So we had another uninspiring (at least to me) sermon today at Zarephath Community Chapel. The text for the sermon was Colossians 3:12-14. Paul exhorts the readers to clothe themselves in righteousness, and zips through a few things to illustrate what he means: Be compassionate, be gentle, be kind, be patient, be humble and vote Democratic (just kidding).
As I saw the text, I figured, "Hey, this is a great passage to preach from!" It contrasts with the categories of fallen behavior Paul mentioned in the previous verses, and there are so many things you can use it as a springboard for. You could give concrete examples where Christians can be compassionate instead of supercilious, such as gay-right issues; ways to be kind, such as welcoming seniors into your lives, or pitching in at a food shelter; and so on.
Nope. The sermon focused more on the line about forgiving as we have been forgiven, which could have been a great message too, if the pastor had discussed areas where it's hard to forgive, such as a spouse's infidelity, or the countless unthinking indifferences and insensitivities that bedevil human relationships. Instead, at least from what I took away, the sermon was about how great it is to have been forgiven — not by other people, for specific wrongs, but by Christ for our general sin. And even then, the people he asked to share about how nice it is to be forgiven were teens or preteens who had nothing specific to share, just that they enjoyed being forgiven.
Well, yes, I suppose I do too, but isn't something as weakly expressed as that so general as to be utterly meaningless -- especially when the person who confesses to sinning "a lot" has no idea what the heck she's talking about, except at some basic level? These are kids, for crying out loud. What do they know about being attracted to someone other than your spouse, about being so frustrated with your children's screaming that it's all you can do to restrain yourself, about having to forgive a malicious, backstabbing co-worker or a lying, indifferent employer for the ways they keep hurting you and tearing you down? What do they know about having your heart torn out of you because you wanted what you can't have, and you took it anyway, or about dealing with old griefs and pains you thought you buried 20 years ago?
What does such a sermon like this one, treating such an in-depth passage in such a cavalier fashion, do, but make us feel good about ourselves and how lucky we are to be forgiven while the rest of the world is going to hell? It's good to be reminded about grace, but when every sermon — or at least a vast majority of them — is about the redemption Christ offers, and how believers will be spared from God's wrath, I can't help but feel someone's missing the point. Is that really all there is to the gospel? If so, why are we exhorted to bear fruit in keeping with repentance? Why all the talk about a transformed life if there's no evidence of a transformation?
This sort of shallow thinking, which seems so common in evangelicaldom, is one of the reasons I no longer consider myself an evangelical Christian, despite the doctrinal similarities. The gospel has to go deeper than that. Christ calls us to holiness, which means not just a restored relationship with the Father, but a restored set of relationships with our fellow men as well — a real and recognizable community. In fact, it's really impossible to get the relationship with God restored if you're out of any sort of fellowship or relationship with a larger community. If going to church and singing "Amazing Grace" once a week (or even three times a week) is the end-all-be-all of the faith, then why does Christ talk so much about our responsibility to other people. It's one of the two prevailing themes of his preaching, along with "No one gets to the Father but through me."
A friend of mine whom I call Respectfully Brian P. (because that's how he always signs his correspondence) suggested that this approach to sermons is probably deliberate. They do the same thing at his church, and when he talked with his pastor about it recently, he was told it was because they're making the church services "seeker-friendly." In other words, the Sunday worship service is meant to vapid and void of meaning because that's all non-Chrsitians and new Christians are supposed to be capable of understanding. In other words, the worship service is meant for evangelism, and growth is meant to take place at the small group Bible studies most members don't attend.
Pardon me, but that's bass-ackwards.
I'm all for churches being seeker-friendly. By that I mean we don't have a someone at the door to greet you who acts like he's your best friend, even though you've never met before. (That screams "phony" to most people.) It means we avoid buzz words like fellowship, grace, blood of the Lamb, saved, Holy Ghost power, and so on. Put it in simple, straightforward talk that's accessible to the man in the street, because anything else sends a message of "We belong and you don't."
