, the great freedom lover, to imprison him? To do damage to him? Does he want God to go against his nature? Does he want God to be un-Godlike? Isn’t this irrational? Isn’t the poet being rather emotional here? But don’t the prosodic control and extended metaphor demonstrated here tell us that this is a remarkably rational man?

Or take for example this little imagistic poem by William Carlos Williams, a 20th century physician poet call “The Red Wheelbarrow:”

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

What is this poem about? Is it really about a red wheelbarrow? Apparently. But why would we care? Why should we care? What is the point? And what depends upon this red wheelbarrow? Does it literally depend or figuratively depend? Or both? Are we talking about rainwater here? Does the glazing of the rainwater depend on the red wheelbarrow? Do the white chickens? Does our understanding of the poem depend on the red wheelbarrow? If so, how so? But doesn’t understanding have to do with ideas? And there doesn’t seem to be hardly an idea here, does there?

Or take for example William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18,” written perhaps in the 16th century:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Is this a woman the poet is talking about? Is it the idea of a woman disconnected from any particular woman? Is this God or Holy Spirit? Is it a man? Is Shakespeare homosexual? If this is a woman the poet is speaking to, why does he pretend to compare her to a summer’s day, when he really contrasts her with spring and summer weather? In what sense can a woman be or exist in eternal summer? What is eternal summer? Is that heaven? Is the poem itself a kind of heaven or eternity? How is this possible? How is it possible for a linguistic object such as a poem to “live?” How can a linguistic object give life to a living person? Doesn’t it work the other way around, with the living person giving life to the poem?

Or take for example the first five verses from the Gospel of John:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

Is “the Word” language? Is it the Torah? Is it Jesus? What does “in the beginning” mean? Does it mean at the beginning of time? At the beginning of the universe? The beginning of this planet? Does it mean before the beginning of time? Of the universe? How can the Word both be God and with God? What sense does it make for a person to both be a man and to be with man, for example? If we say that “the Word” is in some sense Jesus, then what does it mean for all things to be made through him? Did he make all things, or did the agency of their making originate with someone else? What sense does it make to say that a living person had life in him? Isn’t this obvious? Why point it out? And how is the life of Jesus “the light of men?” What is “the light of men?” And in what sense can the darkness not understand the light of men? How can darkness understand anything?

Are ambiguity, ambivalence, and paradox—semantic recalcitrance—at the heart of language and any linguistic object? Are these qualities at the heart of Jesus and his meaning for us? Are these qualities to be found throughout the Bible? And if so, what does this mean for our understanding of Jesus, God, and the Bible? What does it mean for how we would best think about and talk about and write about God and his Word?

Is certainty about God and the Bible possible? In what areas is certainty possible and reasonable and justifiable, and in what areas isn’t it? Why?

Is theology an attempt to perfect God? To perfect the Bible? To the extent that it is, isn’t this a serious problem? Isn’t this like taking arms against a sea of troubles in hopes of ending them? (Please visualize here a man with a sword, hip-deep in the ocean, hacking away at the waves as they come crashing over his head.) Isn’t certainty in every theological dimension doomed? And isn’t the person who seeks certainty about God in all matters doomed?

Isn’t the I AM telling us, in telling us that his name is I AM, to back off? Isn’t Jesus in referring to himself as I AM telling us to back off?

The Single Artificer of the World

2009-05-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

And so what is this poem about, then? This poem by. Well. We think he might be an atheist. But maybe he’s an agnostic. Or maybe he’s a closet Christian after all. He did, supposedly, become a Roman Catholic while in the hospital toward the end. Maybe he’s playing with religious ideas all along. Or Christian ideas. Or maybe not.

Who is the singer? Whose spirit is she? Is she the poet’s muse? Is she the poet? Is she the Spirit of God? Is she the emblem of God and of all human makers? One does recall Genesis 1:2: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the water.”

Is the singer’s song art? Is it the Bible? What are the words she sings? Does she sing God’s Word into existence here? Why is her song different from the natural world itself? The sea itself? Where do the words that she sings come from? What are the words of her song? What is the melody?

Who is Ramon Fernandez? Why is he pale?

Who is the maker in the last sentence? Is this the singer? Is this someone else? Is this God?

Does any of this have anything to do with baptism, which is both of water and the spirit? Does any of this have to do with the creation of the world? With the creation of our understanding of the world?

In what sense do “the words of the sea” speak of origins? Is this whole poem about origins? Is the whole poem about the mystery of the origin of the physical world? About the mystery of the origin of our art, our saying, our speaking about the physical world?

What does Wally mean by the words, “mimic motion?” What is the ocean imitating? And why does he characterize the ocean’s “mimic motion” as creating a “constant cry?”

Why does Wally say that “The sea is not a mask?” I mean, I never thought of the sea as being a mask. Did you?

And what does he mean by saying that “her phrases stirred/The grinding water and the grasping wind?” Did she create them? Did she merely influence them?

And if the poet and Ramon are walking by the sea, how can they only hear the singer and not the sea itself? After all, the poet says, “But it was she and not the sea we heard.” Wasn’t he right there? Wasn’t the sound of the sea and the wind loud in his ears?

Is the sea truly meaningless? After all, the poet says, “meaningless plungings of water and the wind.” Is the poet contrasting the meaninglessness of the sea with the meaningfulness of the singer’s song?

What world does the singer make? The poet says, “Then we,/As we beheld her striding there alone,/Knew that there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made.” Does she make the meaningless world of the sea that she strides beside? Or does she make the meaningful world of her song? Or does she make both? Does she hear the sea or not? Does she see the sea or not?

Does the singer’s song speak the sea into existence or not?

Is the singer God’s imagination? Or is she our imaginations? Is she what God makes to bring order to the world? Or is she what we make to bring order to our world?

One does not know. There is little in the way of certainty here. There are terms we recognize. There are ideas we work with. There are contrasting but incomplete assertions about this world. The world of this poem. And maybe they bear some relation to the world we live and breathe and love in outside the poem.

Maybe the song that is this poem makes a world. Makes a linguistic object. That is a simulacrum of the world outside it. Or if not a simulacrum, maybe it is the philosophical and theological DNA through which such a world can be made.

What? Linguistic Beauty?

2009-05-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Oh, I don’t know. Have you listened for example to Wallace Stevens reading “The Idea of Order at Key West?” You can find a recording on the web. It’s. Oh. It’s like he’s tightrope walking in about eleven dimensions. Inflection, tone, pitch, timbre, volume, head voice, chest voice, groin voice. The syntax. The words. The strange words as they are assembled. None of them strange so much in themselves but their order. They are ingeniously ordered. Mystically arranged. Astoundingly made.

One might with good reason say that there is a very wide swath of poetry since Stevens that is imitative. That is derivative. That is much less ambitious but nevertheless reminds one of Stevens’s semantic resistance, his otherness, his insistent lack of idiomatic coding.

There is in “The Idea of Order at Key West” and most of the rest of his work a kind of nose-thumbing at the paraphrasers. The simplifiers. Those who want a locution, a text, a phrase, a verse, a sentence, a poem—any linguistic object—to mean one thing and one thing alone.

See for yourself:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the grasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and , singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of themselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Pray Tell

2009-05-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

And so pray tell, what can you possibly mean, Billiam? Billabong? You prevaricator. You poetaster. You dissembler. You overly nuanced lover of ambiguity, ambivalence, paradox, and fence-sitting. You over-educated dabbler in pastoral pontification, pulpit puling, and pretentious poesy. You kindergarten theologian. You pre-verbal philosopher. You linguistic cad!

You might say. And you might say this with some justification. In fact, I might say this with some justification.

But take Wallace Stevens. Oh. One of the finest American poets of the 20th century. Take him, for example. Atheist. Literary philosopher. Fictive theologian. A man who comes to poetry. Who takes poetry to be the supreme or original path to meaning. Who says to us, “Look here. Listen here. Meaning is in story. Meaning is in poetry. It’s in the making of fiction. It’s in the making of a beautiful linguistic object.

“At the end of reason. Beyond all reason, there is imagination. And the linguistic imagination is where we live. Where we come alive. How we come alive. And the. Oh. The end of the linguistic imagination. The purpose of the thing. Is the beautiful itself. Is the figuring—the bringing—forth of linguistic objects that are themselves beautiful. That give us glimpses of the Beautiful, which is the source of all linguistic beauty.”

Or he says something like that.

And so, what is this guy after, you might ask. What makes this guy go?

The Beautiful. The Imaginative. The Fictive. The Made. The Other. Poetry. BIFMOP.

And what is BIFMOP? Where does it come from? How does it have such power, to make an insurance vice president and one of the finest American poets of the 20th century scurry after it like a March hare after its love-interest?

Well, haven’t we been over this ground? I mean, haven’t we already spoken at length about this? No matter how much he might protest, isn’t old Wally after God? God as we can find him in language? In linguistic objects? God as he manifests himself in Poetry? In the Beautiful. In story. As he manifests himself to our senses? To our sensibility? To our Imagination?

Isn’t God always the Other whom we seek? Always? In everything? In everyone? In all objects? In all discourse? Everywhere?

Whether we like it or not? Whether we admit to it or not? Whether we are aware of it or not?

Oh, Wally! Keep it up, I want to say to him. Never mind about God. Let’s not talk about God so much, if this is. If you have experienced something that has made you irrational on the subject. If something has happened to you as it has to me.

Just keep that poetry going! Keep that up, please. Keep up that making that is the rhyming we all do in the mind of God. The rhyming we all are after with the Word. With God’s Word. Through which he speaks all things.

Ellipsis

2009-04-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

Or take Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Of Mere Being,” for example:

“The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.”

Sometimes the best one can do is to buy The Palm at the End of the Mind, a book of selected poems and a play by Wallace Stevens, in a random, half-priced bookstore. To reread him, the insurance man from Hartford, Connecticut. Sometimes in the already/not yet, the best one can do is to be an insurance man and write poems about the imagination. Or to be an intellectual property man and write the occasional ellipsis… The occasional blue silence. That merely stands uneasily for what one understands. Or what one comes to. Or what one has to say.

Sometimes the best one can do is to regard the redbuds in Columbus, Ohio, surrounding the house of one’s ailing sister. The redbuds in April. Bursting into the color of fire-coals this way and that. A pink. An almost lavender. A color wood will sometimes become after hours of burning. Wood that glows in the ephemeral flames, surrounded by ash. Redbuds. Surrounding the house surrounded by the improbable green. Irregular flower-works. Flowery wood-works. Striations akimbo against the blue sky. Their red-budded branches also dangled down.

Easter Weekend

2009-04-13T06:22:00.000-07:00

Good Friday darkened evening service. Gathered. Not many. Some children. Some students. Some adults. In the back, some Jesus art. Some crucifixion pictures. Windows back onto that beginning.

And it feels. Oh. I think it feels like straw. Disintegrated straw blown in here. All of us. Turning in the narrow-spectrum, incandescent light. Then the music begins, and we sing. We are human again. And behind me, there.

I imagine because of the voices behind me. The woman’s and the man’s exquisite voices wrapping themselves around me. That I am. Well. That this is it. This is the kingdom of God. This is one of the many chambers in the City of God.

Then Sunday. Sunny Sunday. The bright colors flame through the entry way and up the stairs and into the make-do sanctuary. The rented sanctum sanctorum. The little girls in pink tights. Smiling. The little boys loudly laughing. Ram-jetting all around.

I don’t know. The singing seems quick. Silvery and bright. And again the same woman and man behind. And again now. Lovely. In the natural light broadly washing over us, wave after wave. As the particles carom and ricochet all about the place and burst. Positively burst open everywhere.

And we stand on the western beach of the Sea of Galilee. It’s morning. The waves have just begun to stand up in the breeze bringing us the sun. The waves with the sound of eternity in them. We are eating fish and bread. Our garments flutter in the brightness.

So Try This For Example

2009-04-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

So try this for example. Try patting your head, rubbing your stomach, doing the foxtrot, and reciting Richmond Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s Illiad, all at once. All the way through.

Or try this. The year is 1905. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show is touring France for the second time. You know Buffalo Bill’s Wild West? Right? Cowboys from all over the world. Indians. American Indians. Sitting Bull was a performer in the show for a time. The overarching theme was the taming of the wild west. Making the west safe for white women and their families. Their children.

There was remarkable melodrama. Little real life dioramas illustrating the pioneers’ movement west. The Pony Express was enacted and exhibited. The Deadwood Stage was enacted and exhibited. The hardships. The danger because of the Indians. The heroic exploits of various and sundry. Including Buffalo Bill himself. Who concocted tall stories about his heroism and played them out in his shows. Little fictional accounts of real life events. Or was it real life accounts of fictional events?

The Battle of the Little Big Horn was play-acted out: It was called Custer’s Last Stand. The defeat of General George Armstrong Custer. Bill Cody played Custer. And so on. Little exempla. Little scenarios in which the story of heroic half-white half-savage men made the world safe from the wildness of uncivilized and ungoverned unwhite men. And these. These simulacra. Were how Americans came to know themselves, in part. How Europeans came to know Americans, in part.

It was life undefined, to a large extent. From the European point of view. It was life unrestricted. The American West was the free life. The life of danger and adventure and possibility. There was trick riding and lassoing and sharpshooting, for example. There were cowboys and Indians living in tents! Tents of all things. On the show grounds.

And so in 1905, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was playing at the base of the Eiffel Tower between April 2nd and June 4th. Toured all over France after that. But in Paris drew 3 million visitors during that 2 month period.

And do you know what was going on only 121 miles from Paris during this period? In Bern, Switzerland? Well our friend Albert Einstein is having a wonderful year. His best year yet. He is working at the Federal Office of Intellectual Property as an assistant patent examiner. And he is making babies with his wife. And he is writing and publishing papers. Remarkable papers. Four of them.

It is called Annus Mirabilis because of Einstein’s four papers published that year. 1905. So as Bill Cody was redefining what it is to be an American for the Europeans. As he is setting his simulacra of the American Story before millions of Europeans. As he is raking in the cash and making a name for himself.

There is little Albert Einstein telling his little stories about how the physical world works. Or the physical immaterial material construct we call the world. So one paper was on how we might think of light as many discrete quanta or packets rather than waves. Of course the idea of light as a wave was the popular idea of light among physicists at that time.

So another paper was an explanation of the small movement of tiny bits of matter as Brownian motion. This explanation of random movement traces its heritage at least as far back as Lucretius, a first century B.C. Roman poet and philosopher, who, in his poem “On the Nature of Things” or as it is sometimes translated “On the Nature of the Universe,” explains the random movement of dust particles in a shaft of sunlight as being caused by unseen atoms that cause the random movement of the dust. So this paper by Einstein reaches back to a poet to understand the possibility of the atom—again—and the possibility of randomness or indeterminacy resting at what was then newly (in this paper) considered the foundation of matter.

So another paper was on Special Relativity, which we in part have already touched upon in another post, along with some aspects of General Relativity, which was to come relatively later. Some years later. In his career.

So the fourth paper was on the equivalence of mass and energy and the theoretical possibility of the transmutability of the one into the other. This paper expresses for the first time this idea, and it expresses it in one of the more memorable locutions of the 20th century: E = MC².

So as Buffalo Bill Cody is rescuing a woman and her children in her prairie cabin from her Indian attackers in his Wild West show at the base of the Eiffel Tower, there is little Albert rewriting our understanding of the universe. Or parts of our understanding. Who knows, he might have even taken his young family over the border for a spring or summer excursion to see the splendor and panorama and wild good-naturedness of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

Can you hold both of these in your mind simultaneously? Can you imagine little Albert wandering around the show? Marveling at the. The. Oh, the fancy shooting, for example? At the Indians in their buckskins and their feathery headgear? At the rope tricks? At the trick horseback riding? And at the strangeness of it all?

Now What's Imagination For, Again?

2009-04-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

What is the final cause of imitation? What is the final cause of imagination? one wonders. The purpose of imagination. Imitation. What’s imagination for, really? When you get down to it? I mean, why have it? Isn’t it a waste of time? I mean, people with mathematics on their brains messing around with. With stuff that gets shorter as it speeds up? Are you kidding me?

Messing around with black holes. With places in the universe where the gravity is so great that light can’t escape. What? Are you kidding me? Get outta here! Yuk, yuk, yuk! You really have got to be outta your mind. Don’t you? To imagine stuff like this? To conjure this kind of stuff up out of a notebook full of mathematics and a few observations from afar. From many light years away.

Or take the story of Desmond Tutu and post-apartheid South Africa. Forgiveness. No massive and bloody purge. No mass murder. No frenzied outpouring of anger and revenge and evil. No. An orderly process of discovery and forgiveness. Who could have imagined that? How? Ridiculous, I know. Absurd. Silly. Impossible. Improbable. Given what we know about humans and how they work. Unimaginable.

But of course this is the universe. The one verse in which we in fact do live. Don’t we? Whether we will or no?

The one verse in which heterogeneity and diversity and silliness and absurdity and impossible facts and improbable theories and. A universe in which the foundation of matter looks more like ideas than particles. A universe in which people are bound together by love, an invisible improbable substance. An idea more than a substance. But an idea that is substantial enough to require great mathematical room in our calculations of one another and how we function.

Love that drives what? Self-sacrifice everywhere we care to look. Forgiveness wherever humans are found. Or almost.

Beauty that brings us almost to our knees. The longing for love and beauty that brings us almost to our knees. Or perhaps in some extreme cases, all the way to our knees. Even in America, where nearly everyone is enthroned in a recliner.

And despite Machiavelli and Nietzsche and the Robber Barons and Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Bernie Madoff and the current crop of casino capitalists. Despite all of the striving calculating death-dealing evil in the world. The greed and thievery in the world. There is also. Remarkably. Improbably. Impossibly. Love and forgiveness and generosity. There is forgetting. There is new life. There is new growth in the volcanic ash.

Incongruous. Ridiculous. Preposterous. Inane. Insane. Pure viscous and long-stranded drool.

And yet the universe is so. Is the way it is. No matter its improbability. No matter its uncomfortable paradoxes. Its ambiguity. Its opacity. Its multivariance. Its rascality. Its imbecility. Its. Well you name it. You extend the list from here.

And to deal with all of this. To hold all of this together in our minds and hearts at one time. We have been granted a great blessing. The blessing of our imaginations. A facility so remarkable we hardly know it is present. Sort of like our eyes or our ears. Notice how they are instruments of knowing but they disappear, don’t they? In the process of our knowing.

So also, the imagination. An extension of our eyes and our ears and our taste and our smell and our touch into our souls. Our senses extended into the spiritual realm of our very souls. Into our hearts and minds. So that we may make things. Make ideas. Make words. Make symbols. Make pictures. Make sounds. Make movements. Make shapes. Make stories. That synthesize the various improbable actualities. The impossible probabilities of the one verse. The one making that is our home.

Or Take This Morning's Minion

2009-04-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

Or take this morning’s minion, kingdom of relativity, for example. This is the universe we’re talking about now. How the universe works. The one verse works. How this immaterial material cosmological construct behaves.

And so the theory of relativity apparently has some rather paradoxical and perhaps ambiguous and perhaps ambivalent consequences:

1. Two events that are simultaneous for some observer may not be simultaneous for another observer, if the two observers are in relative motion.
2. Moving clocks tick more slowly than a “stationary” observer’s clock.
3. Objects shorten in the direction that they are moving with respect to an observer.
4. Time goes more slowly in higher gravitational fields.
5. Light bends in the presence of a gravitational field.

This is of course in the physical immaterial material cosmological construct. And specifically in the wonderful world of physics. And this paradoxical theory was first floated. Oh. A hundred years ago or so. So this idea isn’t new. No. It’s older than the Model T Ford.

So it’s old hat now.

Keep in mind that this is not hallucination. No. This is how space-time itself is made. Imagined. How it is structured. How it is being imagined. How it is being formed. Informed. Paradoxically. Ambivalently. Ambiguously.

There’s nothing like your grandfather’s clock about this. There’s nothing as quietly and calmly predictable and polite as a grandfather’s clock. No. This is more like. Oh. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Or take Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem, “The Windhover.” A poem about a bird that is not a bird. A paradoxical. An ambivalent. A bird that is Christ himself. A terrible, fierce, carnivorous bird. A beautiful, bright, ecstasy of a hunting and then a dropping bird. Dropping for the kill. Christ-Falcon. The killer of little field beasties. Bunnies romping in the field! Innocent little bunny poets!

It’s one of my favorites. Here it is:

“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.”

And of course this poem is old hat now as well, having been written before the turn of the century. The 20th century, that is.

A poem in which the speaker sees Christ and a falcon or kestrel as one being. One image. One multi-identity being. Masterfully hunting and then dropping to kill what? The speaker? The speaker-bunny? The floppy-eared poet? It seems like that.

And then where in the heck does plowing up a field come from in those last three lines? They also are linked imaginatively. They also are imagined by the poem’s speaker (who appears to speak to us and imagine this poem each time the poem is read) to be intimately related to the Christ-Falcon. Because. Well, look here. The earth. The dirt itself! As it is turned over by the plow. Is burning also. Is glowing also with the intensely bright. The brilliant! Glory of God.

So the terrible and the beautiful and the dirty and the lofty and the sacred and the carnal are all one. All contrasting. All contradicting. Yet holding somehow together in one imaginative experience. The one verse of our experience. The one physical immaterial material cosmological construct of our lives.

Or Take This Morning's Vision

2009-04-02T06:07:00.000-07:00

Or take this morning’s vision, for example. I say my prayers, per usual. My Divine Hours prayers. My Phyllis Tickle compiled book of psalms, hymns, New Testament passages, passages from Christian literature, prayers, poems, and so forth. The day divided into four prayer times, four groups of prayers.

But I. I. Being lazy about the thing. I do all four of them in the morning. Oh, typically about 5:30 or so. It takes about 20 or 30 minutes to do all four sessions at one go. I say them out loud. Read them out loud. But quietly. Softly. Because Pat is still sleeping. Then I ease back in my recliner. A typically American way of praying. Kind of like watching TV. And pray some more.

Pray for my ill sister. Pray for an ill friend at work. Pray for my children. My wife. My brothers. My parents. People I love. People I don’t particularly love but that. Well. I want to pray for. Various and sundry, in other words. Then let the mind rest. Let the heart rest. Let the soul rest in all the God talk I’ve been saying and thinking. Rest in the river of words I have been speaking to God. Ride on the current of love he returns to me as I send my current of love and praise and thanksgiving and petitioning for those I love and those I only know back to him. Kind of an alternating current of love flowing back and forth between us.

So as I say, I rest in that. Per usual. The quotidian morning love fest to kick off the day down the right road, so to say.

Various images. Various thoughts. Various words. All scrambled. Montage-like action of the mind. But then I settle. Then there is nothing but the floating. The floating on the circulating current of love.

Then a man approaches out of the distance. He is a kindly man. I don’t recognize him, but I do. I can’t for the moment say his name, but he is very familiar. I have a feeling we know one another very well. He is smiling and looking at me steadily.

And he has in his arms a baby. A precious infant. Oh maybe several months old. Old enough to make eye contact. To smile. To laugh. We look at one another and smile. We laugh. We do this for awhile.

Then the kindly man hands me the baby. It’s so quick, I can’t raise my arms in time to take it. The man releases it. And it falls. I come to myself again, trying to catch it before it falls and hits its head on the arm of my chair. Or worse yet might fall to the floor. I wake and in my broad waking discover the room again. Myself again. And there is no longer the kindly man or the happy baby.

What does this mean, I want to know? What is this about? And I immediately have the feeling it has to do with church. I don’t know why I go there, but I do. Which church, I want to know. What church?

And I honestly don’t know. Is it the one I left 11 months ago? Maybe. Is it the one I attend now? Maybe. Is it an admonition from God? A conclusion concerning my behavior toward my former church? A conclusion about my clumsiness?

Had God given me my former church and had I dropped it, hurting it in the process, as a baby would be hurt if dropped? Was God giving me another church to hold? To nurture? To take care of? And was this a caution? Was this God telling me to be more careful this time? Not so clumsy this time?

Was it one or the other? Was it both?

Or was it a prediction? A prediction of what will happen with my new church, if I don’t wake up? If I don’t pay attention?

Or was it after all about something else? Was it about one or the other of my children or my wife or something at work that I am being asked to do?

Was it about Jesus? Was the baby Jesus and the man God himself? Have I let Jesus down. Have I hurt Jesus?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But I do come away thinking about what I have done and what I can do. What I should do and should not do. Say and not say. Differently. I don’t know what it means, but it does change me. It has changed me. I do feel like this is God.

I do feel like. Well. I don’t want to do that again.

Amino Acids, Anyone?

2009-04-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

What? you may be thinking. What the. Let me outta here. Let me outta dis dismal dreck. Dis dyspeptic dialog. Dis dismal dilation. Dis distended dilemma. Dis whole blankety blank versificatory verisimilitude.

And I wouldn’t blame you. I wouldn’t blame you a bit.

But here. Try this quote on for size. And pretend George Eldon Ladd had never come along. Pretend you never heard of him and kingdom theology. Pretend you are a first century Jew trying to make sense of what Jesus is saying.

“Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, ‘The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.’”

Do we find our curious amino acids here?

Well, first what is the kingdom of God? Is it a place? Most kingdoms occupy territory and they are ruled by a king. And kings are largely coercive fellows. They like to tax and make wars and live in. Well. A kingly fashion. They like concubines or mistresses or many wives or all of the above. They spend the people’s money lavishly. And they like to put down opposition rather nastily, with “extreme prejudice” I think is an appropriate phrase. They have people killed, often in quite painful ways. They put people in prison. They tax people so much that most of their subjects live in poverty.

Is this the sort of kingdom Jesus is talking about? Well, we don’t know for sure, because he’s a god or man or God-man of few words. But we must suspect that he is talking about a very different kingdom from the run-of-the-mill kingdoms of the time. In fact, because of other things he says, we must suspect that the differences between the kingdom he has in mind and your garden variety kingdom far out-weigh the similarities.

And so what we have is an ironic metaphor, don’t we? An ambiguous metaphor. A metaphor that points to contrast and paradox. Yes, this will be a kingdom, but it will not be like any kingdom you have known. It will operate on significantly different principles.

Why use the metaphor of a kingdom at all then? If the differences far out-weigh the similarities? Why not pick some other way to refer to it? Whatever it is. Why not refer to it as nirvana? Why not refer to it as America? Why not refer to it as a garden of heavenly delights?

So there is paradox and ambiguity in how Jesus talks. Perhaps a heavy dose of irony.

And what do you make of his saying this to a group of Pharisees, people who are out to kill him? People toward whom Jesus has a real attitude. You might go so far as to say that he thinks these are the last people who he would consider admitting to heaven. The last demographic who would be considered for admission on the last train departing for the garden of heavenly delights.

Is he really saying that the kingdom of God is present even to these? Is he saying that these people who he repeatedly condemns for their oppressiveness and hard-heartedness and hypocrisy and lovelessness and Godlessness. Is he really saying that these people somehow also live in the kingdom of God?

And so is his tone ironic? Is he sincere? Is his tone ambivalent? Could it go either way? Could it go both ways?

Hard to say. Hard to pin Jesus down, isn’t it?

Hard to take him one way only. When his language is so full of paradox, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Hard to understand him simply, when in fact his meanings are complex. Hard to feel comfortable thinking only of him as the Lamb of God when he often roars like a lion and is quiet and subtle as a snake and is generous as the sun and is cold and dark as a starless arctic winter night.

Literal and Figurative DNA?

2009-03-31T05:57:00.000-07:00

Literal and figurative DNA? you may be thinking. Literal and figurative DNA? What in Sam Hill are you talking about? Why can’t you speak plainly? Why do you have to go off on these. These. Oh, I don’t know. On these confusing excursions. These silly similes. These monotonous metaphors.

Would you please say a thing straight out? Would you please say what you mean?

But indirection is how art works, I want to say in reply. Metaphor is how art words. Works, I mean. Figure is how we know. It’s how we imagine and therefore how we know. And in God’s universe, paradox and ambiguity and ambivalence are his amino acids. They are his basic building blocks of life.

To bring real life into the conversation. To bring economy and concision and precision into the life of meaning. We need to use metaphor. Simile. Tropes of various types and kinds. We seem to need this. We seem built to take in meaning, take on meaning, take in the spiritual shapes God has in mind. Better. If we use figurative language to say what we mean.

And so when I say literal DNA, I am certainly referring to the chemical code, the molecular information from which all life is created. I am certainly referring to the infamous adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. I am certainly referring to the actual molecular structure and the behavior of the stuff—the words, the syntax, the semiotics, if you will—of the chemical language that God uses to speak life into existence.

And when I say figurative DNA, I am certainly referring to the figurative power of the language. Of these chemical words. To put shape and color and attitude and hairiness or scaliness and role and talent to the life a particular strand of DNA contains in code. Just as human language contains the figurative power that enables us to give shape and color and smell and tone and pitch to the life of meaning our language contains in code. To the stories our language contains in code. To the overarching understandings our language contains in code.

And so by conflating them, I hope to say something about the similarity. The resemblance. The illuminating possibility of looking at one in terms of the other. And I hope to say that as God speaks us physically into being through our DNA, he speaks us spiritually into being through spoken language. And as we use language and as we manipulate DNA, we participate in God’s own imagination.

We are not only imagined by God. Given a shape and image by God. But we also participate with God or work against God in his imaginative enterprise. In his creation. In his salvation. And in his love.

I Imagine You Imagining

2009-03-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

Looking for you. Looking to see you, touch you, taste you, hear you, smell you. I imagine you imagining all this. All that I know. Except my choosing. My choice to accept your love, for example. My choice to love. And this is what you discover when you imagine me. This is how you let me surprise you. Delight you. Maybe.

But after all, you imagine this also. All imagination is discovery.

I imagine you imagining me imagining you. Imagining your universe.

You are working all the time at this. It brings you pleasure but much pain. It brings you joy to spin us out of your immaterial material heart and mind. To make us and all that is about us. All that is not us. All that we are coming from and going to.

I remember a reverend in boarding school. A Ph.D. railroad economist turned Episcopal priest. Then hired into the school I was attending. Telling me my understanding of you was pantheistic. Telling me I was a pantheist, not a Christian. Telling me I had an improper. An incorrect. A heretical idea of you. He took delight in this.

I was fifteen. And he enjoyed cutting me. Cutting me down and casting me out. Casting me into outer darkness. I remember it. Like it was just this past weekend. He smiled a dazzling smile and turned his back on me. He was always smiling.

I became an atheist after that. I wandered for decades without you. Not knowing to look for you. Not knowing you are everywhere around here. All around this life.

I thumb my nose at that Episcopal priest. I imagine you thumb your nose at all such priests as well. At all those who would limit you and your Kingdom. You and your presence. You and your power. You and your work. Your making.

I thumb my nose at all those who would reduce you to a neat set of doctrines. A neat set of precepts. A set of ideas about you that keep you uninvolved. Unintegrated. Aloof. Apart. Imaginatively dead to this world.

I imagine you as a poet, not a systematic theologian or a designer. Not a logician. (You delight in confounding logicians.) Not a watchmaker. (You delight in a universe that is infinitely indeterminate.) Not a designer of machines.

I imagine you writing the story of the universe. The one verse. And as you write your story, we emerge from it. You discover us. You are delighted as we emerge from your words. From the work you are making. From the literal DNA and figurative DNA that you are spinning out. Spiraling forward through the infinite present. The always now.

We, among other things, are the work you are making.

We are made up. Fictions. Actual true-life fictions. Creations out of your mind.

Characters in your verse play. Your comedy. The original divine comedy.

And this comedy evolves. This comedy has many acts. Many ages. Along the way, you make many marvelous, beautiful things. You make the stars and the galaxies. You make the moons and the planets. You make the creatures of every kind.

You are deeply involved. You are profoundly present in everything. But you create everything with a common set of semantic and syntactical rules. With certain conventions. You create everything in an idiom that is purely yours. That is unmistakable because everywhere in the making there is beauty. Everywhere in the making there is a liveliness. A loveliness. A grandeur. An imperfection. An immediacy. An urgency. That is striking. That is overwhelming.

Because this is of you. Because you have imagined it. And are. Because you continue to do so. Not because you are bored. Not because you haven’t anything better to do.

You do this because you love making. You love creating. You love discovering what will emerge next into the nexus of your love.

And so I think of Psalm 148. I am always thinking of Psalm 148. Everything you make is grateful. It is alive, after all. It is made and enjoys the astounding loveliness you are making. Enjoys its participation in the Kingdom that is becoming. That has come and has yet to come. That is overwhelmingly possible. Now. And now. And now, again.

Everything enjoying what emerges as the writing moves forward. As the story unfolds. As we together imagine you more and more clearly. And are able to see you more and more clearly. Hear you. Touch you. Smell you. Taste you. More and more of you. And what you have made.

Present As This Day

2009-03-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

So who are you, Abba Father? I mean, where are you today? Where will you show up today? How will I know you? How will I see you? Hear you?

Sometimes I think you are hiding because you don’t like me so much anymore. Sometimes it’s because I’ve done something you don’t like. Sometimes I think you aren’t hiding at all. Sometimes I think I’m not paying enough attention.

O Father. I ache sometimes to be near you. To be with you. For your presence to overwhelm me. Inundate me like a fifty-foot wave glistening with many suns. Many images of the sun. A wave that will annihilate me and submerse me completely in your holy presence.

If I have absence of mind. If I have presence of heart.

If I physically ache in my mouth and my head and my shoulders and my back and my chest and my belly and my buttocks and my hips and my thighs and my knees and my calves and my ankles and my heels and my toes. For you. Only for you.

If I have not allowed the quotidian to distract me. If I have not allowed sinfulness and tasks and being good and being right and being better to distract me.

O God. Save me from being good. Save me from having to be good. Save me from proving that I am good. Showing that I am good.

O God, be present as this day so that I may walk into you.

Aesthetics Anyone?

2009-03-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

I remember taking an aesthetics course as a graduate student. Oh. A lifetime ago. So I’m sure all the rules have changed by now. I’m sure the philosophers have rewritten all the rules and what used to be beautiful isn’t any longer. And what used to be ugly maybe isn't either.

So please take anything I say as being qualified by old-fashionedness. By a quaint sensibility. A dowdy sense of artistic and philosophic style.

But one of the things we read. I forget what it was now. Came to us from the wonderful world of Anthropology. A philosopher of beauty wrote this book on representation, see? He tried to suggest that any art has its conventions. Its rules. And representational art was no different, he said.

And he gave as examples the difficulty people in New Guinea had upon being presented photographs of familiar people and things. (New Guinea people who lived remotely and separately from westerners. From moderns. Or post-moderns. Or ultra-moderns. Or supra-moderns. Or whatever we are. Or were then.) Photographs of huts and trees. A village, for example. And how they had no idea at all what they were looking at. How they looked at the photographs and seemed only to get a welter of color and perhaps shape.

As hard as they looked. As hard as they tried. They didn’t get meaningful shape. Identifiable shape and color and identity. The westerners in this example had to laboriously explain to the people in question in their own language what they were looking at. They had to insist on the relation between the objects photographed and the photos themselves.

They had to repeat the explanation over and over again and over again, pointing and gesticulating and jumping up and down and getting red in the face and insistent in their voices until finally. After hours of this tedium. The locals began to see what they were supposed to see. Began to identify the shapes in the photo with the objects they were supposed to represent.

So even objects that are present to the senses are conditioned. Are conditional. Need to be interpreted. Need rules for their interpretation. For their understanding.

Everything needs to be decoded. Everything is provided to us as neutral. As semantically insensible. Or philosophically opaque. And we must bring to it meaning. A priori or a posteriori meaning. Context. Story. Understanding. Imagination.

Oh, an interesting aside. Or I hope it’s an interesting aside. It is to me, but I’m biased, and am not strictly speaking fit to judge. So you be the judge.

Prior to enrolling in this course, I called the professor to see whether I was qualified. Whether I knew enough, basically, to take the course without risking failure. And I seemed to catch her at the cocktail hour, a time of the day when she had imbibed a bit. Had had a couple of glasses of wine and was enjoying everything in God’s creation, in part through the experience of an extraordinary pinot noir.

And I’ll never forget what she said toward the end of our conversation, a conversation in which I told her what courses I’d taken, what sort of course of study I was engaged in, what professors I had worked with and continued to work with, and so on. She said, “Mr. Elkington, I’m sure we’ll have a lovely time. A lovely time. Please do take the course. I know we’ll all have a lovely time.”

I don’t remember using the word “lovely” much prior to this. I don’t know why. But I do like it now. It’s one of my favorite words these days.

And I think of this particularly now because last night I had a conversation with my daughter. And my daughter is a person who, unfortunately, has never met my aesthetics professor. But she said something interesting. She said, “Dad, if there is one word I think of when I think of you, it’s the word ‘lovely.’ It’s a word that you like to use, and it’s a word that I just don’t hear other people saying. But you say it all the time.”

Well, I certainly don’t mean to be repetitive. I mean. Repetition, as my wife likes to tell me, is at best boring and can be maddening. And I don’t want the effect of my words or my presence to be either.

But I do think my daughter may have something there. I must admit to thinking love and beauty do have a great deal to do with one another. Are conflated, one in the other. And further, I do imagine that we are given both. That love is a gift from God. It doesn’t so much originate with us in any meaningful way but is passed through us, if we allow it. If we choose for it to be.

And further, I do imagine that when we allow God to pass his love through us, we are allowing God to pass something of his beauty through us also. But what’s important here is that this isn’t so much us. This is something we allow. And in allowing it, we reap great emotional benefit and understanding.

What I imagine is happening here is that God’s love is a kind of light. It is in the spiritual world the equivalent of photons in the physical world. We are able to see a thing or a person spiritually. To see them steady and see them whole because of this light from God that we allow to pass through us and upon others. And they do become beautiful, nine times out of ten, as a result.

And by the way, we did have a lovely time. The few of us who took that course together. An extraordinary and enlightening time. And I remember that professor with profound gratitude. I learned a great deal from her.

The woman’s name is, oddly, Catherine Lord. And of course, my daughter’s name is Katharine. My daughter was conceived and named years later. A connection. A relation. A meaning. I had not understood before writing this post. Could not have possibly imagined.

Imagine That!

2009-03-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

How do we imagine? Why do we imagine? What role does imagination play in our lives? What role should it play in our lives? What is the purpose of imagination? What is the function of imagine. Why does imagination exist?

What is imagination anyways?

This imagination business. I don’t know. There’s something quite mysterious here, isn’t there? There’s nothing rational or rectilinear about it. There’s something almost absurd about it, don’t you find? Something that feels like it’s imported. Something alien. Something other.

I’m reminded of the artist M.C. Escher and his “Drawing Hands.” This is a print of two hands that seem to emerge out of the bounds of a piece of paper they both belong in, and both of them are busily drawing the shirtsleeve of the other.

I’m also reminded of the Mobius strip. A surface with only one side and one boundary component. Take a strip of paper. Make a half twist in it. Tape the ends together. Then draw a line along it until the beginning of the line and the end are the same point.

It’s like wondering about the beginning of the universe. If it began with a Big Bang, what was before the Big Bang? Imagine that!

What I mean to say is that it is a bit like the particles that seem to appear out of nothing. Physicists tell us they are there and that this sort of thing happens all the time. That particles are appearing and disappearing all the time. And this isn’t just one physicist.

If this were just one physicist, we could safely call the guy loony. Off his rocker. On account of the law of the conservation of matter. Which was a very firm law when I went to elementary school and junior high school. But by the time I went to high school, this law wasn’t so firm after all. It was more of a guideline. And then by the time I was in graduate school. Well. By then, we had discovered that the laws of physics are just about as subject to question and revision and rethinking as the laws enacting the federal budget.

But we now know. Hey, isn’t that a kick? To say something like that? “We now know….” As if one could speak for the authorities (whoever they are) in such an authoritative way. In a field one—strictly speaking—has no competence in?

But as I was saying, we now know, because just about every reputable physicist on the planet will say so, that matter appears and disappears just about everywhere all the time.

And so this imagination. This activity of imagining. Well. It just seems to be bubbling along all the time, doesn’t it? Like mystical matter. Like these elementary particles. Bubbling up out of nothing. All the time.

Where does it come from? Why does it pop up where it does? Why does it appear in the form it does? How does it work? What are the rules of its operation? Who knows?

And so one wants to know, for example, where Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems come from. Or where. I don’t know. Where Yosemite Valley comes from. Or where Ansel Adams’s photos of Yosemite Valley come from. Or where paintings depicting Yosemite Valley come from.

I don’t know. But maybe I’ll take a shot at saying several things that I’ve observed about my own imagination at work.

First, it seems unstoppable. It just keeps bubbling along, as I say.

Second, it is indiscriminate. Oh, it’s a bit like going to a landfill. Have you ever been to a landfill before all the stuff gets dozed beneath a pile of dirt? There’s stuff in there no one ever could have imagined. Or I should say. There’s stuff in there I had no idea could ever possibly exist.

Third, every once in awhile, something actually apparently useful pops out. But most of the stuff seems random.

Fourth, getting a sense of things seems impossible without it.

Fifth, planning anything is impossible without it.

Sixth, understanding possible outcomes is impossible without it.

Seventh, framing hypotheses is impossible without it.

Eighth, sympathy and empathy are impossible without it.

Ninth, anticipating others’ reactions to things is impossible without it.

Tenth, telling stories and making stories are impossible without it.

Eleventh, understanding what someone else means seems impossible without it.

Twelfth, getting out of bed in the morning and going anywhere or doing anything or thinking anything or feeling anything all seem impossible without it.

Thirteenth, speaking about or writing about or thinking about or depicting God in any way seem impossible without it.

Fourteenth, speaking about or writing about or thinking about or depicting anything not physically present seem impossible without it.

Fifteenth, speaking about or writing about or thinking about or depicting anything that is physically present seem impossible without it.

Naked to the One Verse

2009-03-19T07:40:00.000-07:00

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Another of my congress. Drug addict. Christian. Poet. Literary critic. Literary philosopher.

In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge says something momentous and germane:

“The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

“The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

The context here, in the history of ideas, is the Enlightenment. This is the end of the 18th Century, beginning of the 19th. Reason and God are one at this time. And what Coleridge is audaciously claiming is that. No. Reason and God are not one. Imagination and God are one. Reason is subsidiary to Imagination. Reason is in service to Imagination. Making is not the product of reason. Making or creation, if you will, is the product of Imagination.

The universe, according to Coleridge, is not a clockwork universe. It is not engineered and pieced together. No. It is imagined. As poetry is imagined.

When we are told that we are made in the image of God, what this means is that we have imagination as God has imagination. That we are creative as God is creative. Among other things.

Coleridge was thumbing his nose at the conventional wisdom—the received ideas—of the time. And by doing so, he kicked off a whole new old way of thinking and feeling and experiencing that has continued to ramify down to us today. And the loopy wild world of quantum mechanics (an ironic misnomer if ever there was one) fits right into this conception. Mystic matter. Paradoxical immaterial matter.

In other words, the conflict continues. We have Enlightenment Christians, and we have post-Enlightenment Christians. We have clockwork universe Christians, and we have narrative theology Christians or mystic matter Christians. We have deterministic Christians, and we have open theology Christians.

So when I recommend that we imagine God with us, I am not making a recommendation that is innocent and light-headed or light-hearted. (Or maybe I am, but for the moment I’m going to pretend that I’m not.) I am making a recommendation that is freighted with real heavy-duty goods.

I am not recommending hallucination, for example. And I’m not saying we should lie about what we see and hear and feel so that we appear to be more saintly or more holy or more perfect little Christs.

What I am recommending is that we take the story that we all say is true and live inside that story. Uncompromisingly. Unflaggingly. Faithfully. Completely and fully. (Does that sound like perfection? I think it does.) Or as completely and fully as a bunch of buffoons and scoundrels like ourselves can manage. Which probably means periodically. From time to time.

And to do that, we have to exercise our imaginations. We have to consciously and intentionally imagine ourselves inside God’s story. In the way that the novelist consciously and intentionally imagines himself as the protagonist inside the story that he spins out. Or in the way that the poet imagines the speaker inside his poem saying the poem. Or in the way that the songwriter imagines the singer and the singer’s song.

And what we need to imagine is a God who loves us. A God who is love to us. For us. A God who wants us to wade out into the warm lake of him up to our chins and enjoy the overwhelming comfort and acceptance and buoyancy we can only find in him. The restoration. The peace. That he wants to provide us. Periodically here in the already/not yet. And eternally thereafter.

I Say Doorway to Eternity

2009-03-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

I say doorway to eternity. I don’t mean the doorway into a funeral home parlor in which someone is laid out under a massive display of flowers. Nor do I mean the doorway into the embalming room in the funeral home’s basement. Nor do I mean the doorway into the morgue. Nor do I mean the doorway into the autopsy room. Nor do I mean the doorway into the dying room—the room in which someone is dying.

While all of these doorways may be instructive places to hang out and may be salutary in their own way, what I am talking about is the doorway to eternity. The doorway into God’s holy presence. Into the peace and rest only God provides us.

Many of us stumble around as believers. We are random mystics rather than systematic mystics. We seem to randomly happen upon God and are. Well. Surprised. Surprised? Yes, we Christians. Many of us. Are surprised to discover that God is with us after all. God is right around here somewhere after all.

And death provides us an extraordinary opportunity to find ourselves walking or sitting or merely being in complete solitude. Complete and singular solitariness. Naked to the cosmos. Naked to the one verse. The universe. A state of being in which we are very open to being visited by God. Very open to hearing God’s voice. Seeing him. Feeling the peace and love and beauty of his holy presence. Experiencing the affirmation and encouragement of his ordinary extraordinary presence.

I’ve run into a lot of Christians over the past 58 years or so. A ridiculous number, maybe. And mostly what I find are intellectual Christians. No, that isn’t right. I find Christians who are wedged tight as an oaken bung in the bunghole of their minds. No leaking. Successfully retaining the contents under pressure.

I mean, seriously! I’ve run into a lot of people who have no idea that their main thing is enjoyment. Their main activity is to find God and enjoy his presence. Their main preoccupation is to welcome God and his love for them. To find God. To look for him. To expect him. To look forward to seeing him. Hearing him. And then once found, to rest in his presence.

I was reading a book the other day. And in it, the author talks about some of these Christians. And I immediately wanted to reach through the pages of the book, through the lines of type, and stroke these poor people. Pet their heads. Hug them. Oh, these poor souls! They had no feeling in them. No feelings of love for anyone in them. They had been so traumatized. So hurt by. Oh. Who knows. Parents. Grandparents. Brothers. Sisters. Lovers—supposed lovers. Random events. Random catastrophes. Random violence.

Oh, it’s terrible what happens to people! It’s so sad! Here they are reading their Bibles and listening to their pastors and participating in small groups of one kind and another, and they’re dead inside. Completely numb. They don’t need drugs or alcohol because they are walking through life in a semi-comatose state already. They are lethargic and depressed and a bit zombie-like.

And they don’t know how to change this. They don’t know that they are living inside a tragedy and have a choice. They don’t know how to choose comedy. They have no concept. They read the words about how God is love and how all the Law and the Prophets can be summed up in the two commandments. They read the words about the Counselor coming and role the Counselor is to play in our lives.

They read the words about the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. And they have no idea what any of this could possibly mean except to be good. Be Christlike. Be perfect. They honestly think that love is a commitment and not a feeling. They honestly believe that it’s their job to identify sin in other people and themselves and work on various sin-reduction projects.