Dumbing down the message is about the stupidest thing a church can do. People who are wrestling honestly with life's questions are going to be turned off by a church that gives pat answers for everything like, "Omigosh, Jesus is just so cool, you know!? And, like, following him has made my life just so much better, you know? Like, totally!" Anyone who knows diddly about Christians knows that our lives aren't perfect, that we still screw things up royally for ourselves and the people around us. And anyone who's been following Jesus for any amount of time knows he usually makes life worse for us, dividing members of families against one another, and bringing pain after pain to our lives. In fact, that's what he promises us. It'snot our happiness that is his chief concern -- it's the glory of his Father.
Christians who tell you that Christ has made them happy all the time either are simple-minded or in denial. Making happiness and the ease of the Christian life the official teaching of a church is inexcusable. Lying to people is a horrible way to bring them into a relationship with Christ.
Going by church tradition and by biblical record, the meetings held on the Lord's Day, i.e., Sunday, are believers' meetings. Those were meetings where the early Christians got together to celebrate the Lord's supper together, to encourage one another, and so on. Especially during periods of persecution, it would have been disastrous to bring someone to church who wasn't a Christian already.
In terms of evangelism and outreach, it makes far more sense to get someone involved in a small group, because that's where the relationships form, that's where people are going to be more honest and open about their doubts and struggles, and that's where you're more likely to get a nonbelieving friend to come out and return again and again, because of the intimacy of the group.
The dumbing-down of church services "for evangelism" is one of the all-out stupidest, most lame-brained, ill-conceived ideas ever to be blamed on the leading of the Holy Spirit in recent American church history, not to mention one of the most condescending.
(That's not to say that small groups should be dumbed-down either. I've never been at a Bible study with a nonbeliever who complained it was too deep. Honesty, brokenness, Christlikeness -- these are the things that will really win people over to Christ, not keeping everything at a beginner's level.)
The sad thing is, Rob Cruver is a decent preacher. I don't doubt his commitment to the Lord is real, but I can't help feeling empty inside after church each week. Heck, I feel empty inside during church each week.
I'm supposed to meet with him a week from Thursday, when I hope to spring some of this on him, in a loving and respectful way. I'm not sure what I hope to accomplish, really. The meeting is supposed to be to discuss ministry opportunities at Zarephath, which is essentially what I want. I don't want to be plugged into a standard ministry slot, nor do I want to stage a confrontation where we end up angry at each other, each convinced the other guy is missing the point or otherwise a hopeless case. I'd like to generate honest discussion about what I would like to bring to the church and whether it matches what the church wants from its attendees and members.
If not, I guess it'll be time to move on, and I'm really sick of looking for a new church.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
happy birthday
Dear Isaac,
As I'm writing this, it's almost the end of your fifth birthday. I wish I could have been there to celebrate it with you, but that isn't possible. By the time you're able to read this, you'll be closer to celebrating your seventh birthday than your fifth, and by the time you actually do read it — assuming you ever do — your fifth birthday will be long past and long forgotten.
If you do read this one day, it will be because you decided to seek me out. Hope is that thing with feathers, but I still hope you will come looking for me one day, however far off that may be. As I stand before God, I hope one day to see you again in the flesh with my own eyes. Foster son or not, I loved you as much as my own flesh and blood, and I still do.
You stayed with us from January to mid-October 2002, after Iowa Child Protective Services placed you into foster care. When you arrived you were a wreck -- unable to speak, barely able to stand or walk, incapable of showing any emotion except anger, and unable to concentrate on anything except watching TV.
That changed while you were in our care. I watched as you began to bloom for the first time in two years, and mastered skills that we had always taken for granted with our own daughter. I watched as you learned to stand and to walk without falling down, and as you learned to pick up things with your fingers and to eat with a fork. I cheered the first time you used an actual word to ask for something. Most of all, I lost myself in those smiles of yours, that silly laugh you had, and that insane humming you made whenever you wanted to sing butdidn't know the words.