They think that conduct is everything. They think that sin-management is everything.

And all I want say is, “You poor baby. You poor damaged human being. You weren’t made for this. This isn’t what God has in mind.

“He doesn’t want you wandering through life getting beat up over and over again. He doesn’t want you to make believe you are a little Christ. Pretend you are little Miss Perfect. Little Mister Perfect. He wants you to experience his love. He wants you to experience his peace. He wants you to come to him and live in his presence. Look for him. Speak with him. See him. Hear him. He wants to reassure you. He wants to comfort you.

“You can’t see him or hear him or feel his touch, feel the deep and abiding warmth of his holy presence, because you are wedged there in the bunghole of your mind. You are too busy feeling the pain of the tight wedging. Feeling the constriction. Feeling the pressure. Holding your breath.

“Or you are too busy not feeling. Refusing to feel. Too busy being wooden. Strong. Inflexible. Moral. Sin-free. Too busy pointing out the defects of others and perhaps yourself. Too busy thinking theology and giving yourself no opportunity for feeling the profound, the infinite, love of God washing over you.

“You poor baby,” I want to say. “Take care of people who are dying. Take care of people whose loved ones are dying. Do something. Anything. Desperate situations require desperate measures. Do something different. Use your imagination. Set yourself free.

“Walk away from the church, if you have to. It can be a toxic place. It can encourage this self-destruction. This God-denying. This self-denying. This God-destruction. Desperate situations demand desperate measures. Open your heart to God.

“Imagine God in your living room. Imagine him in the passenger seat of your car. Imagine him at work, walking down the hall toward you. Imagine him in every room you inhabit. Imagine him with you wherever you go. Imagine speaking to him. Speak! Imagine him speaking to you. Listen! Imagine him as a tub of warm water. Lie down in him, and let him warm you there.”

O, Death

2009-03-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if you have ever heard the version of “O, Death,” the Appalachian Mountain song, that Ralph Stanley sings in O Brother, Where Art Thou? But if you have heard it, you will remember it. And I think, like me, you may treasure it.

It’s a conversation between one who is dying or may be dying and Death himself. The man asks to be spared for a time. Death proclaims his power in a sadistic litany:

“I’ll fix your feet till you can’t walk
I’ll lock your jaw till you can’t talk
I’ll close your eyes so you can’t see
This very air, come and go with me
I’m Death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim”

Ralph sings it a cappella, which emphasizes the spiritual nakedness of the man dying. If you are a mystical believer priest, this will be a comfort: It will remind you that there are other spiritually naked people out there, just like you.

I admit that the comfort is ambivalent, since the guy is dying, and dying isn’t all that pleasant a state for most people. And one’s own death isn’t all that pleasant to contemplate. But pleasant or not, this is what mystical believer priests do from time to time.

In fact, it is de rigueur, I find. Or maybe it’s de rigor. I’ll have to look it up. What I mean is that it is salutary to look Death in the face. Or it can be.

But take a moment before you go off and do something like this and answer a question: In what genre do you live? Is it a comedy or a tragedy? If it is a tragedy, the effect won’t be salutary. No. It will be sad. Grievous. Despairingly bleak. Terrible.

If the story you live inside is tragic, I don’t recommend that you confront Death. That you contemplate your own death. Because this will be depressing, and that is all it will be. You may even begin to feel. Oh, I don’t know. Suicidal maybe.

If you live inside a tragedy, I recommend you consider changing genres. Changing your life story. Because sad, grieved, depressed, and lethargic is no way to live. A bit of it goes a long way. As a steady thing, it’s really. Oh. It threatens to make a failure of the entire enterprise.

But for those of you who have chosen comedy or whom comedy has chosen (it happens both ways), I recommend a good, strong dose of Death periodically. I suggest taking care of the dying and of those they are leaving behind. I suggest wading into the experience of death the way you would wade into a mountain river on a very hot day. Douse yourself in it. Thoroughly wet yourself with it.

Oh, it might be frighteningly cold. It might make your bones ache and tears come to your eyes, it is that cold. It might make you numb for a time, if you stay in long. It might threaten to annihilate you, it is so cold and the currents are so strong. You might have to desperately hang on to someone’s hand to keep from being pulled away.

But do it anyway. Because here God is in remarkable power, and here also is the doorway to eternity.

Of Course, Death

2009-03-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

Of course, Death comes like one of those. Oh. Those smiling evil geniuses with a knife. Comes to cut us all down to size.

Comes to cut off our conversation, our words bleeding from us in inarticulateness, pooling on the floor. In the bed. Making a mess in the carpeting. As we struggle to escape.

But we do not escape. Oh, maybe for a time. But then he returns like a Mormon evangelist in the summer. A young person. White shirt. Dark pants. Well-mannered. Book of Mormon in one hand. Scalpel hidden discreetly in the other.

Ding-dong. He’s baaaack!

So far, several teachers have fallen to him. All the important ones but one. George P. Elliott. Philip Booth. Hayden Carruth. W. D. Snodgrass.

Both parents in law.

A childhood friend. Boarding school acquaintances. Boarding school headmaster, who helped me through a difficult time.

Quite a number of random strangers whose hands I’ve held, whose medications I’ve delivered, whose sputum I’ve wiped, to whom I’ve read to pass the time.

Who’s next? I don’t know. It seems random, doesn’t it? Random as a madman.

He teaches us to number our days. And to make the words we have time to say, count.

The other day, I was reading the blog of a friend of mine. A very good pastor friend. And the responses he was getting! The comments that people who supposedly cared about him. People who are supposedly Christians. Supposedly God lovers. Supposedly neighbor lovers. The comments that they made. Were. Well. They were terrible.

It was like all of them had scalpels, white shirts, dark pants. Male and female. Holy books in one hand. Scalpels in the other. And I had an image of them all running up to the stage in my friend’s church, all stabbing together. Stabbing and stabbing. Until my friend was silenced by these friends, lying helplessly in his blood on the stage, expired.

Pupils fixed and dilated. Staring at the ceiling, like an imbecile.

With nothing more to say.

Blog, Blog, Blog

2009-03-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

Work, work, work. Trope, trope, trope. Blog, blog, blog. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

All the world’s a blogosphere,
And all the men and women merely bloggers.
They have their endings and their beginnings;
And one may in his time blog in many voices ….

What is a poem or a story or a book or a blog or any saying, really? Any verbal simulacrum? Anything constructed of words?

Isn’t it our contribution to the conversation? The long story of our manifold conversations?

One of the striking things Christopher Tietjens—the protagonist of Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End (an excellent novel, by the way)—says is that a relationship is really a conversation. A relationship between a man and a woman, in the context of this particular novel, is principally thought about by Tietjens as a conversation. But I think we can abstract this to all relationships.

So, for example. The simulacra that we know as Aristotle’s Poetics and Moses’s Torah and Aristophanes’s The Birds, down to. Oh. W.D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle and Annie Dillard’s Holy The Firm and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. And…. And…. And…. And all the blogs out there today on the Web. Are all contributions to the relationship. The relationship that people have with one another in a common attempt to understand things. To come to terms with things. To represent what happens—what is and what was and what is to come—and to turn it this way and that until it reveals itself. Until the truth of it steps more fully out from behind the curtain. Until the truth of things becomes more fully known. Until we can make something of it!

And this conversation takes place across the ages. Oh, it is contemporaneous among the living. But there is a store-and-forward kind of thing going on with the moribund. They have made their blogs and left their blogs—their simulacra—to the generations that have followed them. And we. Well. We first of all read their simulacra. We attempt to form a shape of the world they see in our own minds and then look out of ourselves at the world as though we were in fact, in some sense, them.

Then we ramify them. We add the shape of the world that they have articulated to us to the other shapes we have been given and invent a new shape that takes into account all that we understand from all of the other simulacra we have inherited and then reshape everything to take account of our own particular experience as well.

And then we create our own simulacra. And these. Well. These articulate pieces of the shape that has formed and is forming as we speak in our minds of what the world is, was, and is yet to be. And we exchange these among the living, each of us reshaping what we know or think we know with the shapes provided by our contemporaries.

So, yes. What happens among contemporaries is most appropriately called a conversation because only this is a bidirectional interchange. A bidirectional contemporaneous reshaping of the known universe. The one verse.

But this shape—this making—that emerges in contemporaneous discussion and debate and the sharing of simulacra has within it the shape of the world that has been handed to us by our ancestors, our literary forebears. Our linguistics masters. Our philological and philosophical progenitors.

One might almost think of this as a process of passing, combining, and recombining spiritual DNA. Words and combinations of words are our spiritual DNA. Just as physical DNA is used to determine the shape and characteristics and operating modalities of our bodies, so is spiritual DNA used to determine the shape and characteristics and operating modalities of our souls. Of our minds and hearts.

And so those who came before deposit their spiritual DNA in us, which is recombined with the spiritual DNA of those around us. Inevitably there will be differences in what we have read and with whom we have conversed, and the conditions of all this will of course be slightly different and will have an influence. And so each of us will end up with slightly different spiritual DNA. One result is that each of us has a somewhat different shape of the world in mind as we go about our business.

And just as it might be said with justification that our role biologically is to reproduce imperfect physical copies of ourselves, so it might also be said that our role spiritually is to provide our spiritual DNA to our descendents as well. Descendents taken both biologically and spiritually.

One of the upshots of all this is that the world model that we have in us. The made shape that we have come to concerning the way the world was and is and is yet to be may be something like biological DNA—there may be something in us that urgently wants us to share this. In other words, we may be designed and built in such a way that forming spiritual DNA may all be very well, but there is a spiritual imperative for many of us that it be passed along for the making and use by contemporaneous others and future others.

So what is required is relationship. The foundational concept for any of this to happen is relationship. And relationship requires—in the spiritual realm—the ability to look at the world through the other’s simulacra. To see the model or shape of the world constructed by the words of another. To make of things, at least provisionally and hypothetically, what the other person makes of things.

If we cannot do this, we are strangers inhabiting different galaxies that are billions of light-years apart.

I'll Call Him Liking

2009-03-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

Another man I know. I’ll call him Liking. Why an odd name like Liking? Maybe it suits him. Maybe he’s a modern day tropist. A modern day simile-man.

Author of prosaic complaints and laments, thanksgivings, descriptions of God’s sudden manifestations. A satirist. A surrealist. A self-centered bit of gristle and nakedness. A blogger, in other words.

Finds God by rolling around in his bed all night. His wife sleeps in the other room, he is so energetic and persistent in his rolling. So sweaty and teary and altogether irritating in his wrestling and cavorting and caterwauling and caviling with God that she will have no part of it. That she will make her own bed so that he and God may have their fun. The light on every hour or so. The TV on every hour or so. The “Abba, Father” rasping every hour or so in his dry throat.

Finds God also by waking up, turning on his computer, and writing. Writing his bloggy pseudo-psalms. His soggy balms. His bleary songs. His seery bongs. His. Well, you get the idea. Writes out of anxiety and love. Out of fear and grief. Out of tenderness and anger and banality. A holy rolling blogger, if you will.

Full tilt boogie human here who reads the actual Psalms. A real dirty human, see. The real thing. Muck of the earth. Your garden variety human. Your muck farm human. Your slimy 21st Century American human. Your ruling class type of human. Your Holocene extinction type of human. Your wealthiest class of human in the history of the world type of human. Your make war, not love type of human.

And who can’t understand. Can’t altogether get. The angst. The hyperbolic whining that he finds there in the Psalms. Until he comes to the blog at hand. His own particular blog. And then of course the whining comes wheeling out like some Medieval war machine. Creaking and moaning. Flinging real figurative missiles all about. All about the place.

Real Medieval death machine that comes creaking down the centuries like Freedom’s monster itself. Like the monster that the idea of Freedom (God’s own idea, by the way) unleashes to maraud over the earth, laying waste the earth, extinguishing the beautiful almost wherever it might be found. The great long whine we humans make when we are given a little comfort and expect comfort then like a birthright. Preserve comfort then at all costs.

And orthodoxy. Preserve orthodoxy of whatever peculiar variety. At all costs. However odd. However arcane. However involved and difficult to explain. Rightness. Correctness. A real motive force to be stored and then used to. To what? To assail, of course. To avail. To lay waste. To bring down a wall. Any wall. That stands between the self and what it must have. What it must lave. What it must take. What it must make its own.

But Liking is also mild-mannered. He is humorous. He has a sense of humor. He understands civility. He understands courtesy. He is generous. He likes to think of himself as loving. He likes to think of himself as an okay guy. As a pretty good guy. But of course, he’s made of dirt. He’s made of muck. He’s a potato. He lives underground. He shoves up leaves that live above ground.

He lives in two worlds, really. The world of the air and the world of the earth. The root is his mind, and it is a mind buried in the mud where the worms and the grubs course and the fungus grows. The leaves are his heart, open to the sun and the wind and the rain. Fragile as any leaves that will be dust again in the winter. He is pathetic, really. A pathetic fallacy if I’ve ever seen one.

Liking. A guy I know. Find him anywhere out there in blog-land. Anywhere you’d like to go.

I'll Call Him Bob

2009-03-06T07:53:00.000-08:00

A man I know. I’ll call him Bob. Finds God by rolling a wheelbarrow. He takes the wheelbarrow out of his garage in the morning, and he rolls it all day long.

He lives in a place where this isn’t a nuisance. Or a menace. It’s out in farm country. Out where there’s nothing but corn and soybeans in summer and a house here and there. A town here and there. A town in which there is maybe a gas station, a church, and a bar. A few houses scattered around like pebbles on the prairie.

A place where the people call themselves Ethel and Homer and Clyde and Stan and Gertrude and Amelia and Josiah and Ruth. A place that looks a little like a Grant Wood painting except for the absence these days of old-fashioned windmills and horses and the presence of machinery.

Bob lives with his mother, Doris. His brothers and sister are all married with children and live this way and that. His father’s deceased.

Bob’s been simple all his life. Born that way. He doesn’t talk. He hums and yodels. He sounds a little like he’s singing the blues when he hums and yodels, from time to time. Sometimes it’s hard to find a tune in what he’s singing. Sometimes it’s hard to find the most simple of themes.

But then other times he seems to have found something. Something complex and a little bluesy and jazzy. Something Chick Corea might have made. Or no. Something Mississippi John Hurt and Chick Corea might have made together.

He has a route. It’s about a 30 mile route. It takes him past Daisy’s and Isaiah’s and Lyle’s places. His sister’s and brothers’ places. It takes him by Preacher John’s place. It takes him through the town of Paradise, with its one gas station, one church, and one bar. And it takes him through miles and miles of farmland.

Doris packs his lunch for him. Puts it and three bottles of water in a worn canvas knapsack. After breakfast and not long after dawn, he sets out. He sings and he rolls. He looks all around. He looks into the empty wheelbarrow. A wheelbarrow full of air.

But if he could talk, he would tell you the wheelbarrow is not full of air. He would say that it is full of an angel. A brightly burning angel. An angel who sings out a music that makes and remakes the world. That sustains everything. And is beautiful.

And so he sings along with the angel. He sings whatever the angel is singing. And what the angel sings sounds to him a little like a violin and a little like a saxophone and a little like a person singing. It has a silvery tone to it. But this modulates back and forth into gold. More of a gold tone sometimes.

And so he carries the angel in his wheelbarrow. The color of the wheelbarrow is red. Red, the color of the sun in the evening on the prairie. Which Bob washes every evening when he gets back home. Douses with soap and water each evening and wipes down with a shammy. Actually several shammies that his mother hangs to dry for the next day. And the next and the next.

Spirit On The Water

2009-03-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

Modern Times, Bob Dylan’s 2006 release. A jasmine sound. I’ve been playing it off and on so often my wife has banished it from the house. “Play it in the car. Play it when I’m gone. Play it, Baby, but please play it somewhere else.

“I’m done with it, Baby, or I’m done with you!”

Oh, she doesn’t call me Baby. I don’t think she calls anybody Baby. And she wasn’t quite that adamantine about it. I dramatize. I engage in hyperbole. But she is tired. Very, very tired of the thing.

But I’m not. I love it. I can’t get enough of it. I think I bought it back last fall. And I can’t hardly keep it off the stereo. I can’t hardly keep it out of my head. And heart. It’s made a place for itself in both places, and on my lips and in my throat and lungs and wind pipe as well.

This is Dylan full of God. Full of God all integrated into his thinking and feeling and knowing and experiencing. This is Dylan full of the presence of God.

I particularly like “Spirit On The Water.” But I particularly like just about every song on the CD. They help me to know who God is better. God through the voice and music of Bob Dylan. God in this rendition is sweet. He’s impossible. He’s a she. She’s the beloved. She’s everything to the singer. She’s his delight and his meaning. He aches for her when she's gone.

Dylan says he’s not a poet. He’s a songwriter. I agree. But still. There’s a poetry in what he does. Here are the words to “Spirit On The Water.” See what you may hear.

Spirit on the water
Darkness on the face of the deep
I keep thinking about you baby
I can't hardly sleep

I'm traveling by land
Traveling through the dawn of day
You're always on my mind
I can't stay away

I'd forgotten about you
Then you turned up again
I always knew
We were meant to be more than friends

When you're near
It's just as plain as it can be
I'm wild about you, gal
You ought to be a fool about me

Can't explain
The sources of this hidden pain
You burned your way into my heart
You got the key to my brain

I've been trampling through mud
Praying to the powers above
I'm sweating blood
You got a face that begs for love

Life without you
Doesn't mean a thing to me
If I can't have you
I'll throw my love into the deep blue sea

Sometimes I wonder
Why you can't treat me right
You do good all day
And then you do wrong all night

When you're with me
I'm a thousand times happier than I could ever say
What does it matter
What price I pay

They brag about your sugar
Brag about it all over town
Put some sugar in my bowl
I feel like laying down

I'm as pale as a ghost
Holding a blossom on a stem
You ever seen a ghost? No
But you have heard of them

I see you there
I'm blinded by the colors I see
I take good care
Of what belongs to me

I hear your name
Ringing up and down the line
I'm saying it plain
These ties are strong enough to bind

Now your sweet voice
Calls out from some old familiar shrine
I got no choice
Can't believe these things would ever fade from your mind

I could live forever
With you perfectly
You don't ever
Have to make a fuss over me

From East to West
Ever since the world began
I only mean it for the best
I want to be with you any way I can

I been in a brawl
Now I'm feeling the wall
I'm going away baby
I won't be back 'til fall

High on the hill
You can carry all my thoughts with you
You've numbed my will
This love could tear me in two

I wanna be with you in paradise
And it seems so unfair
I can't go to paradise no more
I killed a man back there

You think I'm over the hill
You think I'm past my prime
Let me see what you got
We can have a whoppin' good time

Words and music by Bob Dylan
Copyright 2006 Special Rider Music

Gerard Manley Hopkins

2009-03-02T06:17:00.000-08:00

Been reading the biography Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Paul Mariani. Gift from a good friend. We both admire Hopkins’s poetry, and for Christmas he gave himself and me a copy. Something we could share and talk about.

Funny. When I first started writing poetry with some seriousness. Oh, this was back when Pangaea, the super-continent, was still forming. This was about 300 million years ago or so.

At a time when rhyme and meter and alliteration and parallelism and syllabic construction—all the techniques we now know today are actually useful in constructing poems—had not been invented yet. Or at least I wasn’t aware of them. But it nevertheless turned out that I sounded—to every knowledgeable person I showed my work to—like Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Go figure. One of the most learned and gifted prosodists and classicists of the 19th century. One of the most innovative and insightful poets in the English tradition. And I had the misfortune to sound like him. And so early on I became aware of him backwards, so to say. Read him because I sounded like him and needed to understand him a bit before I could alter my style and approach so that I wouldn’t sound derivative any longer.

I don’t think I’ve fully recovered since. But I have enjoyed and do enjoy his poetry. I admire it greatly. Part of what is so exciting for me even now is his love of God. It comes through loud and strong in his work. I comes across fresh. Newly made. Every time. He really did experience God. Time after time after time. And he is extraordinarily faithful in bringing that experience to us. Bringing God to us.

And so I launched into Paul Mariani’s biography with some energy. Some enthusiasm. But here I am about two months later and still I’m not completely done. I’m close, but I’m not done.

Why? Well, first of all it’s long. And second, it really does do a remarkably thorough job of revealing Hopkins’s agony. It provides a lot of source material, quoting from his journals and letters and others’ letters, to ensure that we can see that his observations and insights and conclusions are valid. And I enjoy that, by the way.

I say agony. What I mean is that what Hopkins appears to have done is to take quite to heart the idea that he should be like Christ. That he should be Christlike. And he of course never measures up. He never stops trying. But he never is good enough.

Not clear exactly how this idea gets into his head, comes swimming into his head like some marauding lamprey worming its way up a brook trout stream to spawn. But it does. Maybe when he converts from Anglican to Roman Catholic, this happens. Maybe when he decides to become a Jesuit, this happens. Maybe the Ignatian exercises imported this non-native species. Maybe when he is routinely dismissed by his superiors as an eccentric, this happens. Mariani isn’t clear. He may not know, either.

But it does happen and it does so early in the poor man’s life. And it debilitates him. It fills him with despair. It sucks the joy and stamina and laughter right out of him. It makes him diligent to the point of being obsessive. It makes him so self-critical and anxious that he thinks about suicide often. He thinks about his many friends and acquaintances who have committed suicide. Often.

So here is a man of God. This Jesus follower. This God-lover. This mystic. This spiritual friend. This person I have been linguistically and poetically connected to through his writings for most of my adult life. And I’m reading his biography. And I want to weep. I want a time machine. I want to go back in time and find the poor guy and put my hand on his shoulder and say something like, “Peace, Brother.

“God’s own peace. Listen to Jesus. What does he say in this matter? Doesn’t he say to love God and love your brothers and sisters? Isn’t this enough for you? I know you are ambitious. I see that. But set that aside for love. Let love be your companion. Peace, Brother. Cut this idea away like you would cut a parasite away. Or let me do that. Here. I have the stomach for it, if you do.

“This will be painful. It has become so much of you now. Where this begins and you leave off are no longer distinct. But listen. Let’s talk about the Gospels. Let’s talk about what Jesus said in the Gospels. Let’s go to him in prayer together. Let’s ask him.

“Jesus is not a torturer. Jesus does not like torture. Particularly self-torture. Particularly torture that is not necessary. He brings love. And yes, this does entail pain and troubles. But the pain and the troubles are the necessary evil. Not the sought-after good. The sought-after God.”

What We Know

2009-02-28T15:29:00.000-08:00

What we think we know is not something. Or it is more idea than thing but thing as well. Maybe. The river thinks as we think. The river knows what it comprehends. It contains what is in it, and so it knows whatever it contains.

So one might say the brook trout and their habits are what it knows. What the Fox River knows. The many downed trees, straining its waters. Budding in spring even after they have fallen. Straining, which is to say purifying. Slowing. Injecting air. Straining, which is to say shadowing the depths with their trunks and many evergreen or deciduous branches stretching like the hands and arms and legs and feet and toes of so many prone, unlikely personifications.

The quick and beautiful brook trout. Evening horizon in its belly. The planted augmentation fish. Raised artificially. Raised in concrete containments, fed artificial air and water through jets in the side walls. Raised on grain delivered in pellets. Raised like so many ideas fed with artificial food.

And now transplanted here. Trucked here from the nursery. Delivered juveniles. Delivered young into this semi-wild world. This unstatic universe. This coursing. This eddying, pooling, streaming, dreaming, pouring, upwelling, many-stranded space-time rivery consciousness. Unconsciousness. Supra-consciousness of water, earth, and sky. Of images floating as clouds and pictures of upright trees passing. Passing on along.

This is the water as it falls down the earth. Through the earth. Over the earth. Strains down the sandy, loamy, ferny, deer-dotted, beaver-befuddled, ospreyed earth. As it courses, carrying the very earth in it. As it cuts and grinds and drains and tumbles the sand-grains of the granitic earth. The buoyant granite of the continents that float on the ocean streams. Continents that float all about the spheroid place like so many sticks on a river in the sun.

And yes. The sun is in it in the daytime. Dropping down to discover. Well everything. The trout and the nymphs. The twigs and the rising flies in spring. And the dying flies in spring. And the crayfish. And the eggs. And the quick detritus. And the blue.

And at night the dark and the stars and moon. The white brightly silver light of night. And the splashing of the coyote or the wolverine. Or skunk. Or weasel. Many come down into these waters and make their way. And move about. And move on.

And in it also are the native fish. The naturally reproducing fish. The fish that arise from adults here. Very much here. In these quick tannin waters. Fish that are the outworking of the place itself. The waters themselves. The heterogeneous multi-toned thrumming of these waters we happen to call the Fox.

What does it mean, though, one wants to ask. What does all this come to? In the end? Well that’s easy enough to say. The Fox River comes to the Manistique and then to Lake Michigan. It slows into the cold dark blue of that. The depths so dark they are introspective out a ways, opaque to the naked eye on the surface, and remain so for many miles.

The Importance of Endings

2009-02-15T11:50:00.000-08:00

So as I say, endings will give you a clue as to genre. A movie or a novel or a short story or a play or a narrative poem may not be particularly funny, but if the ending is characterized by restoration, the affirmation of love, redemption, or forgiveness, what you are likely to have is a comedy. A story with a comedic structure.

We get the feeling we are actually in one—in a comedy, I mean—because, in part, of the humor. The humor is there to let us know it is okay to laugh. That the ending won’t be all that bad. That we are in a universe here. The universe of this particular story. In which the structure is comedic. We are in the kind of universe that—no matter how grim or terrible or sorrowful things get sometimes along the way—the ending will affirm the values of love and gentleness and kindness and generosity.

What the constructed narrative does then is to end in such a way that we are given hope. That we are given permission and encouragement to love. Yes, we will all of us—everyone—die. Yes, we will all of us grieve over the deaths of loved ones. Yes, we will grieve over the oppressed. But the end of the big universe—by implication, by metaphor—will somehow. And we have no idea how. Will somehow preserve the possibility of love. Will affirm the saving nature of love and kindness and generosity and forgiveness.

The other day was the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Wednesday, February 12th. Charles Darwin has been a figure of some ambivalence for many of us. On the one hand, here is a guy who pokes around for awhile, collecting data. Specimens. Then he spends decades trying to decode what he’s found. Tries to construct a pattern.

To imagine a story. A narrative. In which these data. These bones and geological strata and just then living specimens that he has found. Would make sense. Could make sense. Should make sense.

He uses the data of his experience to construct a story of times and places and beings and forces that are today largely unseen. Are invisible to the naked eye. Except for the few bits that as I say. He has picked up as a young man on a young man’s journey. A young man’s adventure to the still accessible ends of the known world.

What is so frightening about Charles Darwin’s story? His theory?

I wonder why so many of us react so emotionally to his theory? His story? It seems disproportional. Here is a scientist, after all. A mere scientist. Hypothesizing. Wondering. Trying to fit the data to a story that would comprehend the data. That’s all.

What if we think about natural history this way? he says. What if we suppose these relations? What if we suppose this sort of sequence? This kind of duration? These kinds of forces? What then? Doesn’t that make a little more sense of things? Doesn’t this new story accord a bit more faithfully with the information we have?

Well, I don’t know. Why isn’t there as strong an emotional reaction to black hole theory? Or string theory? Or quark theory? Or the germ theory of medicine? These play as much a role in our everyday lives as the theory of evolution. In fact, the germ theory plays a much more prominent role, I think.

Why don’t we get as emotional about market theory or game theory or chaos theory? What has happened here, to poor Mr. Darwin? Why do we come down on him in particular? What has he done, after all? Isn’t he merely doing what scientists do? Isn’t he simply trying to fit a particular data set to a theory? To a story that would help us understand the data?

I think maybe it has to do with endings. Our sense of an ending. And what we imagine, if we follow Mr. Darwin’s story out. If we follow it along and out several millions or hundreds of millions of years into the future.

I personally think it scares the willies out of a lot of people. To think of the world—this particular world right here—one hundred or two hundred million years from now. And where we humans might be then. At that point in time.

I think of Gulliver’s Travels. Jonathon Swift’s brilliant satire. (A funny book. A funny story.) And I think of the Houyhnhnms. Serene rational creatures. The perfection of nature. Ruling over the Yahoos--monkey-like creatures who look a great deal like us--who take great delight in defecating on others from the trees.

More Gran Torino

2009-01-15T06:26:00.000-08:00

Let’s talk for just a moment about the Catholic priest in Gran Torino and his relation to Walt and the function of that relation in the movie. For just a moment, because I don’t think it’s worth more than a moment’s discussion.

The priest is a young man, just out of seminary; Janovich is his name. Walt calls him an overeducated virgin. He tells him he knows nothing of life and death, after Janovich tries to instruct Walt on life and death. And Walt is largely right. The Janovich character knows very little.

He does redeem himself, however. He has made a promise to Walt’s dying wife that he will somehow get Walt to confess his sins to him, and Walt hasn’t been to church in decades. He doesn’t have any use for it. Or for confession. So Janovich, in order to have any hope at all of fulfilling his promise, must engage with Walt. He must humble himself to Walt and listen to Walt’s abuse. He must earn Walt’s trust and confidence or at least attempt to do so.

Janovich redeems himself by being willing to learn from Walt. By his persistence in pressing himself upon Walt, even in the face of significant abuse. By his tacit admission that Walt can teach him something.

So Janovich becomes an echo, to some extent, of Thao. He serves as Walt’s apprentice also. Walt helps him understand something about the terror and horror of war and of killing in war and about how killing stays with you. This torment is something that confession will not touch. That preaching about forgiveness is likely not going to touch.

And Walt teaches Janovich something about love. About what real love looks like. A man possessing real love doesn’t stand ineffectually by while those he loves are tormented. A real lover looks for effectiveness. Looks to take action that is effective, that will protect his loved ones.

And of course this is what Walt does. Eastwood’s acting is very good. We can almost see the chained syllogisms locking Walt’s action into place. The Hmong gang will be expecting Walt and Thao. They’ll be ready for them. An assault will not be effective. Walt and/or Thao will be stopped, killed most probably, without achieving the objective—the complete elimination of the gang and the opening of freedom and possibility to Thao and Sue.

Walt is old. He has an ailment that will take his life in the foreseeable future—he repeatedly coughs up blood. His life is coming to an end, anyway. How can he achieve his purpose? Giving his life isn’t all that big a deal, if he can achieve this one thing.

Janovich doesn’t teach Walt. Walt teaches him. Because Walt cares about Janovich, he confesses to him. He enables Janovich to clear his conscience. The confession to Janovich means nothing to Walt spiritually, except that by doing it, he is able to lighten Janovich’s conscience. Enable him to fulfill his promise to Walt’s dying wife.

Janovich doesn’t bring spiritual truth to Walt. Walt brings spiritual truth to Janovich. Walt shows him what real love for his neighbors looks like. Real love isn’t sophomoric eulogies. Real love is real sacrifice for others. Real love is effective action in the world.

And so the theology that this movie preaches is the theology of the supernatural God naturally inhabiting natural man. The idea here is that Walt follows his heart, no matter how foul-mouthed and growly he is. From the beginning of the film, when he helps jumpstart a Hmong’s vehicle, until he lies dead in front of the Hmong gang’s house. And his heart is the more reliable source of spiritual truth than Janovich is. The idea here is that the love that is in Walt’s heart—if left to its own devices—is capable of changing the world.

But as I say. This is all tangential. This relation between Walt and Janovich. Oh, for us bashers of the priestly class it offers a vicarious thrill or two. And it does make some theological and spiritual claims that otherwise would not be there. But this is another subject. This is another matter, really, for another film.

I’ve heard that Eastwood isn’t going to make any more films. It will be sad if that turns out to be true. He has given us some first rate ones in the last decade or so. He has given us stories of what it looks like for a man to live out his love, no matter what, which is of course what we’re all looking for.

Gran Torino

2009-01-12T09:42:00.000-08:00

Yuckko-bluckey! I feel like this blog is turning into a movie review column. If so, it’s happening on its own. Completely on its own volition. I have no interest in being a movie reviewer. In fact, I have little interest in the popular imagination, of which movies are, along with music, almost the heart and soul. Ugggh! I have touched pitch, and I am defiled.

But I suppose what makes the pitch tolerable. What makes me come back to this piney woods with my little tree saw over and over. Is that these stories. Stories presented in movies. Just like any stories, but these for the masses. Tell us what is important about ourselves, who we are, where we fit in the scheme of things, what a good life and a not so good life look like, how we might fall short and do better, what right and wrong relation to others looks like, what human purpose and meaning look like, whether there is a god or not, what our relation to God looks like, assuming there is a god, and so on.

And so I come to Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood’s latest film. A 2008 release. Which helps us understand something about Walt, the main character, a retired Ford assembly plant worker. A man who growls routinely at his children, his grandchildren, and the world, at the world his Detroit neighborhood has turned into, as it has been occupied by the Hmong, a people who have immigrated to the U.S. from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, following the Vietnam war, escaping the communists who liked murdering them for helping the Americans.

The movie opens in grief, at a funeral for Walt’s wife who has just died. A funeral at which his grandchildren dishonor him and his wife. A funeral at which a shallow eulogy is preached, and Walt’s sons attend because they must. Not because of love for their father or their mother.

The movie is often funny because Walt is funny. His sour, mean-spirited demeanor is out of proportion. He is really much more tender-hearted than he’d like others to believe.

The progress of the movie moves along three lines, really. The discovery on our part of the depth of Walt’s sons’ and their families’ selfishness and self-centeredness. The discovery on Walt’s part of the humanity of the Hmong people living around him, and his progressive involvement in the lives of two of them—Thao, a teenage boy, and his sister, Sue, a single young woman—who live next door to Walt with their grandmother. And Walt’s discovery of the possibility of undoing, in a sense, two wrongs he has committed—the unnecessary killing of a young North Korean soldier in the Korean War, and the withholding of his affection from his two sons as they were growing up.

This latter movement or theme—the possibility of redeeming one’s past misdeeds through right relation and right action in the present—gets worked out in his relationship with Thao and Sue, two young people who find themselves put upon, bullied, and tormented by a Hmong gang that terrorizes the neighborhood. Walt steps in to protect them by a mistake at first—by protecting his property rights against the gang.

But this quickly moves into his functioning as a mentor or grandfather-like figure to Thao, showing him how to perform domestic maintenance, instructing him (as best he can) in what it means to be a man, and getting Thao his first job through a friend in the construction business. He helps Thao learn and adopt manly responsibilities, as Sue instructs Walt in what it means to be a member of the Hmong community.

Soon, Walt is integrated into the life of his community again. His new community of Hmong people. So as the movie progresses, we see Walt show the love toward Thao that he seems to have withheld from his sons and that his grandsons and granddaughter clearly do not deserve or welcome. We see him nurture an Asian teenager, in contrast to his daily memory of killing an Asian teenager in the Korean war.

Then of course, there is the 1972 Gran Torino, on which Walt personally installed the steering column and which he keeps carefully garaged and waxed, only to be driven on special occasions. It is the emblem to Walt of what has been good in his life and the good of his work. Thao enters into Walt’s life through his attempt to steal Walt’s Gran Torino as a forced initiation into the Hmong gang that has made Thao’s life difficult. And it is because of this mistake, this sin of attempted theft, that Thao and Walt begin their relationship. It is to make amends that Thao begins an apprenticeship to Walt and is able to move forward successfully toward manhood.

Just as Thao is subordinated to Walt, so is Walt subordinated, in a sense, to Thao and Sue. He becomes their protector, with his Army-issue M1 rifle and his .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol. Their aged soldier. And as the Hmong gang continues to escalate their bullying of Thao and Sue, so does Walt escalate the threat of violence and then actual violence toward the gang.

Finally, after the gang shoots up Thao’s and Sue’s house, wounding Thao, and after the gang rapes Sue, Walt understands what must be done. He understands that, short of moving away, Thao and Sue will continue to be victims of the Hmong gang. Thao may be coerced into becoming a member of the gang after all. Sue may never be allowed to move on with her life. She will always be sexually threatened.

Something must be done. The gang must somehow be eliminated. Must somehow be eradicated. Excised.

At this point, the movie shifts into overdrive. It moves from humorous comedy, interspersed with the threat of death and destruction, into high, humorless comedy, with redeeming death at its center. The Hmong gang must be dealt with. They must be dealt with effectively. So Walt confronts them in such a way that he is killed and they are arrested, to be imprisoned long enough to enable Thao and Sue to grow up and move on into adulthood.

So the progress of the movie is from bigotry to altruism, from hatred to love, from alienation to integration and affirmation. From isolation and death to the reaffirmation of life. From sin to redemption. Polish Walt—the offspring of immigrants—saves the children of other immigrants. And he leaves to Thao, his adopted grandson, his Gran Torino, the symbol to Walt of all that has been good in his life here, in the land of the free. In America.

So what we rediscover here is that love entails sacrifice. Sometimes it requires death to be fully lived out. The death of the lover himself. So that those he loves may live and may do so freely. May do so fully.

It is fitting that this movie take place in Detroit. And that Walt is a retired autoworker. The subtext here is the open road. It is freedom from oppression. It is freedom from tyranny. It is freedom to love. And the automobile is the emblem of this. It can take us wherever our heart leads us. And Walt’s Gran Torino will take Thao into the heart of adulthood, into the possibility of love, however delightful and dangerous and possibly fatal this will be.

I like this movie. It has its flaws, but I won’t go into them. Oh, I will say that one of its imperfections is a gratuitous visual effect at Walt’s death. Walt laid out dead from the Hmong gang’s bullets on the ground like Christ nailed to the cross: arms cruciform to the line of trunk and legs. Oh, Clint. We are dumb, but we aren’t that dumb. Please give us a little respect.

Little Miss Sunshine

2009-01-10T18:34:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the movie, Little Miss Sunshine? Oh, you should, if you haven’t. Congratulations, if you have. It’s in color. And it’s executed in a modern or post modern sort of an acting style. Cinematic style. Released in 2006. It trades on the idiom of familial ambiguity and brokenness and heterogeneity.

It uses divorce and homosexuality as cultural markers. It is current, in other words. It is not old-fashioned. It is not melodramatic. It may be a bit pedantic. A bit homiletic. But because we are not in church when we watch it—at least most of us aren’t—and there is no churchy idiom pushed, we don’t think of it immediately as Scriptural or religious or Jesusy or anything like that.

Oh, and it isn’t pretentious. It doesn’t seem to puff itself up. It’s quotidian. It feels almost disposable. The subject is modest—a family’s trip to a beauty pageant of sorts—the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant, two states to the left. There’s physical humor and a dirty old man, which both camouflage the homiletics. Both send us in the other direction. So misdirection is also one of its techniques.

It opens on a family assembling for dinner, a dinner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and frozen popsicles. The exposition is admirably and economically done in the dialog and the visual effects in the preceding scene and in this one.

Turns out the mother—Sheryl—is overworked, underappreciated, and irritated with her husband—Richard—for not bringing home a paycheck for an extended period of time while he has worked on a self-help manuscript and motivational spiel that are both based on the profound philosophical idea that the world is divided into winners and losers. Further, he has worked out a formula so that anyone who studies his several step program can turn himself or herself into—wonder of wonders—a winner!

At the table also is Sheryl’s homosexual brother, Frank, who considers himself the world’s foremost Proust scholar. The number one expert on Proust. He has just tried to kill himself because the successful rival for Frank’s lover’s affections—the number two Proust scholar in the world, according to Frank—has just received a prestigious award that should have been Frank's. According to Frank.

Then there is Dwayne, Sheryl’s teenage son by a previous marriage, who is reading Nietzsche and who hasn’t spoken for seven or eight months because he hates his family and wants to be an Air Force fighter pilot. He will not speak until he has achieved a significant milestone in becoming an Air Force fighter pilot.

Then there is Edwin, Richard’s foul-mouthed father, who has just been kicked out of an old folks home for irremediably snorting heroin. And finally there is Olive, Sheryl’s and Richard’s (approximately) eight year old daughter, who is a bit on the wide side and wears glasses that make her look a like a midget clown. And who has just found out that she has won a spot in the “Little Miss Sunshine” beauty pageant to be held shortly in California, two states to the left.

The family reluctantly piles into a decrepit Volkswagen minibus, the sort of vehicle that was popular back in the late 1960s (and that is, itself, almost familial to many of us in the vicinity of 60) and that shortly develops a clutch problem that requires just about everyone to push the vehicle to get it going. Everyone is irritated with everyone else, except Olive, who is quite pleased to be on her way to nirvana or heaven or someplace quite close to these, a place of beauty and fame and happiness. But as the trip unfolds, it turns out that everyone, except Olive, falls short of perfection. Edwin falls so far short, that he ends up dead from a heroin overdose.

Through a series of personal growth moments in which everyone, except Olive, comes to terms with his or her own imperfections, this unpretentious American westwarding road trip proves both actual and metaphorical as well as moral and funny. At the beauty pageant itself, perfection is what almost everyone—little girls and parents—is striving for. But Olive’s routine—choreographed and designed by the now dead Edwin—turns out to be more burlesque than perfect. Olive is joined by her family onstage as the audience of parents and the pageant’s organizers and operators makes outraged noises and gestures. It is a lovely and humorous moment.

So this post modern travelog takes the Hoover family from dislike, irritation, judgment, striving, dysfunction, disorder, and unhappiness, to love, acceptance, purpose, order, and joy through several individual discoveries along the way. Each of them discovers that while perfection is not likely, imperfection is infinitely better. Because imperfection of course requires and implies love.

Now this isn’t what I would call great cinematic art. But it is modestly fine. And while. As I say. It is a bit homiletic. It is nevertheless true. It takes us on something of a journey also and discovers something in us that is beyond selfishness, despair, and death. That may actually be the infinite promise of love.

At the end, the family is restored. Right relationship is discovered and established and affirmed. And everyone has a rousing good time thumbing their noses at the stuck-up worshippers of perfection: the little girl contestants with their capped teeth, perfect hair, sprayed on tans, and highly practiced and skilled song and dance routines, along with all of those who are their teachers.

The ending reestablishes God’s own order. God’s own irreverence for the ideas and practices and dysfunctions of the world. The ambitious, achievement-oriented world. It reaffirms God’s own idea. That love—and nothing else—has the capacity to lift us out of our selfishness and our sin and our death. That love vanquishes perfection always.

And so, one might almost think of this loony family as God’s own disciples traveling out to the hinterlands to present the uninformed with the Good News. The Good News of salvation through love. And in fact, at the little “Miss Sunshine Pageant,” at least two people are converted. Or if not converted, they do at least cheer Olive and her family on. Just as we gratefully and thankfully do also.

Getting and Spending

2009-01-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

So what can I tell you about. I don’t even know the guy’s name. Let’s call him Cash. Cash Money. I actually know somebody named Cash, and I actually know someone named Money. So putting them together in an amalgam name seems. Oh, I don’t know. Fitting. Fun.

So what can I tell you about Jack’s friend, Cash? Nothing really. No more than I’ve told you already. Did he serve Mammon? Which did he actually worship, God or Mammon? I don’t know. Did he feel impoverished as he went about his life? Crabbed? Miserly? Pained with self-denial? I don’t know. Did he withhold his love from others or did he lavish it upon them? Did he allow or encourage others to love him? I don’t know.

Jack was appalled, once he learned of the man’s wealth. A wealth that was carefully hoarded. Assiduously husbanded. Completely obscured. Jack says we should enjoy our wealth. Oh, not spend it all upon ourselves. But at least spend some of it on ourselves. Enjoy ourselves a little is what he asks. Why not enjoy ourselves as we are serving God? Why not take a little pleasure along the way? Why not spread the wealth a little as we go? Why save everything for the end? It’s almost like Cash was trying to buy his way into heaven.

This is what Jack thinks. These are some of Jack’s questions and concerns. But I don’t know. I do know that the engine of the economy needs fuel. Needs a little fuel from all of us to do its work. To do its life-saving, life-enhancing work. I do know that Greed is a tricky son-of-a-gun. That Greed motivates us much more than we understand. That Greed is used to standing on his head and does some of his best work in that position. That Greed dresses up in an array of costumes. That Greed in fact is almost always found in costume, wearing a mask that makes him look like someone else.

But never mind. Let’s set Cash’s extreme behavior aside for the moment and focus on what getting and spending is. We spend ourselves in getting our money, spend our time, our lives, our effort, our work, our very lives in making this value. We exchange ourselves—our work, the time allocated to us here on earth to do that work—for a value we can, if we wish, transfer to others. We can exchange ourselves and our time on earth for the improvement or the comfort or to relieve the suffering of someone else. Or we can exchange ourselves to purchase goods and services that provide comfort or enhance the value of our own non-work experience.

And this is true whether we purchase goods or services with this value or we merely hand off the value in the form of money to someone else. So getting and spending are sort of the Yin and Yang of the same thing. The left and right hands of the same organism. Or activity. Or dynamic. Or put more precisely or more vaguely or both, perhaps, creating monitory value and spending it are the inflows and outflows of. Of what? Greed? Love? Providence?

We are all economic engines, taking in fuel, putting out work. Putting out work that takes us or someone else somewhere. We are all travelers. We can enable others to travel also. Travel further and perhaps less miserably, more comfortably, than they otherwise would. But what is all this traveling for?

The Tower

2009-01-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

Where my friend Jack used to work before the flood. The flood that destroyed. Oh. Most of our downtown here. Late last spring. Fifteen thousand put out of their homes. Their homes destroyed. People who could least afford to lose their homes and most of their worldly goods. Hundreds of businesses closed, many forever. Billions in value wiped out in a few days. The flood submerging. Burying. Drowning. Value that took tens of thousands of people decades to create. Canceled in a few days.

The Tower. Where my friend Jack used to work as a janitor. A federally subsidized apartment building where the destitute the old the addicted the lame the blind the diseased and the broken made their home. Where my friend Jack’s friend worked as a janitor also until he died, and it turned out he’d. Oh. Man! The guy rented a room all his life. Never married. Rented a room. In someone else’s house. Saved. Invested. And when he died, he left equities valued then. This was in 2007. At three million dollars. Three million dollars!

Imagine what one could do with three million dollars. How many people one could save. Could rescue from starvation. Disease. Death. In say a country like. Oh. Ethiopia, for example. Three million dollars! A lifetime’s wages minus costs. Minimal costs. The necessary costs. Saved all for God. Gave it to the church. His particular church. To do with as it wished. Their responsibility now. What saving they think best to do with it. With the man’s life savings and investings. The man’s worldly goods. Worldly gettings.

And so what does this mean? It means quite plainly that we can all be an Oskar Schindler. We can all be a George Bailey. We can all save hundreds. Thousands. We can all leave a saving legacy, should we choose to. We all make at the least what a janitor makes—anyone reading this. Have at least a janitor’s capacity to save. An ordinary janitor’s capacity to bring salvation to the world.

The Tower. Home of the poor. The oppressed. The diseased. Generator of wealth! Saving wealth. Redeeming value. For the peoples of the world. The dusty, dirty, diseased of the world.

How extraordinary. How apposite! Poverty generative of wealth. Wealth inherent in service to the poor. A treasure. A literal treasure. Lying everywhere around us here. Everywhere we look. Everywhere we may lay our hands. Here in this field. This field we have inherited. This America!