The day you left is one that is seared indelibly into my very soul. The sky was clear blue, the leaves were beginning to turn color, and the air had the crisp quality of an early autumn morning. You'd been taking trips to your birth parents twice a week for the last nine months, so when the DYFS driver buckled you into the car seat and drove off, you were smiling happily, and all the while my heart was clenching tighter and tighter in my chest. The tears started when you disappeared from sight, and to be honest, they've never really stopped.
I don’t think I can ever begin to tell you how much I've missed you the last two years. Not a day has gone by since you left that I haven't thought about you, and sometimes the grief has been so great that all I've wanted to do is to crawl into a hole and cover myself up, or to drown it.
The day you left, a heavy blackness fell over my soul. It was as though I had been following Christ willingly and in faith, trusting him as the road got ever darker, until finally I came to the darkest place I had ever been. There was no way forward, and no way back, and on all sides there were beasts that would gladly rend me limb from limb if only they had the chance. I could hear them whispering, just out of eyesight. One wrong step would mean my destruction, and my guide was nowhere to be seen.
For the life of me, I don't know how I survived that time, except to say that God's love and grace are greater and more bewildering than I ever could have imagined. Trusting to him is like riding the rapids of a waterfall, without even the benefit of a barrel, and yet I wouldn't have it any other way. By his grace, I survived.
Having you and losing you has had a more profound effect on my life than just about everything else I've ever known — more than college, more than being an exchange student, and more than being a missionary. The loss of you is a pain that suffuses my writing, my relationship with God, and the relationship I have with my children. Every day when I think of you, I give thanks that I still have them, and I hold them close.
Evangeline, who was your older sister for those nine months, had a horrible time when you left. For weeks after, when we went to the movies or to a friend's house, she looked around for you. Once I came home from work late at night to find her, wide awake at the top of the stairs, wondering when you would come back. And when her sister was born, and we had to leave her with friends for the night, it made her ill. She knew — she just knew — that we had got rid of her, too.
Two years later, she still remembers you. She asks me why you left, she wants to know when you're coming home, and she prays for the chance to see you just one more time. She no longer lays awake at night waiting for you, nor does she still want to send her younger sister away so that you can come back, but losing you has affected her also. She loves you, and she misses you too.
I don't know what the future holds for you, but I hope it is full of good things. I hear that you've made remarkable progress the last two years: that you speak well; that you are relatively happy living with your father, your grandmother, aunt and cousins; and that you may even start school with the other children your age. That's fantastic.
I pray for you every day. If I could make a wish for your future, it would be this: Finish high school and either attend college or learn an honest trade. Stay clear of the wrong crowd, and keep away from those who would lead you into gangs, drugs or violence. Search for love, not one of the cheap substitutes we so often settle for in this world, and when you find someone special, make it work so the relationship can last a lifetime. Most of all, find Christ.
And if it's selfish, it's selfish, but I'm going to wish for it anyway: Come home to me. The day you left I promised that I would always carry a piece of you in my heart, and that you would always have a piece of me in yours, even if you didn't remember it in your waking hours. It's still the truth two years later, and it will be the truth in another twenty and another sixty. Neither one of us will be complete until we connect again.
I love you, Isaac, more than anything. Have a happy birthday.
Love,
Abba
As I'm writing this, it's almost the end of your fifth birthday. I wish I could have been there to celebrate it with you, but that isn't possible. By the time you're able to read this, you'll be closer to celebrating your seventh birthday than your fifth, and by the time you actually do read it — assuming you ever do — your fifth birthday will be long past and long forgotten.
If you do read this one day, it will be because you decided to seek me out. Hope is that thing with feathers, but I still hope you will come looking for me one day, however far off that may be. As I stand before God, I hope one day to see you again in the flesh with my own eyes. Foster son or not, I loved you as much as my own flesh and blood, and I still do.
You stayed with us from January to mid-October 2002, after Iowa Child Protective Services placed you into foster care. When you arrived you were a wreck -- unable to speak, barely able to stand or walk, incapable of showing any emotion except anger, and unable to concentrate on anything except watching TV.