But of Course

2009-01-02T14:11:00.000-08:00

But of course these movies are off-putting. Of course they are in black and white, and this bothers people. Some people want to see movies in color, no matter else. So they discount them. They dismiss them. As though this were a reasonable criticism. As though this were a good reason to discard all this heavy lifting that has been done for us. Why not 3-D, I’d want to know? Why not insist a movie be in 3-D to be acceptable? There is no verisimilitude in 2-D. The world is 3-D, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t we insist for a movie to be engaging and moving and thought-provoking and satisfying and interesting that it be 3-D?

But of course It’s a Wonderful Life is constructed in a different idiom. Using a different idiom. A different set if acting rules and linguistic rules and conventions and currencies and cultural markers. Just as Shakespeare does. I don’t know if you have read much Shakespeare or seen much of it performed, but it takes a lot from us for us to get something substantial out of all that gobbledygook. All that vocabulary difference. That acting convention difference. That culture difference. That stage convention difference. And the idiom difference is an impediment. Yes. So?

But of course It’s a Wonderful Life is a tad melodramatic. But so is. Oh. Macbeth for example. If you will disallow all melodrama and any sense of it, you will have a greatly impoverished understanding of human beings and the simulacra they make.

But of course a different idiom requires something of us. Requires more than rolling out of bed. Any understanding of art requires more than rolling out of bed. Throughout the tradition of any art form, the rules will change. The idiom will change. And what we see exhibited in any art form today will seem modern or contemporary or what have you. And everything else will seem old fashioned. Will seem dated. Quaint. A little silly. To us superior moderns. Or post moderns. Or whatever stinking pseudo-honorific we like to apply to ourselves like a medal this particular month or year or decade.

But of course Schindler’s List is a difficult movie to. Oh. Want to return to. Actually want to see again. Because of all the death. Because of all the evil everywhere. It is hard, just as life is often hard. Just as life is often full of death. Full of evil. But listen here, my dear. Get a little backbone, please. Get a little spine. Get out here with the rest of us in the howling and experience this. Understand this. Live fully in this real life that is always full of death and evil. And expect art to contain this too, because it wants. When it is good. To imitate the full tilt boogie actuality of our lives. And to do so faithfully.

But of course these movies are about extraordinary characters. Characters who are not like us, to the extent they are extraordinary. And that is also off-putting. But after all they emerge from the ordinary stuff. Ordinary flesh and blood. That we emerge from. That veils us also from pure being. From the world of pure spirit. And they put one foot in front of the other much as we do. Listening to their hearts and doing more or less what their hearts cajole them into doing. At least some of the time. In the carefully selected scope of what they are made to be. For us.

These Movies

2008-12-19T12:06:00.000-08:00

And so these movies. These two simulacra. It’s a Wonderful Life and Schindler’s List. Are quite similar in their subject matter. In the focus of their stories. And not surprisingly they are quite similar in the quality of their outcomes. Schmaltzy party in the one. Schmaltzy real life people and actors join hands across the generations in the other.

In a sense, they are both fictional. Fictional because they do place before us dramatizations. Imitations. Mimetic semblances. Stories that are quite selective as to what they include and exclude, unlike real life. Stories that are acted for us by professional actors whose job it is to play a plausible someone. A possible someone. A someone we might know or be ourselves. Or could be. Or could be like. Stories that include dialog that strictly speaking, in the case of Schindler’s List in particular, may have never happened. At least some of it. Dialog that is there to support the story. To make the story more compelling. More interesting. More explicable.

Most of our stories aren’t altogether explicable. Most of the time, we do things that are. Oh. Random seeming. Out of character. Whimsical. We wonder off track for no apparent reason. No good reason. It happens all the time. Look for example at all the Christians who divorce. Half of Christians divorce. Christians, mind you. People who are supposed to be taking the Bible seriously. Taking God seriously. Taking love seriously.

But we all have this tendency to go random. Go evil. Do destructive things. Say harmful things to people we love. Not once. No. Many times. But sometimes once is enough. And then it’s done. Then we’ve participated in the destructive processes of the cosmos. Then we become members of that army. That relentless march of the living enlisted in the army of death. That army that hurries itself on toward its own destruction and that tears at itself, tormenting itself as it goes.

And so what these two films do is to show us a different way. A different way to be human. A different way to be before God. To be in God’s presence.

And they show us that we aren’t necessarily talking about self-control here. Personal discipline. Resisting temptation. An act of the will in defiance of or rebellion against our natural impulses. We aren’t necessarily talking about denying ourselves anything when we choose to turn toward love and life and God.

What these films intimate is that there is something natural and wonderful in us. Residing in us. In our hearts. Something that wants to love and care for and look after and nurture and provide saving help to others. Even though this may be costly. Even though we have to sacrifice.

And sometimes. I don’t know. I think that love and sacrifice are the same thing. Aspects of the same thing. The same reaching outward to affirm. Encourage. Support. If you think you can love without sacrifice, maybe it isn’t really love. Maybe it’s something masquerading as love.

So these stories encourage us to rethink our willingness to love. To love practically. To love faithfully. To love in how we live. They allow us vicariously to participate in the protagonist’s love. His acts of love. And by doing so they encourage us to try our hand at this sort of love. To take it into our lives and see if we don’t feel that sense of.

Oh. That presence of the beautiful. That presence of the divine. That we experience when we watch these movies. But maybe it’s also possible out here, we think, as we watch the credits scroll up into nowhere. Maybe its possible also with us, out here. In our particular stories. In our normal, everyday lives. To experience the beautiful also. To experience love this way also.

Maybe it’s possible for us to be protagonists. For us to be the main character of our own particular story, rather than the bystander or the Potter or the Goth we sometimes feel ourselves to be. Maybe we have, today, the opportunity. To.

Well. Despite all our self-doubts and fears and second-guessings. Maybe we have the opportunity to love like a protagonist in a novel. In a play. In a movie. Maybe we have the possibility of living as if it really did matter. As if it really could bring hope or faith or peace or safety or love into somebody’s life. As if it could really save somebody’s life. As if it could open the door to the light of the beautiful and allow that light to come flooding in.

The Twentieth Century

2008-12-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

When I was eight or nine or so, I discovered The Twentieth Century, the CBS documentary TV show on Sunday nights. Walter Cronkite was the host, and. Well. What a contrast. I mean, Cronkite in his day and at this point in time was regarded as one of the most trusted men in America. But he would show newsreel footage of the most horrendous and disturbing things.

There was a lot of war footage, particularly World War II. And I was horrified occasionally to see film of the concentration camps. Film showing Jews who were still alive after liberation. A lot of film showing Jews who were dead in the camps. Other film related to the Holocaust. I became so upset that I would routinely turn off the TV in the middle of the program. How could this have happened? How was this possible? Dead people stacked like distorted, emaciated dolls on carts or on shelves. Living people so malnourished that they looked more like animated skeletons out of a horror film than real live people.

I felt. Oh, I don’t know. I felt like crying, but I couldn’t. I felt cruel looking at these people in their misery in my comfortable suburban home. I felt like I was doing something evil. Unforgivable. I felt like Walter Cronkite should be ashamed of himself for showing these horrors to us and should be prevented from doing this ever again.

And so when I watched Schindler’s List, I felt some of those same emotions. I won’t go through the plot in any detail. If you haven’t seen it, you should, but to understand this post, you might look it up on Wikipedia and read the plot summary.

So Schindler’s List is about a corrupt business man that becomes a Nazi to profit from World War II. He buys a factory in the Krakow area, which is also the location of the Plaszow Concentration Camp. The camp is run by Amon Goth, a madman who personally kills certainly many hundreds and perhaps thousands of Jews. A man who as I say does this personally. Many other Jews are killed at the camp and in Krakow, but he is personally responsible—with his own handgun—for killing perhaps thousands of people.

Oskar Schindler buys a factory and then arranges to use slave Jewish labor to operate the factory. Initially his objective is to make a great deal of money from manufacturing war goods for the German government. He bribes people left and right. He becomes a darling of the SS. But then he witnesses one of the Krakow roundups of the Jews in the ghetto there, in which Goth murders many, and his attitude toward his factory workers changes. They become human. And he decides to protect them.

The rest of the movie is about his work to protect the 1100 or 1200 people who work in his factory. How he bribes Goth, members of the SS, and anyone he needs to bribe to keep these people safe. Keep them from being murdered or shipped back to Germany for extermination.

By the end of the war, Schindler has run through all his money to save the workers in his factory. The ending of the movie shows the actors in the movie with many of the real people who Schindler saved. Art and life, fiction and fact, in a sense, come together.

In real life, Schindler went on after the end of the war to start a number of businesses that failed. He ended up penniless, on the dole. And he died that way, alone.

There are some interesting similarities and differences between this film and It’s a Wonderful Life. Schindler is like George Bailey in that he is faced with moral decisions that have significant consequences. They both make good decisions, and the outcomes of their decisions benefit their communities. The benefit in Schindler’s case is life for 1200 people who would otherwise have been murdered. The benefit in Bailey’s case is the economic well-being and moral character of the community of Bedford Falls.

George Bailey is fictional through and through. Oskar Schindler is real through and through. He really happened. Speilberg—the producer and director—and his writers didn’t so much make him as brought the real Schindler through an actor to the screen.

But it’s odd. Schindler almost makes himself up, in a way similar to the way that Bailey makes himself up. There is strong motivation pulling George away from community and toward making money, and there is strong motivation pulling Oskar toward treating the Jewish community in his factory as merely a colony of ants and toward using them solely to make money. But then there is something in both characters that works against this greed motive that enables them to rise to the occasion. Many occasions, as it turns out. To make of themselves something more interesting and salvific.

For both, this resistance comes with a substantial cost. It literally costs each a comfortable existence to listen to their hearts. To act in accordance with what their hearts are suggesting they do. Both are forced into personal economies that are quite iffy. Quite marginal. Quite contingent. Neither becomes comfortable. The choices they make take all economic cushions away and leave them both vulnerable. And in the case of Schindler, he constantly runs the risk of being murdered himself.

Oh, and then we have Amon Goth and Mr. Potter. The personifications of evil. In Potter’s case, this is what George might look like some number of years hence if he allows his ambition and his cupidity to get the better of him. In the case of Goth, here we have someone who does not see the Jews really as people. They are more like ants to him, and he enjoys his life-and-death power over them in the way a boy might enjoy life-and-death power over a colony of ants.

What drives Goth is certainly money. So in that way he is quite similar to Potter. He sucks Schindler dry almost single-handedly, he is so greedy. And one can imagine that if Potter were given the legal and moral latitude given to Goth, he would become a profligate murderer as well. But his cultural and legal context does not allow him that. It only allows him bigotry and economic oppression. And so that is what he exercises. He will be as evil as his cultural and legal context allows.

So what we have in both cases is a character doing extraordinary things but doing these things in an ordinary way. Making one decision at a time. Choosing to divert, one step at a time, from the path he begins on. The choices the two characters make are moral choices, but these are not so much motivated by the characters thinking that something is right and they therefore should do it. The choices seem to arise more from their hearts rather than from an idea about what is right and wrong. Choices their hearts make first to love someone, to care for someone, to take care of someone. And then the action—their behavior—follows this choice their hearts seem to have made independent of their minds or their wills.

Both are comedies, then. Oh, I know. Schindler’s List isn’t a laugh a minute. Let me tell you, it’s not at all fun. It’s serious stuff. And throughout watching it, I have a horror and sense of dread and enormous grief that sits in the back of my eyes and in my throat and in my insides like an alien that is trying to tear me into ragged, bloody, little pieces. Like I did back in the days when I watched Holocaust newsreels on The Twentieth Century.

But unlike the newsreels, Schindler’s List shows us what one quite flawed and ordinary man can do, if he let’s his heart have its way with him.

He can save lives. Real human lives. Nothing at all pretend in this. When in fact he’s just an ordinary Joe or Oskar putting one foot in front of the other, doing what his heart asks him to do.

And this choice. These many choices a person can make to follow the heart. When strung together through actual and simulated life. With their many not so happy consequences and the many possibly happy ones as well. Become like a string of gemstones, a glittering and beautiful thing. One weeps or wants to weep, this is so beautiful. So fragile. And so possible.

Why Is George Bailey Frustrated?

2008-12-16T06:11:00.000-08:00

It’s almost always useful to ask obvious questions. Questions whose answers appear to be immediately obvious. I suppose it’s useful because stating the obvious needs to be done to get us through the front door of a story and on into its interior. If we can’t make our way through the front door, we can’t begin to appreciate the internal architecture, the furnishings, the interior decoration. We can’t meet the inhabitants and get to know them.

So let’s ask an obvious question about It’s a Wonderful Life: Why is George Bailey frustrated? Isn’t it because of his capacity for love? Isn’t it because he loves too well to suit the ambitious and self-interested impulse in him? Isn’t he really more frustrated by the affections of his heart and the wisdom of his heart and the decisions of his heart than he is by his nemesis, Mr. Potter, or by the incompetence of Uncle Billy, or by the apparent passivity and mediocrity of his father?

Let me remind you of George’s initial motivation and a bit of the plot. George wants to leave his home town, Bedford Falls, since the time he is “elected to membership in the National Geographic Society” and probably before. As a boy behind a soda fountain, he wants to become a famous explorer. As a young man, he wants to travel widely and become an architect who will design great bridges and buildings to constitute and adorn the world’s great cities. He wants to become sophisticated, rich, and famous. He definitely does not want to work with his father in his family business, at the “two-bit” Bailey Building and Loan Association.

But George’s love for his brother, Harry, his love for his father and his father’s memory, his love for his community, and then his love for Mary Hatch keep him from going to college and realizing his ambitions. He sends his brother, Harry, to college, at the same time filling in at the Building and Loan for his dead father so that the working poor and the marginally middle class of Bedford Falls can afford homes of their own, rather than having to pay Mr. Potter’s outrageous rents.

So George’s American Dream of riches and fame is consistently frustrated by the wisdom and the commitments of his heart. As his hair begins to gray and he is barely able to afford his growing family, Mr. Potter offers him compensation that is almost 10 times his current salary at the Building and Loan, if only he will sell out to him. The American Dream side of George leaps at the opportunity Potter offers, and he accepts. But then as he puffs away on one of Potter’s expensive cigars, his heart realizes what a betrayal this would be to the life he has chosen for himself and the values he lives by, and he rejects the offer.

Finally, on a Christmas Eve day, the present of the story, which has mostly been told to us in flashbacks, Uncle Billy misplaces a substantial sum of the Building and Loan’s money, which actually ends up in the hands of Mr. Potter, who keeps it and tells no one. This threatens to result in jail for someone, and George imagines this will have to be him. He can’t figure out how he can go to jail without his family being destroyed. So he goes through a crisis in which he considers suicide, because he wants to restore the money, without harming his Uncle Billy. He feels so overwhelmed by his lost opportunity—his frustrated dreams of success—that he wishes that he had never been born. An angel—Clarence Odbody—who appears to have the intellect of a bag of rocks but who turns out to have considerably more wisdom than any other character in the story, shows George what life in Bedford Falls would have been like without him.

At first, George cannot believe what Clarence shows him. He’s convinced that the world would have been better off without him and that his life has been a waste. Further, he’s convinced that the world Clarence shows him is some kind of mental trick. But no, after he becomes convinced that the might-have-been world that Clarence shows him of joylessness and poverty and greed and sin and viciousness might not be a mental trick—it might actually be a kind of parallel world in which he really never did exist—he prays to be returned to his family. He then is miraculously restored to the world he helped create—the world into which he actually was born. He is returned home by one of the town policemen, and he is reduced to tears of joy and humiliation at his reunion with his family.

The people of the community, after hearing about George’s financial trouble, have apparently all pitched in and more-than-replace the missing funds. The movie ends with George’s restoration to his family, his community, and himself, in a schmaltzy Frank Capra Christmas Eve party full of singing, silliness, and celebration.

Throughout, then, we see George at war with himself. His heart leads him into commitments that his mind tells him are unwise. His mind—his self-interest, which is his ambition—continues to chafe against his heart until the crisis on Christmas Eve, when it is once again put down. It is put down by reality. The reality that George’s heart has helped to create as he has made choice after choice throughout his life. It is a reality that is shown to be much finer—much more fortunate and more beneficial and more happy and more inspiring and more beautiful and more meaningful and more loving—than the alternative reality that Clarence Odbody shows him. The alternative reality in which George’s heart and its decisions play no role and in which Potter, the greedy, loveless, voracious businessman who grasps to own and control all of Bedford Falls, dominates without any contest from George.

George—through his sacrifice to his community, his love of his neighbors—has helped to strengthen the character of his friends and neighbors. They have seen how George has sacrificed for them. Now they sacrifice for him, by contributing more money than they can really afford to bail him out of his trouble. Please notice that they really don’t care what the nature of his trouble is. They will help him no matter what.

What if his community had not come forth and rescued George? Well, the world that he had helped to create would have been the same in its essentials, but it would not have been fully realized. It would not have fully become itself. But George’s decision to pray for restoration to his real and actual life would not have changed. And his joy at his restoration to his family and friends would not have changed.

The party ending is important, but it isn’t essential to George’s life. George’s struggle is what the story is about, the shaping of his character and the shaping of the world that he inhabits. We want to see the sacrifice of the community in the end, though, because it is just and right and beautiful, in a schmaltzy sort of way. It is the realization of the good of George’s temptations and his sacrifice.

And it puts to rights the Christmas story. The story of Jesus. We want to know that it is possible to get a different outcome these days—even in America—to a life of sacrifice. We want to know that a life lived through love and forgiveness does not have to end in defeat. That it can change us this time. We want to know that we can fully participate this time around in the love and the beauty of such a life, rather than be the cause of its destruction.

And so we identify more than we may care to admit with Uncle Billy and Bert and Ernie and Cousin Eustace and Cousin Tilly and Mr. Martini and Nick and Sam Wainwright and Ruth Dakin Bailey and Carter and Mr. Gower and Violet and the others. We want ourselves this time to fully participate in the possibility of salvation. In the possibility offered us by someone who only knows how to put one foot in front of the other on his way to a destination that only his heart knows. A destination that is right here. Right here in this place. Wherever and whenever this happens to be.

Mimesis

2008-12-14T17:24:00.000-08:00

But allow me to digress. Allow me to regress. Allow me to readdress myself back, back, back in time to let’s say. Oh. Where and when I lived with my forgiving and loving bride 30 years or so ago. Allow me to send myself and you back to a rather poor, beat-within-an-inch-of-its-life flat in Syracuse, New York, where I read books and wrote papers and was poor. Bassett was the street. A poor, sad-eyed homophone-of-a-street.

We were middling poor, what with me going to school and Pat nursing. We had the one car. The one green car her parents gave us. I think our rent was $140 a month, and that included utilities. Our furniture was junk pulled out of somebody’s garage and doused in varnish remover. A normal meal was hotdog casserole or macaroni and cheese, sometimes meatloaf, when we could afford it. I walked a mile to school and back, down streets and across a park where people were occasionally robbed or raped or murdered or all of these.

Those were the days, as I dim-wittedly dodged knives and bullets on my way, back and forth to school, in which I was both a grad student and a teacher. In which I taught a variety of students a variety of subjects, all of them having to do either with writing or literature. In which I was the particular sort of an indentured servant called a teaching assistant.

And Syracuse was the place where I read my early Plato, my Aristotle, my Bloom, my Campbell, my Brooks, my Wittgenstein, my Clive Bell, my Kant, my Tolstoy, my Beardsley, my Freud, my Jung, my Santayana, my Frye, my Arnold, my Saussure, my Warren, my Ransom, my Leavis, my Barthes, my Levi-Strauss, my Chomsky, and my horde of other literary critics and philosophers, along with literature itself, my Shakespeare, my D.H. Lawrence, my Yeats, my Williams, my Pound, my Woolf, my Faulkner, my Dos Passos, my Beckett, my Ionesco, my Camus, my James, my Forster, my Carver, my Melville, my Flaubert, my Swift, my Donne, my Herbert, my Eliot, my Dostoyevsky, my Wordsworth, my Coleridge, my Shelley, my Pope, my Milton, my Ibsen, my Chekov, my Neruda, my Borges, my Cheever, my Gogol, my Keats, my Browning, my Dickens, my Stendhal, my Bishop, my Thomas, my Heaney, my Carruth, my Dillard, my Whitman, my Hawthorne, my Twain, my Golding, my Updike, my Pynchon, my Lowell, my Hughes, my Lewis, my Ford, my Sinclair, my West, my Roethke, my Hemingway, my Joyce, my Fielding, my Richardson, my Defoe, my Wilde, my Conrad, my Hardy, my Cervantes, my Homer, my Frost, my Millay, Aeschylus, my Euripides, my Sophocles, my O’Connor, my Virgil, my Bunyan, my Samuel Butler, my Cummings, my Turgenev, my Goethe, my. My, my, my, one does go on!

And one of the questions that insinuated itself into me. Wormed its little way in through my ear and into my brain and wouldn’t leave. Wouldn’t be shaken out. Was the question that goes something like this: “If literature is an imitation of life, what in us is it imitating?” And its corollary: “If literature is made for reading, what is reading literature made for?”

In other words, why do we need it? Why do we want it? Why do we look for it? What is its use? Yes, it certainly serves the economically and politically powerful in exhaustively and boringly elaborated ways. But it also serves the powerless. Stories and poems and plays seem egalitarian in their service to everyone, everywhere. But what, beyond reinforcing political and economic ideas, is literature serving in us? Why do we put up with the brainwashing aspect? Why isn’t law and custom and social sanction and the exercise of direct political and economic power sufficient to reinforce political and economic interests? Why literature, in particular?

Why all these replicas? These representations? These imitations? Why all this dangerous and expensive and circuitous and labyrinthine and distracting and refracting and indirect and ramifying and recursive and recalcitrant and philosophically illegitimate and illogical and irrational and emotional and morally slippery and impractical frou-frou?

Background. Plato first writes about mimesis or imitation or representation or acting or reciting or presenting a simulacrum in Ion and The Republic. Aristotle picks up the discussion later. And others, down through the ages, have tried to understand what goes on between plays, poetry, narratives, novels, stories, music, dance, art, film, etc. and us. Why we make these things, which I’ll call simulacra for lack of a better word. How we use these things. What their function is. Why they exist. What good they are or do.

And of course the opinions are all over the map. Plato begins the discussion by having Socrates assert that the actor and by extension and implication the poet or story-teller don’t really know anything. They have no truth to convey. They have no particular skill or craftsmanship. They are merely inspired. They are divinely inspired to a kind of madness. Truth is the province of the philosopher only. (If he were alive and writing today, he’d probably say philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and scientists only.) And these stories and plays and art and all other simulacra are therefore mere entertainments. And to the extent they may mislead people and convince them of things that are false, they may in fact be quite dangerous.

So I did quite a bit of reading at the time. And some since. And some thinking. I won’t go through it all. It’s boring and irritating. Tedious. I list some of it above. I circuitously touch on some of it in previous posts, and I’m certain I will in future posts.

So please allow me to skip most of that and arrive immediately in the present. And this present is. Oh. Maybe an eight to ten year ongoing sort of a present.

And in this rather fluid sort of a present, here’s what I’ve come to, propositionally speaking, and in no particular order of precedence or importance: (1) We do think by story, by image, by character unfolding, by accumulating narrative meaning; (2) Our hearts do most of our useful thinking, with the assistance of our heads; (3) Our hearts use words and actions and images and smells and color and flavor and sounds and the feel of a thing to reason about it—but always our hearts place these sensations in the context of a story, a narrative, a timeline, a sequence, with character implicit, imputed, or invented, no matter how minimally realized or referenced; (4) Character is our principal way of entering the world of simulacra, our principal construct through which we extract meaning; (5) Good tragedy presents us with one or more characters who are greater in some respect (usually morally or in their capacity for suffering) than we are; (6) Good comedy presents us with one or more characters who are just about the same as we are, in morality and moral capacity; (7) In both, the most credible protagonists are flawed; (8) Congenitally, we prefer comedy, given half a chance, because it aligns with a terminal orientation toward hope and purpose, a capacity for love and forgiveness and generosity, that is emergent and ascendant and insistent in us; (9) Comedy tends toward resolution, restoration, love, forgiveness, and redemption, while Tragedy tends toward dissolution, destruction, death, suffering, and judgment, and we choose which of these orientations we will like best and perhaps have, ourselves; (10) Poetry (of which song lyrics are a species) is still one of our most powerful and pervasive story-telling techniques; (11) Simulacra (e.g. plays, novels, short stories, poems, songs, TV shows, painting, sculpture, dance, music, etc.) all find their home in narrative, in plot, in sequence; (12) Simulacra are all metaphors in which we imaginatively place ourselves to think usefully and operationally about our lives and one another and the world and God; (13) Metaphor is how we figure we can possibly know anything; (14) We make figures-tropes-metaphors in order to think about or know anything; (15) Most propositional argument—philosophical discourse—is built with metaphor; (15) Most propositional knowledge is explained through the use of narrative or narrative reference, no matter how minimal; (16) Beauty is always (but not only) what we are looking for in simulacra—beauty in character, in event, in appearance, in sound, in movement, in shape, or in expression—as though it were our purpose in coming to simulacra in the first place; (17) Meaning is always (but not only) what we are looking for in literature, and when a work of literature is well done, meaning and beauty become one; (18) Words themselves are metaphors, in a sense, rather arbitrary sounds and marks standing for things and ideas and emotions that only they make present and comprehensible; (19) Grammar and syntax taken together as semantic structure is a metaphor for action and stasis, for living itself.

Oh, I know. What I’ve done here is skip the proof. Skip the steps in the mathematical proof. Or proofs. Skipped the argument and the evidence and gone straight to the conclusions. It’s wrong. It’s illegitimate. It’s backward. It’s non-linear. It’s convoluted. It’s anti-intellectual. It’s non-verifiable. It’s an outrage. It’s not to be trusted. It comes out of pure air. Pure blue air. If this were a Freshman essay, I’d give it an F.

And another thing. These propositions (and others like them) are to this blog as quarks are to atoms, and to all else that I write. Or know. Or think I know. I think.

But Then

2008-12-10T07:51:00.000-08:00

But then, after saying all that, it also occurs to me to say that we do all end up dead. No matter our choices for good or ill. No matter whether we had a jolly good time or a jolly rotten time. No matter whether we married and had children and were happy. Or whether we were murderers and were chronically angry and depressed.

We could have been loving and forgiving all of our lives and been blown to bits in a spectacular highway crash or drowned in a tsunami or killed by starvation in a dusty, barren, and indifferent wasteland of a world.

Depending on the activity or inactivity of others and of nature itself, we could lead utterly trusting and loving and forgiving lives and be rewarded, in part, by suffering—by terrible suffering—and early destruction here on earth.

And so if that can occur—and let me assure you that it does all the time—you have every right to wonder what I could possibly be talking about. Comedy? you might ask. Comedy? You call the people who perished in South Africa leading up to the ending of apartheid characters in a comedy? You call the Holocaust a comedy? You call Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Hitler a bunch of comedians? A bunch of characters in a comedy?

You’ve got to be kidding, you are thinking. You have got to be out of your mind.

You call Jesus’s story a comedy? A story in which he dies a terrible death at a young age. A brutal and lonely death. This is comedy?

And so this is what I mean about Laurel and Hardy, for example. Comedy in the sense that I am using the word may include Laurel and Hardy, but it also definitely does include Hitler and Stalin and all the rest. It does entail an iffy plot and a lot of characters that do not come out to entertain us so much. Rather, many of them come out to torment us and destroy us, as it turns out.

So when I assert that life and the world has within it a comedic structure. Or the possibility of a comedic structure. When I say that life lived in a certain way is comedic. Is a comedy. What I don’t mean is that it is a laugh a minute. What I do certainly mean is that beneath all the suffering and evil is something that is more real. More essential. More actual. Than all the suffering and evil that conceals it.

What I do mean is that liveliness and loveliness and hopefulness and forgiveness overpower and overwhelm what endeavors to destroy these qualities, when exercised. When lived. When given human expression. When insisted upon. When embodied. When enspirited. When allowed expression by one’s spirit. When lived out by anyone, even by people who are facing death. Whose bodies are failing and passing away.

There is something thrilling about a person who in the face of death and suffering will choose to love, to forgive, to affirm, to encourage, and not to despair. Something noble. Something that seems beautiful. That makes one weak in the knees, it is so beautiful.

It is this underlying beauty that I am talking about here. And this beauty, which I’ve written about elsewhere in this blog, and our mysterious, mystical response to it, which tells us we’re on to something. Tells us we really do have something here. Independent of the evidence and logic and beauty and rightness of the Resurrection, which I’ll get to later.

Oh, I don’t know. Have you ever seen the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life? How about Schindler’s List? One is largely fictional. The other is largely factual. But don’t these stories get at something that we want to believe? Aren’t we drawn to the possibility that we can personally make a difference? That we can change the world?

Isn’t changing the world in our blood somehow? Isn’t wanting to bring a contribution that makes a difference deep down in us somewhere? Isn’t there an intuition that changing the world is what we are put here to do?

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. It’s a Wonderful Life is schmaltzy and old-fashioned and kind of silly and not really what the real world looks like. And you’re thinking that Schindler’s List is an extraordinary example. That real people don’t have the opportunity that Schindler did to make a difference.

But of course these are merely rationalizations for living a comfortable life. A selfish life. A greedy life. For preferring comfort over heroism. Over beauty. Over sacrifice. For preferring safety over risk.

We can all make a difference, if we choose to. We can make a difference to one another. To our families and friends and co-workers. We can make a difference in the suffering and pain of others. I see it all the time. I see better people than I am do this all the time.

But seeing it does require opening one eyes. It does require one to look for this sort of thing. To expect it. To expect God to give us help right here and now to live this way. To live beautifully. To live lovingly. To live forgivingly. To give up the comfort and righteousness of one’s anger. To give up the comfort and righteousness of a materialistic and money-oriented life. To give up acquisitiveness. To give up the idea that one’s significance has anything at all to do with money and acquisitions.

In the divine comedy that I’m talking about, we all. Without understanding it. Against our better judgment. Against our American instinct for economic accomplishment. Could very well find ourselves like George Bailey. Frustrated and wanting and vulnerable. Just scraping by. Wet-faced with tears of joy and humiliation. Dependent. Completely contingent. A few paychecks away from homelessness. Grinding out ordinary lives that occasionally seem schmaltzy and contrived and flawed by impatience and anger. But also tilting the world, however minutely, in the direction of the sun.

The Characters in the Play

2008-12-05T14:52:00.000-08:00

The characters in the play, in other words, need to help write the play. Write the play that fits the genre in which they wish to exist. The kind of world in which they want to live. Write themselves the kind of role they see for themselves. The kind of role they want to play.

The playwright has chosen to do only so much after all, and the characters must do their part. They must develop. Well. Their own character, their own logic. Their own attitudes. Their own motives. Their own particular places in the action.

It’s kind of like improv. Only instead of stand-up comedy, it’s stand-up narrative. Stand-up playing. Stand-up theater. You and the other actors in your play are all improvising your parts, largely.

I say play, but pick your literary form. Pick your medium. Could be a movie. Could be a novel. Could be a narrative poem. Could be. Oh, I don’t know. A TV show.

But here’s the idea. You’re an actor, see, if it’s in one of the performing arts. Or you’re an agent, if it’s purely literary. Purely written and not performed. A clue is that an agent is not fully human yet. So also is an actor with respect to his character. They are both proto-characters in search of their full human identity. Actor or agent in search of who they will be. Who they will choose to be. What role they will actually play. And that role may change. May evolve. One hopes it does, because with experience, one would hope there is some learning and some changing. As one interacts with others, develops relationships with others, one hopes one would change to accommodate the needs of others. One hopes for a dynamic quality to the performance.

In other words, you start off in the life of the narrative as something pretty close to a blank. A mere possibility. A possibility, however, that is qualified by certain constraints. Certain givens about your circumstance. Some are given more options than others here. And as the narrative progresses, you realize progressively more and more of the possibility you’ve been given. You make choices. You select a particular path through the landscape. Everywhere you go, there are branches off the path you are on, and you are therefore making choices all the time.

The path you take is selected from a many, many possible paths. You become individuated. Your genre almost selects you based on these individual choices you make. Let’s use weather as a metaphor for genre. So your path leads you to. Oh. San Diego, for example, where, except for the June Gloom, it is mostly sunny and warm. Comedic, let us say. Or you select a set of paths that take you to Barrow, Alaska, for example, where for six months of the year, it’s dark, and for most of the year, it’s cold. More of a potentially Tragic sort of a place, where you really must scramble to make any sort of a living at all, where there are few jobs to speak of, and where hunting and fishing are the principal occupations. Which is in contrast to San Diego, where the jobs are plentiful, of great variety. Et cetera.

But let’s shift our metaphor back to the theater, for a moment. So you’re an actor, let’s say. A male actor, who finds himself in a play, playing A, for example. A young man fresh out of Columbia University with a degree in English, of all things. (Who gets a degree in English, you moron? What were you thinking? You can’t get any sort of a job with a degree in English. A good-paying job, I mean. Oh, you can be a clerk or dishwasher or bathroom attendant. Yes. If you want a career in cash register jockeying, an English degree is ideal. But otherwise, you are up a sorry, stony, dried-up creek-bed without a paddle, Fella!)

Where was I? Oh. Then A meets B, a successful comedienne on Saturday Night Live. And that’s it. That’s all you’re given. Now you make up who you are as you go. And what you do. What your attitude is. What your values are. What you believe. What kind of a life you want. Improvise!

You decide what your genre will be. What kind of story you will live inside. What you’d like the beginning, middle, and end to look like. To live like.

For example, here’s one plot and implicit genre that you might try to fashion for yourself: A falls in love with B, but B doesn’t fall in love with A until late in the third act, when A goes to work for an NGO in Darfur. A is rivaled by C for B’s affections, a rich up-and-comer investment banker. C woos B in A’s absence. A feeds the hungry and contracts a disease that almost kills him. He’s rushed back to New York for critical medical care. B helps to nurse him back to health, revives his will to live type of deal. C proves himself to have been a linchpin in the development and sale of mortgage-backed securities. B finally rejects C for his moral bankruptcy. Word-play intended. A writes a best-selling book about his experiences in Darfur. A and B marry, taking an apartment together in SoHo, where they live a bon vivant type of life, routinely having parties for the cast of Saturday Night Live and the homeless, in which everyone yuks it up over hors d’oeuvres and drinks.

Or here’s another plot and implicit genre you might try on for size: A never falls in love. He’s kind of like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, except that instead of falling in and out of love, he never falls in love. He’s too demanding. Too picky. Too whiny. He meets a nearly infinite number of possible Bs, but each of them is faulty. Each of them is something less than perfect. A knows what he’s looking for. He knows exactly what he’s looking for. But he can’t find a B that meets all the requirements. So he becomes a career employee of the New York Public Library. He works in the bowls of the organization on obscure conservation projects. He slowly gets his MA in Library Science, one course at a time. He saves his money carefully for his retirement. He’s promoted slowly over the decades after he receives his MA. He begins to take winter vacations in Belize, where he delights in sea kayaking. He begins to dream of retiring early there. He saves his money carefully, almost never going out, eating macaroni and cheese for dinner or spaghetti, looking forward to the day when he can retire to Belize—he loves the sound of that word, when he says it—where he can live in the sun. But then one day, at his desk, he dies.

In other words, you have a great deal of latitude here. Particularly in North America. You in fact have a great deal of freedom. But so does everyone else. You may have difficulty getting your plot to turn out exactly as you wish, but your character and your attitude. That wonderful Mr. Wonderful You. Is the one aspect of this whole metaphor that you have quite significant choice over. (Particularly with 21st century psycho-active drugs.) And to the extent that character can increase the probability of genre—and it can quite profoundly—you always have that.

Plot. The particulars of plot. Well. That’s a bit more iffy. As I say. What with freedom running rampant all around us and a certain randomness embedded in everything.

But I’m repeating myself. But I’m repeating myself.

The point is that the structure of the world is open in some significant measure. Is open in the sense that much of it can be up to you.

The Metaphor That Changes the World

2008-12-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

So the hypothesis that the structure of the world is fundamentally comedic is what all my examples at the beginning of the last post have in common. Or maybe you want to call it a theory, since there is some evidence for it. Some significant evidence. Take the recent history of South Africa as described in Desmond Tutu’s book.

If people are in fact forgiving. If they act consistent with the theory that forgiveness creates a better life for them. That love creates a better community. That love and forgiveness are possible and that they lead to better outcomes. That they themselves are in fact capable of the improbable emotions and intentions and plans and sacrifices that are bound up with love and forgiveness.

If people will not only entertain the theory but act on it, in contrast to all reasonable expectation. If people will allow themselves to be led into a simulacrum. Into a story in which vicious retribution, bloody revenge, descent into hatred and destruction are all set aside. Into a story in which the oppressors are forgiven. Are allowed to walk away. Free and carefree as birds.

If people will suspend their other less lovely ideas about the way the world works and entertain the comedic idea, no matter how improbable. No matter how apparently naïve. No matter how vulnerable this makes one. No matter how silly looking and perhaps unsophisticated and perhaps stupid-seeming. Perhaps unstylish or unwise or foolish. One may appear.

It may actually turn out to be true. Accurate. The comedic model may fit remarkably well. But its fit. Its reasonableness. Depends completely on our willingness to use it. To live in accordance with it. To operate as though loving and forgiving were our most natural and favored modes of being, of acting, of feeling, of believing, of doing. To live as though we were made to operate this way.

In other words, its use does require choice. Its operative reality does require intentionality. Choice sometimes in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. And contrary emotion. And pressure from others.

I remember, for example, decades ago now, a man who. Oh, the memory is dim. A man who was walking with his daughter. (Perhaps you remember him also. He became famous at the time.) This was in Northern Ireland. I don’t know which they were. Catholic or Protestant. Anyway, a bomb goes off. They are buried in rubble. The young woman is killed. The father survives and goes on the radio saying that he forgives those who did this terrible thing.

He repeatedly goes on the radio and the television also. And I think he was interviewed in the newspapers as well. And everywhere he proclaimed forgiveness. Everywhere for a time he was found to be saying the most ridiculous thing: that he forgave his attackers. His daughter’s murderers.

People called him crazy. Insane. They dismissed him as mentally defective. Because he forgave his enemies. Forgave the murderers of his daughter.

What was his trouble, really? It was that he reasoned by metaphor. He reasoned that the world really does have, underneath all the death and suffering and hate and oppression, a comedic structure. He reasoned that his role in this comedy was to live in accordance with this metaphor’s precepts. And so he forgave.

He was faithful to this idea about the world. He was faithful to this idea about his daughter. He was faithful to this idea about his community. He was faithful to this idea about how all of us are made. And what we are made for.

He was faithful to this idea no matter what. No matter that his beloved daughter had been slaughtered needlessly. For no good reason. A person he loved more than his own life.

And he was faithful to this idea when his friends and family maybe joined others in calling him crazy. Insane. Unfaithful to his daughter’s memory. Unfaithful to his daughter. Maybe.

He reasoned by metaphor that life was bigger and more important than his own anger. Than his own desire to destroy the people who would do such a horrible thing. He reasoned by narrative. He reasoned by story. And he found himself—found his real, actual, genuine, made-up, fictional, intentionally selected self—in a role in that story. In the role of protagonist. The role of lover. A lead role in his own story and the story of the world.

And When I Say Comedy

2008-12-01T13:51:00.000-08:00

And when I say comedy, what I’m thinking of is, in no particular order, Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, the movie A Thousand Clowns, Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness, the Gospel of John, and other such simulacra.

Other such representations. Other such meditations. Other such narratives. Other such explorations into the world as a fortunate place, into the idea that life is. Well. Filled with cupidity and insanity and banality and terror and death and suffering and corruption and evil. But also into the idea that life has in it restoration and order and beauty and light-heartedness and enjoyment and vitality and love and generosity and forgiveness and word-play and a modicum of hilarity from time to time.

Explorations that discover a dark world where there are also the moon and stars. And ultimately the sun.

Narratives that acknowledge that while our particular lives end, our endings may not be all that bad. And they may very possibly be good.

And this is from someone who is a hospice volunteer. Who occupies himself with people who are dying.

I sit with people as they die. I sit with people whose brother or sister or wife will not sit with them as they die. So I see death. And I see a bit of suffering. And I see cowardice. In other words, I am not isolated from the real world in a world of books.

So when I say comedy, I mean something beyond Laurel and Hardy. There’s nothing wrong with Laurel and Hardy. I think The Music Box is a scream, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was a teenager, when I fell off the couch laughing as the classic short played on the television.

But let’s face it, the destruction of a home and the destruction of a player piano by idiots, while amusing, doesn’t discover much in the end but destruction and mayhem and guffaws. Low humor such as this can serve the purpose of amusement in a larger comedic structure, but this is not itself an example of the comedy I mean.

The comedy I mean is unlikely. Improbable. The skeptic in us momentarily rebels at the comedic ending. But we put him down. We put down the skeptic in order to let the restoration or the salvation or the consummation or the survival of love in the ending stand.

Oh it may sometimes stand a bit shakily, depending upon our phase of life. Depending somewhat on our life experience. On whether we are clinically depressed or not, for example. On whether we have lost people we’ve loved.

And this shakiness is part of what comedy discovers also. It requires something of us—a steadying hand, in some sense. It requires a willingness to overlook whatever contrivance there might be. A willingness to forget something of what we think we know about the way the world works. And to remember hope. And to remember possibility. Consciously. Deliberately. As a matter of choice.

The River of the Water of This Life

2008-11-30T12:51:00.000-08:00

Early in our marriage, before children, Pat and I took a road trip through Maine. One of our stops was in The Forks, where the Dead River joins the Kennebec.

The idea was to raft the Kennebec, putting in north of The Forks, just below the dam near Indian Pond. It was early morning. Sun just up. The dam and the put-in were in a gorge a few hundred feet high, the rock walls intensifying the water’s roar. The water was hilly, as we stood there on the bank, the hills standing considerably above our heads, and the declivities below them a bit dark and obscure.

In other words, we were terrified. It was our first time in serious white water. We entered the raft a bit shaky in the knees and voices and sinews. We felt absolutely swallowed already by the end-of-time noise the water made. Death was here. The great huge potentiality of death. Death was everywhere in the blackness of the water. In the shaded darkness of the frothy white.

But there was also a liveliness. An intensity and immediacy and presence and energy that one associates with life itself. An elemental quickness and the possibility of comedy, of a tour de force ending, in which all things turn out well, some distance down river, where the walls diminish and the fields open up and the sun pours in.

We paddled with the rest of the people in our raft. I think there were seven of us altogether. As we began to nose over into our first major rapid—Magic Falls—I thought surely I would die, it was so deep and dark and shiny and glistening. While the rest of the people sensibly held on, both Pat and I flipped up and out at the base of the fall, suddenly swimming in a souse hole large enough to miniaturize a Greyhound bus.

After a time. What seemed like a day or two. We bobbed to the surface and floated, submerged by standing wave after standing wave, for. Oh. I don’t know. What seemed like a very long way. Thinking. Thinking what? Of course that we would surely die. Thinking all the while how difficult breathing ends up being when one is submerged. How difficult life is when lived underwater.

Isn’t that what living’s like? Normal living? Sometimes? School and work and marriage and children and family and friends type of living? Being alone type of living? Being asked to do more than one can possibly do type of living? All of it’s hard sometimes. The whole blessed trip. One feels like one cannot get one’s breath, one is so submerged in the days that come over one like so many standing waves.

Reasoning By Metaphor

2008-11-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

“Rather than discussing and debating Trinitarian doctrine and what it means for Jesus to be both human and divine, why don’t we just all agree to call Jesus ‘The Word of God?’ And end the discussion.”

Oh, I don’t know. I maybe have a couple of the words only approximately right. But I’ve captured it about 80% accurately, I think.

This is what a new friend said the other day as we were digesting a delicious lunch that he and his bride had generously made and shared with Pat and me. And as we were chatting. Incurably chatting.

And then I said something like, “Yes. Why don’t we try reasoning by metaphor rather than by….”

“Dialectic,” my new friend said.

“Yes. Dialectic. The method by which words are turned into mathematical analogs.”

And that got me to thinking, and as I thought, I remembered something that Phyllis Tickle taught me some years ago:

God be in my head
And in my understanding.
God be in my mouth
And my speaking.
God be in my heart
And my thinking.
God be at mine end
And my departing.

This is a Celtic prayer of which I’ve found several variants and which I occasionally say in the course of saying prayers from Phyllis’s Divine Hours. And in fact, I keep it in my wallet these days and pull it out and pray it occasionally.

It seems to reinforce this idea, doesn’t it? I mean, that one does one’s thinking with one’s heart, if one is thinking properly. If one is thinking clearly and precisely and effectively.

I think philosophical method misunderstands its medium.

I remember a seminar one day many years ago in which we were discussing Gertrude Stein and her experiments with words. Her attempts to use words in such a way that she strips the words of all meaning. Experiments in which syntax is completely reinvented with respect to the words, so that the words become merely sounds, with no sense.

Someone in the seminar that day said something like, “Yes. What she seems to be doing is stripping words of an essential quality, as if a painter were working only with transparent paint. Various tubes of transparent paint.” As I recall, the comment stopped the discussion.

What I guess I’m insinuating is that dialectic and the sort of discourse that supports dialectical method may not be the best way to proceed in the field of theology. Or the best principal way. It may attempt to strip something essential out of the way words themselves are designed to be used.

Perhaps words and their meanings have more to do with our hearts than our heads. Perhaps mathematical symbols are closest to what our heads use, and words are closest to what our hearts use to understand the world. To apprehend experience. To comprehend what the senses bring to us.

And maybe that’s why poetry and story are so much what the Bible is and what Jesus said and did. Poetry and story seem. Oh, I don’t know. What words seem to be made for.

And yes. We do go to philosophy and philosophic method for help. Just as in everyday life we do go to mathematics for help. But dialectical use of language and mathematical use of arbitrary symbols are both servants to. Well. Story. The story, in the first instance, of our lives.

Our lives in which we experience God.

And the story, in the second instance, of the Bible. God’s Word.

November Leaves

2008-11-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Walking away from work, workful still and grateful to have meaningful work to do in this desolate time. This time of stripped wealth and wintery expectations. I cross a parking lot to my car where the wind moves the brown, dry oak leaves back and forth. Lifts them. Turns them. Then drops them again and sends them scuttling across the concrete. This way and that. Dead and scratchy leaves animated by wind.

The tree where more than a year ago I saw a red-tailed hawk brilliantly light and perch in the rich green-and-red-and-yellow-turning color of the leaves is now bare as bones stood up in the dark. Leafless. A place for the cold wind now to make its grieving home.

Day’s end. Walking away from work, I’m thinking of money. Money. Money. Money. How it appears and disappears as if by spirit-work. As if spirits swelled it and diminished it, outside of our knowledge or control. As if it were more idea than substance, or if substance, then a spirit substance, different from all others we know of.

We work for money but if only so, it’s poor compensation for what we do. Or try to do.

Really, it’s never enough, is it? Money. We never have enough. It’s never enough to enliven this November place. This place of chill wind, bare trees, and dry leaves skittering across concrete, a walk alone across the pale concrete. The material world stripped to this staccato hissing of the leaves manipulated by wind.

It never quite gets at what we’re looking for from work, either. It never measures up to the sense we have of infinite expenditure. For what? A few dollars? Many dollars?