That changed while you were in our care. I watched as you began to bloom for the first time in two years, and mastered skills that we had always taken for granted with our own daughter. I watched as you learned to stand and to walk without falling down, and as you learned to pick up things with your fingers and to eat with a fork. I cheered the first time you used an actual word to ask for something. Most of all, I lost myself in those smiles of yours, that silly laugh you had, and that insane humming you made whenever you wanted to sing butdidn't know the words.
The day you left is one that is seared indelibly into my very soul. The sky was clear blue, the leaves were beginning to turn color, and the air had the crisp quality of an early autumn morning. You'd been taking trips to your birth parents twice a week for the last nine months, so when the DYFS driver buckled you into the car seat and drove off, you were smiling happily, and all the while my heart was clenching tighter and tighter in my chest. The tears started when you disappeared from sight, and to be honest, they've never really stopped.
I don’t think I can ever begin to tell you how much I've missed you the last two years. Not a day has gone by since you left that I haven't thought about you, and sometimes the grief has been so great that all I've wanted to do is to crawl into a hole and cover myself up, or to drown it.
The day you left, a heavy blackness fell over my soul. It was as though I had been following Christ willingly and in faith, trusting him as the road got ever darker, until finally I came to the darkest place I had ever been. There was no way forward, and no way back, and on all sides there were beasts that would gladly rend me limb from limb if only they had the chance. I could hear them whispering, just out of eyesight. One wrong step would mean my destruction, and my guide was nowhere to be seen.
For the life of me, I don't know how I survived that time, except to say that God's love and grace are greater and more bewildering than I ever could have imagined. Trusting to him is like riding the rapids of a waterfall, without even the benefit of a barrel, and yet I wouldn't have it any other way. By his grace, I survived.
Having you and losing you has had a more profound effect on my life than just about everything else I've ever known — more than college, more than being an exchange student, and more than being a missionary. The loss of you is a pain that suffuses my writing, my relationship with God, and the relationship I have with my children. Every day when I think of you, I give thanks that I still have them, and I hold them close.
Evangeline, who was your older sister for those nine months, had a horrible time when you left. For weeks after, when we went to the movies or to a friend's house, she looked around for you. Once I came home from work late at night to find her, wide awake at the top of the stairs, wondering when you would come back. And when her sister was born, and we had to leave her with friends for the night, it made her ill. She knew — she just knew — that we had got rid of her, too.
Two years later, she still remembers you. She asks me why you left, she wants to know when you're coming home, and she prays for the chance to see you just one more time. She no longer lays awake at night waiting for you, nor does she still want to send her younger sister away so that you can come back, but losing you has affected her also. She loves you, and she misses you too.
I don't know what the future holds for you, but I hope it is full of good things. I hear that you've made remarkable progress the last two years: that you speak well; that you are relatively happy living with your father, your grandmother, aunt and cousins; and that you may even start school with the other children your age. That's fantastic.
I pray for you every day. If I could make a wish for your future, it would be this: Finish high school and either attend college or learn an honest trade. Stay clear of the wrong crowd, and keep away from those who would lead you into gangs, drugs or violence. Search for love, not one of the cheap substitutes we so often settle for in this world, and when you find someone special, make it work so the relationship can last a lifetime. Most of all, find Christ.
And if it's selfish, it's selfish, but I'm going to wish for it anyway: Come home to me. The day you left I promised that I would always carry a piece of you in my heart, and that you would always have a piece of me in yours, even if you didn't remember it in your waking hours. It's still the truth two years later, and it will be the truth in another twenty and another sixty. Neither one of us will be complete until we connect again.
I love you, Isaac, more than anything. Have a happy birthday.
Love,
Abba
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Introducing the new Battlestar Galactica
It's been about two weeks since we borrowed the "Battlestar Galactica" revival DVD set from a friend of ours, and I'm still more than suitably impressed by how well it played out.
The original series, which starred Lorne Greene as Commander Adama, Dirk Benedict as Starbuck and Richard Hatch as Apollo, came out in 1978 after George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had launched a sci-fi revolution in American culture with "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." As sci-fi series go, the original "Battlestar Galactica" wasn't all that memorable. The plot of choice usually involved either the Cylons attacking and threatening the escaping Colonials, or a Gilligan's Island type of story where the Colonials thought they had discovered Earth and ended their quest, only to find they were wrong.
Characters were generally weak and unbelievable — Baltar was a larger-than-life evil person who had betrayed the colonies to the Cylons because he wanted to rule the survivors and had struck a deal with the Cylons to that effect. (Why he continued to work with the Cylons even after it was evident that they weren't going to honor their side was never really clear.) Starbuck was the hormone-driven womanizer, Apollo was the family man, and Adama was the all-around in-charge guy, who acted as visionary, high priest, military leader and top political official.
And if the characters lacked nuance at times, some of the show's spiritualism was just downright kooky, like that bit where the crystal city starts abducting Colonial vipers and their pilots and Starbuck meets an angel who tells him that one day he'll be a god, and all that weird stuff.
It was an odd show.
What was better about the new series? It's hard to know where to begin.
For starters, the new "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries gave us the view from the ground of the attack on the twelve colonies. The original series treated us to a tremendous space battle that began soon after the opening credits were over and we had established that Baltar had just negotiated a peace treaty between humanity and the Cylons.
Because this was a three-hour miniseries, the writers took some time to introduce us to each of the major characters and what drives them, and we got to witness the slaughter of the human population of Caprica — not by spaceships flying overhead and shooting lasers at people, but from a surprise nuclear bombardment. That's a much more accessible way to depict the genocide of the entire human species, particularly since 9-11 here in the United States and the terror attack in Spain last year, when many of us are wondering when the next shoe will drop.
The series also reimagined the Cylons. Since the war ended, the Cylons have altered their appearance so that they appear to be human, down to the blood level. They’re not shiny robots with a flashing red eye anymore; they're synthetic humans.
More than that, while the original-series Cylons were a reptilian race bent on the slaughter of humanity for reasons that never were expressed, these Cylons were created by humanity and gifted with intelligence. In other words, it's humanity's own creation attempting to destroy it — a familiar theme in science fiction but still a potent one since our penchant for advancing technology still outstrips our ability to use it by light years. Additionally, the Cylons' ability to pass among humans undetected easily lends itself to fifth column paranoia.
The big thing, though, has to be the way the series creators have reimagined the characters. Adama remains the confident military leader, but while the original Adama had a sterling relationship with his son and was able to maintain a professional rapport with no signs of favoritism or resentment, the new Adama and this Apollo have been estranged for at least two years after the death of Adama's other son, Zach.
Colonel Tigh, instead of being an exemplary executive officer, is past his time and a drunk.
Baltar is not a traitor with ambitions of power; he's just an amoral and self-serving twit who believes himself above the common burden of matters like conscience and guilt.
The Galactica itself is no longer the biggest or the best battlestar in the fleet. It's a run-down, ready-to-be-retired hulk, scheduled to be decommissioned and turned into a museum and so far past its prime that the Cylons are unable to hack into its computer system and shut it down like they do with the rest of the Colonial fleet.
The result it a sci-fi setting that is at once futuristic, with space travel and aliens, and retro, with ordnance, and a communications system that uses phone cords.
They also go rid of some of the cornier aspects of the show, like naming the planets after the Zodiac. The capital world is now called Caprica, not Capricorn. Gemini is now Geminon. Fanciful names like "Apollo" and "Starbuck" are the call signs of pilots Lee Adama and Kara Thrace.
As remakes go, this one is a keeper. I can't wait until I can borrow the first DVD set of the new series.