The expenditure of self. Of possibility. Of one’s only now. And now. And now. The infinite now that we expend in work.

For what? For money. Yes. A sufficiency. Yes. But there is more to this than that. Our hearts tell us that. Our hearts tell us that the sufficiency we work for once reached leaves us. Well. Skittering around in wind like this. Shed. Killed. In a season that maybe we choose more than we know.

Because we fail to know the other purposes well enough. The other possibilities of our work.

My view’s this. God’s given us something here that’s manifold. That’s non-finite and immaterial. Something that bears his signature and his name.

But You Say

2008-11-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

But you say, Bill! Bill! I thought you understood language better than that. I thought you were sensitive to the actual meanings of words, unlike so many others writing about God and man today. Writing about the nature of God and the nature of man and the nature of their relation today.

Or if it isn’t you, it’s someone.

So let’s say someone, who will remain nameless, says, Bill! Bill! I am disappointed in your careless use of language. Your sloppy slovenly slatternly slothful slinging around of ideas. Your callous disregard for our linguistic contract, one with another. Your fraudulent synonymous use of contradiction and paradox. It is immoral. It is reprehensible. It is indefensible. It breaks our linguistic contract, which is really our social contract, one with another.

But let me explain. I must admit to having a little fun. I must admit to playing a little fast and loose with the words. A little bit of a slight-of-hand with the words in my head. My head-hand. A little logical loop-de-loop. A little bit of a semantic shell game. But it’s all in a good cause. Really. Trust me. Really.

What I’m trying to get at here is that real contradictions are all around us. True contradictions. Everywhere we look. It’s not like one or the other pole of all these contradictions is true and the other false. What I’m saying is that both are often in some sense true and in some sense not true. Both are planted firmly in the ground, and both are planted merely in space—in a gas that is somewhat clouded by particulates.

And what I am saying adamantly and ambiguously is that these true contradictions merely appear to contradict one another. The poles of this truth/not truth continuum merely appear to be at odds with one another. Seem to want dominate one over the other or eradicate one another or falsify one another.

What I’m saying is that the contradiction is apparent. Merely apparent. And real.

I am bringing the logic of quantum mechanics to bear upon the logic of larger life. The logic of the quantum world to bear upon the spiritual world. The life of spiritual ideas about the world. The life of ideas about God and man and the relation between them.

I’m importing the experience of the mystic. The experience of the marvelous. The experience of the sacred. Of the holy One. The experience of the possible Impossible, the spiritual but material. Into quotidian Christian discourse.

Oh that sounds presumptuous, doesn’t it? Absurd. Ridiculous. Silly. Unlikely. Doomed.

Maybe. Likely, perhaps. But one really has no choice in the matter. One is given nothing else that seems. Oh. So possibly useful as this. To do with one’s time.

Dialetheia

2008-11-14T06:27:00.000-08:00

Or maybe what I’m thinking is not what I’m saying. Or maybe what I’m saying is not what I’m thinking. Or maybe what I’m thinking is not what I’m thinking. Or maybe what I’m saying is not what I’m saying.

I’m reminded of the line from the TV show, Step By Step many years ago. A character by the name of Cody is an idiot. He’s a fortunate idiot because he is irremediably jovial, good-spirited, and optimistic. Everyone likes him because of his effervescent personality. But as I say, he appears to have the IQ of a bag of rocks. This also is endearing.

However, Cody takes the SATs. He’s a high school student, and he’s thinking of going to college, and he is told that people in his circumstance need to take the SATs. So he does, along with a young woman. I forget her name. Also a high school student and also a regular on the show. A person who also wants to go to college and who also takes the SATs. But she comes across as quite bright. She makes sure that she does. She tries to be smart and tries to convince others that she’s brainy. That’s her character.

But it turns out that Cody achieves a higher score on the SATs than she does. I forget the scores. I think both of them were in the high 600s or low 700s on the math and verbal. But I don’t remember.

The young woman can’t understand this. It doesn’t make any sense at all. She gets quite upset at Cody or the universe or God or all three. And Cody tries to say something that will explain what appears to be a black hole in the logic of the universe. Tries to say something to excuse himself for appearing so bright when he also appears so lacking in intelligence. He tries to apologize to the outraged young woman. So he says, “My brain must have a mind of its own.”

Whenever I am down. Whenever I’m feeling depressed or out of sorts, I think of this line. And it cracks me up. Every time. “My brain must have a mind of its own.”

The classic dialetheia—a true contradiction—is exemplified by the following statements applied to Cody, let’s call him, who is straddling a doorway, with one foot in a room and one foot in the hallway outside the room: (1) Cody is in the room; (2) Cody is not in the room.

I think this is the situation that God is in. What I mean is that God is fundamentally contradictory. A paradox. A paradox. A most ingenious paradox.

He’s in the room, and he’s not in the room.

Hey, he’s God, remember. He can be anything and anywhere he likes.

If you hypothesize parallel universes (and we have a good deal of company here) you can have Cody fully in the room and fully outside the room, simultaneously. So using this paradigm, you have no need of the straddling business.

And of course, you have light, which behaves simultaneously like a particle and like a wave.

And so. What I’m suggesting is that maybe God and maybe elements or aspects of his creation. Are dialetheias. Maybe true contradictions are all around. Maybe there is something fundamental here that is paradoxical and that is recalcitrantly and irremediably so.

Paradoxically Speaking

2008-11-12T06:38:00.000-08:00

So what am I saying, you are wondering? How can God be both-and rather than either-or. Or why would he, is maybe the better question, since God can be anything he likes. He’s God, after all.

Why would God be this way, though? Why would he choose to be a tiger-lamb? Why would he be the God of the parable of the talents and the God of the prodigal son? Why would he be heaving a person into outer darkness for burying God’s money to protect it, on the one hand, and welcoming home and forgiving a person who had squandered half of God’s wealth, on the other?

Does this make sense to you? Doesn’t it sound more like standup comedy than theological truth? Doesn’t it sound like the joke about the eggs? The one in the movie Annie Hall: “This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken.’ And, uh, the doctor says, ‘Well, why don't you turn him in?’ The guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’”

Or doesn’t it sound more like Zen Buddhism than your father’s Christianity? For example, here’s a koan: “Chokan had a very beautiful daughter named Seijo. He also had a handsome young cousin named Ochu. Joking, he would often comment that they would make a fine married couple. Actually, he planned to give his daughter in marriage to another man. But young Seijo and Ochu took him seriously; they fell in love and thought themselves engaged. One day Chokan announced Seijo's betrothal to the other man. In rage and despair, Ochu left by boat. After several days journey, much to his astonishment and joy he discovered that Seijo was on the boat with him!

“They went to a nearby city where they lived for several years and had two children. But Seijo could not forget her father; so Ochu decided to go back with her and ask the father's forgiveness and blessing. When they arrived, he left Seijo on the boat and went to the father's house. He humbly apologized to the father for taking his daughter away and asked forgiveness for them both.

"’What is the meaning of all this madness?’ the father exclaimed. Then he related that after Ochu had left, many years ago, his daughter Seijo had fallen ill and had lain comatose in bed since. Ochu assured him that he was mistaken, and, in proof, he brought Seijo from the boat. When she entered, the Seijo lying ill in bed rose to meet her, and the two became one.

“Zen Master Goso, referrring to the legend, observed, ‘Seijo had two souls, one always sick at home and the other in the city, a married woman with two children. Which was the true soul?’"

Why, for example, does Jesus tell his disciples that God withholds himself from some people and reveals himself to others? Isn’t God just? Isn’t he supposed to be just? Isn’t he supposed to be available to everybody, no matter his race, color, creed, national origin, or eye color? Isn’t God an equal opportunity God?

Why does God have particular affection for King David, a man who commits adultery and commits murder and has a houseful of sex slaves, or more euphemistically, concubines?

Why does God say to Adam that he will surely die if he eats the apple, and when Adam eats the apple, he doesn’t die?

How is it possible for a good God to send an evil spirit into Saul? Isn’t God good? Isn’t the spirit he sends the Holy Spirit? Versus the spirit that the devil sends, which is an evil spirit? Are God and the devil two faces of the same being?

What kind of God do we have here, after all? Is he a fair God or an unfair God? Is he a judgmental God or a forgiving God? Is he a kind-hearted God or a hard-hearted God? Is he here to support and encourage us, or is he here to pull our feet out from under us? Is he capricious, or is he steady and dependable? Is he destructive or creative?

Will the true God please stand up? Will the real God please raise his hand?

But I think he has, don’t you? I think he has raised his hand. I think he has stood up. And he is Jesus. And Jesus has sacrificed himself rather than harm anyone. He has raised the dead and healed the sick and spoken encouragement to the oppressed, spoken good news to the oppressed.

But still there is paradox, right? Still there is the parable of the talents. Still there is the threat or promise of judgment. Still Jesus hid himself from the priestly class and God the Father and God the Holy Spirit helped to hide him from the priestly class. To them and to the privileged, he was blasphemous, while to the people, he was holy. He was God.

Why was he not God to everyone? Why didn’t he want to allow everyone to experience him as God? Why didn’t he want to bring hope and love and forgiveness to everyone? Maybe the oppressors don’t deserve it. Maybe their souls are so foul that Jesus will have nothing to do with them.

Then there is the camel and the needle’s eye. And so for even the privileged there may be possibility. But one guesses they would need to change to get access to that possibility. They would need to actually accept the invitation to the wedding feast.

They’d actually have to give up their independence. Their stand-offishness. Their haughtiness. Their self-sufficiency. Their self-righteousness. Their privacy. Their solitude. Their hard-heartedness. They’d actually have to want to see Jesus. To experience him. As God. As present. They’d actually have to want to depend upon him somehow. To sit at his feet like Mary. To run to find themselves a place in a tree along his path so that they might see him over the heads of the crowd.

I say they. I mean they. But I also mean we.

The Cat is Back

2008-11-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve written elsewhere and a pastor friend has also written elsewhere about my experience. Oh. Since the age of 15 maybe. Something like that. Through periods of atheism and agnosticism and belief. Of God during worship. God wandering the sanctuary, as the congregation sings, growling around, rubbing up against my person, like a great jungle cat. Tall as my sternum. Making me tingly. Making me feel.

How should I say this. Frightened and hopeful and a little bit leaky around the window-shades and excited and loved and loving and naked and. Well. Like I could just as easily be God’s lunch as his pet.

It is literally a hair-raising experience. And when I have this experience, I feel also. Of all things. Reassured.

What? You are thinking. Reassured? By a God that is so fundamentally other. So dangerous. So clearly capable of rending one limb from limb. So ready and willing to rend one limb from limb.

And I know. I’m thinking the same thing. Open-mouthed. Gawking at my own paradoxical reaction. My own odd feelings.

I don’t know. This is what love is, is what I’m feeling. This is what at heart I long for. I ache for this. I look forward to this. To the terrible jungle cat showing up and rubbing up against me.

It happened today during worship. Today, he showed up again during worship. And it’s. Oh. I want to weep with happiness that he has chosen to come back.

Maybe this is what I mean. Maybe this suggests something of what I mean. When I talk about mystic believer priests. About the priesthood of mystic believers.

Maybe what I mean is that for us, being the slaves of Christ is not about us. It is not about us at all. We are just his slaves, after all. Our ontological status is just above the pigs and not far from the dirt clods. And being made of the dirt, this seems fitting.

In other words, our being is not about us. Our being is about him and looking for him and finding him and doing what he asks. It’s about loving him. It’s about trembling with love for him. It is about trembling to do what he asks because he is our beloved.

It’s about wanting to live in his presence always. No matter how frightening. And it is frightening. Don’t let anybody fool you with talk of how God is a lamb. Of how God is a lamb only.

God is a tiger in a lambs’ body. A lamb in a tiger’s body. Both. God will tear your insides out as soon as look at you. And he does. He demands the most difficult things. And when one is shy. When one hesitates. He tears out one’s insides. Strews them all about the place.

God is love. But he is tiger love and lamb love both, at once. He is pussy cat love and jungle cat love at once. With God, anything may happen.

After he eviscerates you, for example, you find yourself whole again. Mended. Healed. That does happen. It happens all the time. The eviscerating and the healing, both. Sometimes both at once.

You find him showing up at worship again, for example. Rubbing up against you. Growling. Purring. Inviting you again into something that you think, maybe, he actually means. Means for you. Something that is certainly improbable but may be. If looked at in the right light. Possible.

But you don’t know. You are a mystic believer priest. And you don’t know. All you do know is who you love. And you do that fiercely. Frighteningly. Out of all proportion. Completely. And with abandon.

You look for him until you find him. Then you stay there and do what he says. Or go, if he says so. Stay or go, as he wishes. Doing whatever asked. No matter what that is.

Why? Why? you ask. For the pleasure of his company. For the infinite delight one finds near him. And nowhere else.

Oppression

2008-11-02T15:39:00.000-08:00

Odd how oppression may not feel like oppression to oppressors. I’m thinking of a homily a week ago. The person speaking brought up the AIDs epidemic in Africa and our response to it. The response of the drug companies, the way they price their drugs, and America’s response. Our financial response. Our humanitarian response. Our Christian response.

He wondered if that wouldn’t look like oppression to us if we were poor people in Africa rather than relatively well-off people in the U.S.

That got me thinking about the priestly class in first century Israel. About Jesus getting in the faces of the priests. Getting in the faces of the priestly class of Israel in the first century. Accusing them of oppression. Of oppressing the people. With their many rules, laws really. Their standard of perfection.

I’m wondering about our current priestly class and about whether they are also oppressive. I don’t know. I know some pretty gentle and gracious and smart and kindly pastors and ministers and priests. So it’s hard to think of them as oppressive, really. They don’t exhibit the style of the first century Israel priests.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’ve run across a number who do quite obviously resemble the first century Israel priests, but I don’t associate with that group very much. I hang around people who are more generous, more encouraging, more affirming, and more loving than I perceive their first century counterparts to have been. By about a mile. Maybe a million miles.

But just as oppression may not be obvious for oppressor nations, one over the other, or oppressor continents, one over the other, maybe it makes sense to ask the question as to whether our priestly class today uses their privilege oppressively. I bring up the question. I don’t have the answer.

Well I do have an attempt at an answer, but I don’t feel confident in it. I think there are ideas that get hold of all of us, ideas that have something apparently right in them but that are wrong. Ideas about God and our relation to him.

I have written extensively in this blog about the idea of Christlikeness—the idea that we should all be like Christ. I find this idea and this task oppressive. I don’t know about you, but I don’t measure up very well. I stand Christ up so that I can see him, and then I look in the mirror.

And what I find there is a great disparity. A great contrast. A contrast that is so great that it is depressing. Because it is impossible. There is no way to come out of that experience—for me—without feeling like I should just walk away.

Like I should give up. Go do something else. Because this task is something I cannot do.

What Story, Indeed?

2008-10-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

But of course, one is blessed and challenged by a particular story. One’s own particular story. As that story intersects and interpenetrates and morphs into and out of all the other stories that are proximate to one’s own. A story that is informed by many distant ones that books and plays and art and movies and videos and lives and conversations and relationships bring home.

A story that at every moment of one’s life, one is writing, revising, rewriting, remembering, interpreting, mulling, considering, reconsidering, piecing together, imagining both retroactively and proactively, sorting out, making sense of, repudiating, embracing, rebelling against, reconciling oneself to, asking forgiveness for, asking guidance concerning, and pretending is something it isn’t. One is the most active participant in the making and remaking and discovering and rediscovering and obfuscating and denying of what one’s story actually is.

I’m reminded of Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner’s terrible wonderful novel of the South. A novel that is about story-making in the context of certain destructive and dominant ideas in the 18th and 19th and 20th century American South. And it is about story-discovering on the part of multiple narrators who are all participants in the larger story of a self-destructive family that does have certain resemblances to King David’s family. Hence, the novel’s title. I’m reminded of this particular novel because it is a favorite of a fellow who I had lunch with today.

It is a commonplace in many churches today to talk about story. About stories in the Bible. About one’s particular story. And it is usual to talk about one’s particular Christian story as one’s “testimony.” I find this way of thinking and talking odd on several counts.

First, I find it odd that one’s story and one’s testimony are conflated. Are made out to be one thing, when in fact they are not. One’s story is an ongoing thing. It is much larger than the several selected and related events that one recounts publicly to connect one to the Christian story of love, forgiveness, and resurrection.

Second, I find that testimony is a story of a particular kind—a story that gathers its meanings around the courtroom metaphor. In other words, the metaphorical context is judgment, not marriage or resurrection or celebrating or the rescuing of the lost. And this is not consistent with the metaphors Jesus likes to use with the sinners and common people to whom he ministers by acting out and telling his stories.

Third, we do know that story-making is complex. Much more complex than the testimonies that we use to entertain ourselves and one another. We live inside many stories, and the authors of these larger stories are multitudes. We are characters in hundreds, thousands, perhaps many billions of stories simultaneously. We are the intersections of history, the eternal now, and the future, each of us. Each of us relates one another to one another through time and timelessness.

Fourth, we are spirit vessels and our lives are the expression of spirit, the out-working of spiritual matters. And our stories, to the extent they represent our spirit-selves truly, employ an infinite palate of metaphor. Of trope and figure. Because everywhere they go they are informed by the Manifold, the Infinite, the Mystery of God.

What Story, Then?

2008-10-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

One wonders what story, then? One wonders that if we shouldn’t live inside the story of judgment, the story of condemnation, the story of punishment, what should we do? What can we do? I mean, isn’t this the story in which the rest of humanity is living? Isn’t this the story that the rest of humanity puts on each morning with their clothes? Is not the jurisprudence system required for orderly living? Isn’t civilization dependent on the judgment paradigm being one of the dominant modes or themes of its citizens’ lives?

If civilization depends on the jurisprudence story—and the institutions and power assertion and social contract that allows these—for the enforcement of its orderliness, its safety, its predictability, its promise of happiness, then what does this imply about civilization’s interest in the Kingdom of God? Aren’t the Kingdom of Judgment and the Kingdom of God at odds with one another? Isn’t the conflict between these in our own minds and in our behavior at the heart of the Christian Drama? At the heart of the choice we are daily asked to make as Christians?

Doesn’t Jesus ask us to choose our story? Do you want to live in the world and affirm the world of worldly ideas, beliefs, expectations, and moral choices? Or do you want to live in the world of heaven and affirm the world of heavenly ideas, beliefs, expectations, and moral choices? Do you want God’s order or the world’s order? Do you want God’s justice or the world’s justice?

Do you want to be the bringer of the good news or the bad news? Do you want to be an agent of change or the status quo? Do you want to reveal heaven or more of the same sorry, sad world? Do you want to look for and save the lost, or do you want to leave the lost to their own devices?

Sin through Jesus’s eyes is what we all do most of the time because of the story we choose to live inside. We choose condemnation and punishment for the transgressions of others, not suspension of consequences and forgiveness.

Oh, we say to ourselves and one another, civilization would break down. We need to protect ourselves from the scoundrels. From the thieves and the rapists and the murderers. From the liars and the cheats. From the charlatans and the confidence men.

And so are we protected? Does our story of jurisprudence protect us? Does it, for example, keep people from doing evil? I don’t know. It seems like there is a lot of evil in the world, even though there is a lot of jurisprudence.

Have you been following the presidential debates? And the ads? The campaign speeches and sound bytes? I have, a little. And what I see and hear are people who believe that lying and fraudulent misrepresentation are okay. These are people who want our confidence. Who want our votes. And this is openly done. It is repeatedly done.

When the fact-checkers come on after one of these speeches or these debates—the next day, usually—we discover that both of them have told dozens of lies. Are fraudulently distorting many, many facts. Their ads do the same.

What should we do? Will jurisprudence help us here? Should we put both candidates and all their handlers in jail for lying to us? Lying to us over and over. And pretending they are telling the truth? Smiling at us like a couple of power-mad idiots through it all?

These people are competing to be the most powerful person on the planet. And here they are. In front of us. The most common dissemblers. The vilest liars and cheats. Trying to picture themselves as devoted family men. As devoted public servants. As patriotic. As honest. As straight-talkers. As men we can depend on to lead us wisely, virtuously. As men we can rely on to do the right thing.

Why are they lying so unashamedly? So transparently? So repeatedly? Is it because they can? Is it because there is no judicial restraint? No legal consequence?

That is of course how the world works. If it isn’t illegal, it’s okay. It’s fair game. By definition, if it isn’t illegal, we may do it. And it must be good enough.

Trope, Trope, Trope

2008-10-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

I can’t keep them straight. Tropes, figures, dreams, metaphors, stories, films, parables, proverbs, morals, aphorisms, similes, visions, simulacrums, analogs, avatars, paradigms, frameworks, plays, playacting, actors, agents, dramas, songs, singing, narratives, narratology, music, opera, musical scores, novels, poems, dance, painting, sculpture, symphonies, and so forth.

We are always making. We are always creating something to stand for the thing. For the idea. For the feeling. For the gesture. For the movement. For the change. For the sensibility. For the experience. For the opening onto understanding.

To stand apart from the living so that we can get some. Oh, I don’t know. Get some hope. Some faith. Some sense. Of what it is. What it may possibly be. Or mean. And how we may fit in. How we may fit it. How we may become someone who has a place in this possibility that is not us. But that is us.

And what I sometimes think is that words were given to us as the separateness. The God-made instrument for our setting up of these structures. These twice-made transformations. That we might get some distance from the rest of what the world is and we are. So that we might possibly know a bit about the original Making. The original Being. The original Knowing. And the consequent Living.

And the eventual Judgment. I’ve been writing about judgment. I’ve been writing about jurisprudence as a metaphor for Judgment. Something that does not belong to us. Something that is not ours to do. Something that is a metaphor or a trope or a figure for what. Well. May happen to us.

But it is not something for Jesus to do either. Even he is not charged with this. Not yet. Someday. But not yet.

God himself has not given himself this gesture. This possibility. This ability. This charge. This right. This responsibility. This authority. Not yet. So why would we? Why would we look for this? Why would we ever accept this? Why would we ever believe this is something we would be permitted? Allowed? Granted? Asked? Commanded? Why would we ever believe we have any business with this? Why would we ever believe we would not be struck down if we were to do this?

I’m thinking of the woman caught in adultery. Who is brought to Jesus. To God. To the son of Man. Who suspends judgment. Who suspends punishment. Who brings grace to the woman and to those who would stone her. Thank God. Who refuses to Judge. Who refuses to allow others to Judge.

No matter Paul. Set Paul aside for the moment. Listen to Jesus. Judgment is not his. It is not now. And it is never ours. Listen. Do not judge, lest you be judged at the appointed time. Do not seek this. Do not ever look for the opportunity. Because this. Of all things. Is certainly perdition. Is certainly torment and destruction. Is certainly hell both here and hereafter. Listen to Jesus. This is not tangential. This is not optional. This is central. He is quite clear on this point. Let us all. Everyone of us. Move on from here.

More Jury Duty

2008-10-10T05:41:00.000-07:00

And then there’s my hero, Pat. My wife. Who has jury duty on the same day I do. Tells the judge during questioning that. Well. Having no people of color called for jury duty is just plain unfair and wrong. It’s just not right. She tells the judge that the jury duty process should include making sure that there are people of color called when a defendant is a person of color.

“People are going to be biased,” she says. “They may not want to think of themselves that way, but they are.”

The prosecutor wants to know more. He wants to know what she means. So she tells him. She tells him that many white people are biased. They can’t help it. And because of this, she’d be biased in the other direction. She’d be an advocate for the defendant in the jury room. She will stick up for him on principle. Because there is no one of color to stick up for him. To argue for his side in the jury room.

“Do you mean you won’t look at the evidence impartially?” the prosecutor wants to know.

“Of course, not,” she says. “I just told you that because of what you have done here. Because you have an all-white jury. I’ll be forced to look at the evidence differently. I’ll be forced to be his advocate in the jury room.”

And so the prosecutor moves to eliminate her for cause. And so the judge agrees and sends her packing. Sends her into outer darkness for being partial to the defendant.

So I’m left along with the others. The other defectives trying to demonstrate that we can be impartial. That we can detect the truth and nothing but the truth. That we can be fair. That we will weigh all the evidence equally. With equanimity and prudence. With high-mindedness and pristine attitudes that have been unaffected by history or by conviction. So to say.

But I think what has happened is that I’ve become contaminated. Contaminated with my wife. With my wife’s partiality cooties. I think in the mind of the prosecutor I’m already in the defendant’s corner.

But also, come to think of it, I’m contaminated in his mind because I’ve asked him questions about some inane line of questioning he was on. Because I didn’t know what he meant by “hesitancy.” Because I simply didn’t go along with the inanity.

“Hesitancy,” he kept saying, “doesn’t mean that you can’t be persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Just because the evidence that is presented makes you hesitate, you shouldn’t believe that this should keep you from finding a verdict of guilty.”

And so as I question him about what “hesitancy” means, he seems to become even more inarticulate. A number of people look up, with a look on their faces that seems to say, “I don’t understand that either.” A woman at the break thanks me for speaking up, because she doesn’t understand what his “hesitancy” is all about. And why the others were pretending to understand. Why the others were answering his questions about this as though they understood.

“Do you mean the evidence may not be valid or persuasive?” I asked the prosecutor. “If this is what you mean, this would be normal. This is why they have juries, to weigh and test the evidence. Evidence that may be flawed. This is why the jury process is called the deliberative process.”

Bottom line, I’m not chosen either. I’m not cast into outer darkness, but in the end, the outcome’s just the same. I’m not admitted to the heaven of jurisprudence. To the privilege of judging my fellow man.

Jury Duty

2008-09-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

First time here. I’m a jury selection process virgin. So I look around. Open my eyes and ears wider than usual. Some very heavy women, one of whom sits next to me, shoving me to the opposite edge of my chair and breathing like Darth Vader so that the whole room can listen with expectation to the details of each breath. A few heavy men. A kid who works at a fast food joint. An accountant. A truck driver. A couple of teachers. A construction project manager. A buyer. A young man with no teeth in front whose father was convicted of sexually abusing the young man’s sisters. The son of a detective in another county. A former elementary school principal. A woman whose friend was murdered some years ago.

Nine men and one woman own among them about 45 handguns and shotguns and rifles. Useful for recreation. For hunting and target shooting reasons, they say. This is out of a universe of 25 possible jurors. You could outfit a pretty effective terror cell with hardware like that, I’m thinking.

It’s a criminal trial. It isn’t murder, but it’s close. A crime involving a gun. The use of a gun. The defendant—a young black man in white shirt and tie. A man in custody. A man whose shackles around his ankles are not visible beneath the table from where we’re sitting. The only black man in a white room. A room with maybe 45 white people in it, and we’re in the Midwest. So it’s a very white room. All of us present to consider his case. And one another’s qualifications to judge. To sit in judgment of one another first. Then him. Of this young black man. Whether we like it or not.

Judgment is critical here, which the prosecutor makes plain. “Are you comfortable judging?” he wants to know. “That is what you will have to do. If you are selected for the jury.”

“Are you comfortable sitting in judgment of someone else? Of this man over here, for example?”

We all sit here thinking. Eyes open. Wondering if this guy really does understand what he’s asking. Wondering whether this guy reads books at all, has read the Bible at all, thinks about the various meanings of a question like this. Hears the various meanings of a question like this as he utters it. The various contexts of a question like this, beyond the particular context he has in mind.

Context One: This particular trial, which the prosecutor clearly has in mind. Context Two: Any criminal or civil proceeding. Context Three: Our lives outside of the purely judicial context. Context Four: Eternity. For example.

I want to say something like, “You vile creature! Are you comfortable judging someone else? Is your conscience clear and clean as a newborn’s? Are you untroubled by your job? By what happens to the miserable souls of the accused when you succeed? Do you experience an untroubled sleep? What price does justice exact, do you imagine?” But I don’t. I hum quietly to myself, under Darth Vader’s breathing.

The prosecutor talks a lot about the standard of proof in a criminal trial: “Convinced beyond a reasonable doubt” he says. “Not convinced beyond all doubt.

“Do you understand the difference?” he wants to know. “Does anyone have difficulty understanding the difference?”

I want to raise my hand, but I don’t. It isn’t worth it. This is another existential question. Another eternal question. Another question over which one could make a career in philosophy, for example. In linguistics. In poetry. In prose fiction. I want to debate this with him. It deserves a thoroughgoing analysis. A far-ranging discussion. But we are not in a classroom, I’m thinking. We are not in my living-room. This isn’t a discussion group. We are not so much interested in getting at an answer to this question.

No, we are much more interested in finishing up by 4:30 this afternoon. Much more interested in getting our list whittled down to 12 plus an alternate. Much more interested in weeding out the obviously incompetent. The racists. The cop haters. The slavish cop lovers. The people who are too busy to take this seriously. The people who don’t understand that the current theory of criminal jurisprudence in this country is that the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The people who have trouble with arithmetic tests involving single-digit numbers.

First things first. So when he asks the question and makes a gesture that puts “convinced beyond all doubt” physically above “convinced beyond all reasonable doubt” in space—one hand about belly high and the other hand well over head high—none of us raises his or her hand and says, “Yes. I have difficulty. Please explain the difference. Gesturing doesn’t cut it. Stop your inane gesturing. Give us the criteria. Give us the infallible tests.”

None of us says anything like this. No. We look at him like a bunch of idiots. A bunch of parishioners. A bunch of students hoping we don’t flunk. A bunch of dopy pilgrims. Hoping that we are not publicly humiliated by a guy. Well. A guy who…. Oh, I shouldn’t say it. I shouldn’t say anything.

I don’t know. I get the impression that in this particular little world. This little artificial reality we’ve all agreed to buy into here. That if we are ejected from this process, we are defective. Morally or intellectually defective. And I think we’ve agreed that if this were to happen to us, it would be similar to being exiled to outer darkness. Similar to being sentenced to hell. Oh, maybe not by God, but by somebody who is delegated God-like power here. In this simulacrum of the actual world.

So, what are we, I’m wondering. What are we in this pretend little analogical world in which the judge is given God-like power and in which the attorneys for the prosecution and defense sit at the right and left hands of God? A trumped-up little world in which that black man over there waits also to be judged by all this heavenly whiteness?

Maybe we are the candidate humans trying to be Christ-like. Trying to appear fair and even-handed. Peaceful, forgiving people. Trying to rise above the profanity of our larger lives. People working for a seat in heaven by the avoidance of sin. The avoidance of the appearance of fault or imperfection or sin or defect. No, we aren’t racist, we insist. No, we have nothing but unmitigated love and respect for the police and black people and people of color and all people everywhere.

We are always fair and balanced. We have no prejudices or weaknesses of mind or spirit. No, we have no difficulty understanding improbable distinctions. Impossible direction. No, we are tabula rasae. Clean of mind and spirit. No, we haven’t ever dreamt about putting a bullet into the temple of an enemy. A rich man. A person with privilege or power. Someone like you, for example. Or wittingly imagined it, either. Not us. Not me. No. Not anyone here.

Labor Day

2008-09-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Hammocked again. Reading my former teacher, Donald Hall. Remembering. Discovering. His latest memoir. His latest poems. Listening to his voice again after. Oh. More than 30 years. On the CD in the sleeve in the back of his book of poems.

Another of my congress. Encouraging. Discouraging. Judging. Living his life away, quickly, in the time it takes to read these books, in part. Ambition on display. Love. Devotion. Grief. Fear. Courage. Concupiscense. An aesthetic of work. A work of aesthetics. A life work. A premise. An hypothesis. An assertion. Another deciduous story. Another story that renews itself. Refreshes itself. As he moves forward, poem after poem, memoir after memoir, lover after lover.

From a young age, there are his children. Grandchildren now. His poems. His many friends from his many years here and there who still survive. A generous person who has gathered many to him through his joy, his care, and his liveliness. Through his years.

Each day, as he describes, begins with work on his poems. Then other work. Other freelance and other prose work as the day progresses. With other pleasures coming later in the day. Usually.

Almost 80, his days mostly written now, he tells the story of being picked up for DWO. Driving While Old. Handcuffed. Taken to jail. Etcetera. A lovely story.

In and out of Faith. Less interested since his wife died of leukemia a decade ago. Yet one does understand an underlying faithfulness that is quite profound, one that adheres to the truth in words. To the power and the mystery of words. To the remarkable purposes words take for themselves as we daily spin them out. Purposes that are both concealing and revealing and that are ultimately making, and creating, and underlying, and loving. That are enlivening. At least, in his aesthetic. His life work. His making. Words that come against falsehood. And death. And despair. And destruction.

Words that affirm. Words that open up the possibility again. For what it means to be human. Words that assert our redemption in love and honesty and courage and discipline and work. Hard word. Heart work. Mind work. Spirit work. All of these inextricably bound up in words and our use of words. In how we live our lives. Because our lives and our words are of a piece. Are mutually contingent. Interpenetrate. What we know and what we love and who we are and what we do are all mediated by, defined by, informed by, felt by, and understood by words. Our words. Others’ words.

Words. The medium of communication. The method of connection. The fundamental means of intimacy. Of understanding. Words. The work of our maker. The means of our making. Words. The foundation of what we know of our maker. The Bible is only a pile of words after all. Being made in God’s image simply means—before all other meanings—that we use words to know him and one another. Love him and one another. As he has loved us by giving us his words. His Word. His meaning.

And so this teacher of mine. This fine teacher and poet. Donald Hall. Someone who relatively early got me to pay attention. Who opened my ears to words. As several of us fortunate ones drank beer with him in the Rathskeller. An Ann Arbor drinking establishment. And read poetry. Talked about poems. The beer, the color of amber. A preserving substance. As we wandered the universe. The one verse. Opened up by words’ purest form. Poetry. The world and what it contains made possibly beautiful. Made possibly whole. Made possibly well. Possibly euphonious. Even in its cacophony. Even in its disease. In its fragmentation. Its ugliness.

Poetry. The woman by the well at the heart of the world, drawing water. Pouring water. Sweet water. A water that is nourishment to the soul. And she pours it for all. All day and all night. The sweetness of this water, a daily delight.

And here I am. Hammocked, as I say. Swinging in this rope cradle regarding the world out here. Recollecting my congress. Drinking my water. As the sun arcs overhead. And the days spin. And spin. And the oak and the maple out back and overhead begin to dry. The leaves darken. And the acorns start to fall.

Jack, An Original

2008-08-31T11:20:00.000-07:00

Out. Out to dinner with Jack this week. Another of my specific congress. Jack, who the flood has put out of work, out of his work pushing a vacuum at the local HUD apartment building downtown. The building where the blind, the halt, the addicted, and the poor live. Or used to until the flood.

Jack, who just turned eighty. Jack, who used to work with a Pentecostal minister and an alcoholic attorney on the cleanup and maintenance crew down there. Who would trade theological and political insults with these hard-bitten realists. These people to whom life has been a periodic flood.

Jack, an original mystic believer priest who has spent his life looking for God. And of course finding him. Who has spent his life playing the organ to God. Caring for the parishioners with his music. Teaching others the playing of organ music, a music he thinks is the best possible way to make a joyful noise to God.

He and Ethel ran a hotel in their younger years. He recruited students for a business college. Sold organs for a time. She worked in accounting departments here and there. Early,was a school teacher. He was a pastor and preacher. He was a pastor’s assistant. A vagabond also. A man who also has moved around. An odd job here and there to keep body and soul together so that he could keep playing. Keep making. His music to God.

A man who when he plays gets a sense of God with him. God around him. All through him. A man who is rich in God’s presence.

Son of an alcoholic. Son of a self-made man who managed the electric utility business of half a state. Who had no college. Who read technical books at night to keep up. Who had Ph.D. engineers working for him and had a hard time keeping up. Who had no use for a son who was not interested in engineering. A son who majored in English and organ.

Who this week starts volunteering at the elementary school next door to his apartment building. Something to do. Since there are no actual paying jobs around here anymore for somebody like Jack. What with the flood and all the businesses closed. Fifth graders, he says. He’ll help a fifth grade teacher. A young girl not so long out of college.

When he was in school, the teachers were all old women. Old women who said he wouldn’t amount to much, some of them. Women who weren’t allowed to get married, if they also wanted to teach. But now they have young ones. That’s certainly a difference. Certainly a difference that he could like.

Something to keep from getting old and worn down, he says. Something to get him out of the apartment. Something else to do in addition to his interminable solitary walks. Something to occupy the mind and spirit after almost three months now that he’s been out of work. His janitorial work, his literal and figurative cleansing work. We’ll see, he says. See how this goes.

Jack. Who has left much behind now. Who has lost his son first to Vietnam. Then to a wife. Then to their children. Just like any father whose son grows up. And away. Lost his wife, which was the hardest thing. Her dying was like being shoved into another universe where everything was pain and suffering and evil. Lost all his family—parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so forth—to death, except the one sister he rarely sees and who has diabetes. Has barely kept alive with it in another state. The smart one. The Phi Beta Kappa. Who married an attorney turned elevator manager. Grain elevator manager who died. Oh. Years and years ago now.

Jack. Who has left behind his youth. Who has left behind much pleasure. Who has left behind a life he built. A life that’s largely disappeared now, as far as he can tell, like a refreshing rain that ran to flood and now has disappeared in the dry time. The summer’s end time. The high cloudless sky time. Of the year.

The Deciduous Story

2008-08-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

Or think of it this way, what lives under the deciduous canopy. Think of it as a story that is revised, moment to moment. Season to season. Year to year. Think of the ways the days work. How they keep coming, one after another. The earth rocking round itself, its course through space. And each day is a new day. Anything might happen. Each day, one may choose something new or at least different to do or say or be.

I think of Walt Whitman. The original vagabond. The original American poet. Who spent his life as a poet writing and revising Leaves of Grass. Revising himself. The record of himself. The song of himself. As the deciduous tree revises itself. Shedding and remaking itself seasonally, all of its life.

Shedding what has been in part destroyed and consumed by the life around it. Shedding what has become tattered and bitten. Sloughing off an essential part of the old self to make room for the new.

The earth works this way, even geologically. Architectonically. New rock pressing upward in the form of magma. Thrust upward to form mountains. Eroding over millennia to form sand that mixes with dead matter to form limestone and other forms of stone. That then gets eroded itself when stranded on land, away from its over-mantling water. To make more sand.

Think of the species, the succession of life forms. Moving through time. Changing through time. Revising their forms and their methods and their spirits through time. Life itself revising itself. Rethinking what it will be. Reformulating how it will be.

Revision as the underlying principle. Getting the words right. Getting the forms right. Moving always toward something and away from something else. Leaving something essential behind and inventing or growing or making something new that is also essential. A new essence. A new centrality. A different and perhaps more faithful expression. Rendition. Perturbation. Instantiation. Foliation. Flexion.

I think of Walt. Grandiose magnanimous magnificent quotidian Walt. Disreputable Walt. Inventing and discarding himself. Refashioning and refurbishing his song. Revising and remaking his record. Intentionally making of himself a method. A way. An emphasis. An example. American. Uniquely synthetic. Synchronic. Letting history go. Accumulating the future. Holding in mouth and mind the linguistic trove but reinvesting it for the coming millennium. A new sensibility. A different mode.

Some way, we Americans are in a cradle that Walt has helped make. Find ourselves climbing out of a cradle that Walt sings of. Discover ourselves in a way of speaking that Walt borrowed from the Bible. The cadences. The mixed mode chaos of rhetorical approach and rule and device and form and pseudo-random form. An essentially spiritual formulation of what it means to be alive. But a departure also from the specifics of the Bible’s story to write a new story. With the emphasis on new. On what’s coming. What will happen next. What might or could or be made to happen next.

Walt, full of kindness. Full of sorrow for the Civil War maimed. Full of joy and love and sadness and celebration and grief and. Possessed of an outsized spirit that his body could only with difficulty contain. Like the hummingbird. Improbable. Perhaps impossible. But incontrovertibly actual. Genuine. Impious. Frank. Flagrant. Unbuttoned. Naked before God.

Sunday Afternoon

2008-08-26T14:02:00.000-07:00

Hammocked. In my adult cradle, rocking gently from moment to moment. Metronomic. Metonymic. I look up into the deciduous canopy. The delicious panoply. The precocious and riotous greenery of the woods that stand on a hill over the back of my house. Here, nearby, over and above me also, are the several Rose-of-Sharon bushes with their dozens. Oh. Maybe hundreds of blooms. Red. Semi-flame-shaped. Variously opening and burning and closing and falling. At once. Simultaneous. Moment to moment.

Rose-of-Sharon. Endless flower. Native to China and India. Not so much the flower in the Bible because that may be a lily or a crocus of some sort, one recalls. More the flower from Korea. More an oriental rather than an Old Testament allusion. Importation. But. How to say. Still there is this residual meaning because of the name. The name that marries the Mideast to east and now both to me here in the Midwest. Through time. Through hammock swings. On the deck of a home in the burbs. In America. In the modern cradle of western civilization. As I try to hold together in mind. Oh. More ideas than I can know or say. More history and thought and life and experience and time in the language I’ve inherited than I can possibly parse or explicate or sufficiently articulate.

And here. Here. Here is a hummingbird. Feeding at the rose of Sharon blossoms. Ontologically suspect, it is so light. So fast. So odd, really, sipping flower nectar. Backing up. Hovering. Suddenly here and gone and here again. Murmuring softly as a spirit its small subliminal cheep. Cheep. Odd. It might be as much spiritual as corporeal. Suddenly here. Beautiful. Red-throated and iridescently green. Other-worldly, with its metallic sheen and its. Well. Its complete maneuverability. Its blur of motion where its wings should be. Its ability to appear and disappear at will. In the time it takes to say, for example, Oh!

So remarkably delicate. Exquisite. American. Native to the western hemisphere. (A misnomer, really. More where east meets west. Remember Columbus and his Indians. The theory of the migration across the Bering land bridge.) Summers here. Perhaps travels here from Mexico, one reads. If so, flies over the Gulf. Eight hundred miles. Eight hundred miles! This little thing. A few grams is all. Without food or rest. A feat that suggests the supremacy in it of the spiritual, don’t you think? I mean, really? How is there enough matter there to fire an engine at 60 Hertz for what is it? Days, maybe. Wing-beats at 60 times per second for.

Well, let’s do the arithmetic, shall we? Let’s say 30 miles per hour and a direct line, for the sake of argument. That makes it 27 hours, give or take. And that’s what? Is this right: 216,000 wing-beats per hour? Or a total of 5,832,000 wing-beats over the 27 hour period. Give or take.

Six million or so wing-beats! In a little over 24 hours! Incredible. Isn’t it? From something that weighs a few grams. Wouldn’t it simply expire? Wouldn’t the mechanics fail? Wouldn’t its stores of energy give out? How is this creature possible?

Improbable. Remarkable. This little bit of feather, beak, and bone. A spirit as large as. Oh. I don’t know. An angel, maybe. An angel with ruby neck and emerald back. Come from all that way away to sip on the beautiful here where east meets west and my hammock cradle rocks. And the leaves profuse. And the blossoms profess. And my leisure holds everything endlessly in mind as I swing slightly, thinking of Walt Whitman and his poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and as I remember W.D. Snodgrass reading that poem in such a way one starry night that I thought I would weep. And as I remember this reading, this listening, this moistness around the window-shades, I also remember a poet friend of those very same days who thought. Back then. That the reason we see wildlife. Birdlife, for example. An eagle. A red-tailed hawk. A ruby-throated hummingbird. Is that the particular bird in question wants to be seen. Wants you to see it. Has selected you. To see it for everything it is.

Notes From Above Ground

2008-08-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

“One thing I do know. I was blind, but now I see!”

The response the man makes to the Pharisees in John 9, when faced with their accusations and disbelief.

The subject of the homily this Sunday at the Gymnasium Church, which. Well. It’s where I still find Philip Larkin loitering about. Doubting. Sneering. Being clever. Being his bookish and snooty self. Another of my specific congress.

Plastic chairs. People mostly in their twenties and thirties. Children. A few gray-hairs like Pat and me. Not many.

And the singing. The songs are mostly new to me. But as I sing one. As I learn the new song by sort of singing it and listening to it. I find my throat tightening. My eyes a little leaky. A flutter in the diaphragm like the wings of two mourning doves flying to the peak of my house roof.

I feel God reach into my chest and massage my heart. Caress my heart. And it’s lovely how he does this. This is what I come here for. This is what I love God for.

A fine homily. A remarkable idea. Let’s say what we know from personal experience. This Jesus thing is a personal thing. A personal and intimate knowledge thing. It isn’t a matter of. Oh. Theology. Theology, for want of a better term.

As far as I can tell, he doesn’t so much want to be studied. Oh, that isn’t to say he doesn’t want us to understand him. But so much of theology seems to want to perfect him. Or the Bible. One or the other or both. Seems to want to carve up the words we have from him into pieces we can use to assemble anything we like and call that God.

As far as I can tell, he wants to be worshiped. He wants to be loved. Understood, yes. Understood in part as an outcome of worship. Of love.

It’s a matter of what happens to us personally—what happens to him personally—that he’s most interested in. It’s a matter of how our lives (his and our lives) have changed. How the world has been lit up. Has been opened up. Contrary to what we might have thought. Contrary to Philip Larkin’s snide remarks. Contrary to the rants of the underground man. Contrary to the other evidence and logic one might accumulate and present. Contrary to the rules. Contrary to ordinary expectation.

A blind man is made to see. An underground man is brought above ground. These things happen. They happen more often than most of us understand. I think they happen in one fashion or another millions of times a day. Billions of times a day. All over the world.

What more are we asked to do than to say what we know? Tell the truth, he says to us. Tell the world the truth about you and me. Then follow. You’ll figure it out as we go. Listen. I’ll help. Keep your eyes and your ears open. Forget everything you think you know except the one thing I have asked. Love me. Love one another. Focus your mind and your heart on this. Everything else is secondary.

So as we’re talking about the Gymnasium Church afterward, Pat and I decide. Well. We’re tired of our little church tour. It wears one out. It wears one down like a long walk in a strange dark place. Like a bad long dream. Let’s go to this Gymnasium Church awhile. Let’s see what may happen there.

Notes From The Underground

2008-08-19T06:34:00.000-07:00

“I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.”

The beginning to Notes From The Underground, Dostoyevsky’s famous novella. The book that launched the existentialists. The character who hisses like sulfuric acid in the souls of those who read him. Who recognize him.

The Underground Man—the unnamed narrator—gets under my skin. Got under my skin thirty-five or forty years ago or so and has remained there. Seething. Bubbling.

A man who remains perversely independent. Not heroically independent. Not courageously independent. Vilely independent. Rebelliously independent. And solitary.

A pathetic man. A bathetic man. A person who describes himself as lazy. Who is certainly withdrawn. Fearful of others and their opinions of him to the point of morbidity.

A person who lives in extreme poverty rather than work and be forced to socialize with others. The banal conforming unconscious others who flow around him like a river around a discarded and rusting industrial appliance.

Consciousness for The Underground Man is a disease. His awareness of his own moral degradation is a disease. His self-pity and self-loathing.

He cannot bring himself to be like the people around him, because they are vile. They are unaware of their herd-like nature and are therefore inexcusable. But so is he, in the extreme form of moral consciousness that he cultivates like a fungus in himself.

As I say, this is one of my particular congress. He lunges out into the world occasionally. In fact, there are periods in which his voice can regularly be heard above the others.

Ah, there you are, I sometimes think. There you are again. Where have you been? It’s been awhile.