The original series, which starred Lorne Greene as Commander Adama, Dirk Benedict as Starbuck and Richard Hatch as Apollo, came out in 1978 after George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had launched a sci-fi revolution in American culture with "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." As sci-fi series go, the original "Battlestar Galactica" wasn't all that memorable. The plot of choice usually involved either the Cylons attacking and threatening the escaping Colonials, or a Gilligan's Island type of story where the Colonials thought they had discovered Earth and ended their quest, only to find they were wrong.
Characters were generally weak and unbelievable — Baltar was a larger-than-life evil person who had betrayed the colonies to the Cylons because he wanted to rule the survivors and had struck a deal with the Cylons to that effect. (Why he continued to work with the Cylons even after it was evident that they weren't going to honor their side was never really clear.) Starbuck was the hormone-driven womanizer, Apollo was the family man, and Adama was the all-around in-charge guy, who acted as visionary, high priest, military leader and top political official.
And if the characters lacked nuance at times, some of the show's spiritualism was just downright kooky, like that bit where the crystal city starts abducting Colonial vipers and their pilots and Starbuck meets an angel who tells him that one day he'll be a god, and all that weird stuff.
It was an odd show.
What was better about the new series? It's hard to know where to begin.
For starters, the new "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries gave us the view from the ground of the attack on the twelve colonies. The original series treated us to a tremendous space battle that began soon after the opening credits were over and we had established that Baltar had just negotiated a peace treaty between humanity and the Cylons.
Because this was a three-hour miniseries, the writers took some time to introduce us to each of the major characters and what drives them, and we got to witness the slaughter of the human population of Caprica — not by spaceships flying overhead and shooting lasers at people, but from a surprise nuclear bombardment. That's a much more accessible way to depict the genocide of the entire human species, particularly since 9-11 here in the United States and the terror attack in Spain last year, when many of us are wondering when the next shoe will drop.
The series also reimagined the Cylons. Since the war ended, the Cylons have altered their appearance so that they appear to be human, down to the blood level. They’re not shiny robots with a flashing red eye anymore; they're synthetic humans.
More than that, while the original-series Cylons were a reptilian race bent on the slaughter of humanity for reasons that never were expressed, these Cylons were created by humanity and gifted with intelligence. In other words, it's humanity's own creation attempting to destroy it — a familiar theme in science fiction but still a potent one since our penchant for advancing technology still outstrips our ability to use it by light years. Additionally, the Cylons' ability to pass among humans undetected easily lends itself to fifth column paranoia.
The big thing, though, has to be the way the series creators have reimagined the characters. Adama remains the confident military leader, but while the original Adama had a sterling relationship with his son and was able to maintain a professional rapport with no signs of favoritism or resentment, the new Adama and this Apollo have been estranged for at least two years after the death of Adama's other son, Zach.
Colonel Tigh, instead of being an exemplary executive officer, is past his time and a drunk.
Baltar is not a traitor with ambitions of power; he's just an amoral and self-serving twit who believes himself above the common burden of matters like conscience and guilt.
The Galactica itself is no longer the biggest or the best battlestar in the fleet. It's a run-down, ready-to-be-retired hulk, scheduled to be decommissioned and turned into a museum and so far past its prime that the Cylons are unable to hack into its computer system and shut it down like they do with the rest of the Colonial fleet.
The result it a sci-fi setting that is at once futuristic, with space travel and aliens, and retro, with ordnance, and a communications system that uses phone cords.
They also go rid of some of the cornier aspects of the show, like naming the planets after the Zodiac. The capital world is now called Caprica, not Capricorn. Gemini is now Geminon. Fanciful names like "Apollo" and "Starbuck" are the call signs of pilots Lee Adama and Kara Thrace.
As remakes go, this one is a keeper. I can't wait until I can borrow the first DVD set of the new series.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Exx Man: a rediscovered masterpiece
I found an odd corner of my personal history on the Internet today — a sordid little chapter of my college experience called "Exx Man."
I shouldn't say I "found" it, since that makes it sound like I just happened to discover it purely by accident. The truth is that I went looking for it deliberately, because it suddenly occurred to me this morning that I had posted the entire thing to a Usenet newsgroup, a sort of predecessor to today's forums, in 1992 or so.
"Exx Man" was the high point of a collaborative story board on Lafayette's computer system. Begun my senior year, Exx Man was the sole story my senior year, after three separate stories competed for readership and participation during the second half of my junior year. It was also the most successful story, judging by audience participation and number of installments, ending with more than 100 parts and probably close to a dozen contributors.
It began simply enough as a superhero story, with the first part written by a fellow student named Frank Puskas. That held true for roughly one installment, Frank's own, before readers discovered that Exx Man actually was an inmate in an asylum and merely believed that he was a superhero. In the second part, where we made this discovery, David McCandless began the story's steady ascent into farce with the introduction of the supervillain Dragon Poker, named after a poker game played in the "Myth" series of fantasy novels.
And so it went. Before long, we discovered that Exx Man actually wasn't even a man — she was a woman who merely thought she was a man. When she made that discovery, her superhero days ended, and she became a hairdresser.
Around this time, Frank noticed that we had been messing about with his story, and he attempted to bring it all back into line by introducing a character named Dr. Dingle. Dingle was a mad scientist, experimenting on Exx Man and who was about to give him superpowers. All this stuff about being a hairdresser was just a delusion.
Frank stopped just short of that, though, leaving me a window to step in and reveal that the Dingle scene was merely a flashback, and that it was Dingle who accidentally had changed Exx Man into a woman.
For the next several weeks, Frank and I got into a minor power struggle over Dr. Dingle and his role in Exx Man's life. Frank brought him back in and tried to reassert his vision for the story, prompting me to turn Dingle into a squirrel, run him over with a truck, and serve him as the entrée on the college meal plan.
Frank then revealed that Dingle hadn't actually been so much killed as much as just stunned. I had him shot to pieces by a rowdy bunch of exterminators. I later was forced to annihilate Dingle when Frank had him cloned from a surviving tail fragment, but by that time, it had become so much killing Dingle off in new ways that I started bringing him back to life myself.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, we made fun of one another; offered extended commentary on college life; and shamelessly cribbed from M*A*S*H, Tom Stoppard, the "Terminator" movies, "Speed Racer" and other bits of pop culture; and just generally had a blast.
The story, I now realize, was more popular with the student body than I realized at the time. There were four of us who regularly contributed to it, but a surprising number of people offered one- or two-time additions, and I got feedback from other people who never contributed to it about what a riot it was. (As well as the standard, expected criticism from friends who wanted me to know how useless it really was.)
More than 12 years later, I'm amazed how many elements of "Exx Man" have stayed with me. Dr. Dingle and Markle City (named after Markle Hall, the administration building at Lafayette College) each carried over into the "Chicken Soup for the Soulless" writing McCandless and I have done for our Brothers Grinn project, currently on hiatus.
Other bits, like casting Spridle from Speed Racer as an evil genius on the level of Richard III, have stayed with me as a private sort of joke. Other characters — particularly the triad of Drake, Quince and Elwood — have shown up in one form or another in various bits of fiction I've written.
The other stories never fared as well. The day Paul Galvin launched the story board in 1990, another student and I posted story openers so close together that neither of us knew the other was doing it. The one I began was a Star Trek story, set aboard the U.S.S. James Kirk in the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It made it about seven parts before dying with no ending, but can still be found here and there on the Internet as "The Cardassian Confrontation," often linked with "Deep Space 9," although the story was written months before DS9 debuted.
The story Ron Dauphin began was a murder mystery set around a bumbling detective named Drake. Drake's story was pushed to a hasty wrap-up, after a dozen parts at most, and although it had funny moments — most notably when Drake killed the main character from a third, wholly unremarkable story someone had tried to start on the board — it never went anywhere either. To the best of my knowledge, the Drake stories don't exist anywhere anymore.
The year after I graduated, there was a meager attempt to start a new story based on the second-season Star Trek: TNG episode called "The Royale." It was later co-opted into a time-traveling secret agent story with overtures of Robin Hood and Star Wars, but it died pretty quickly itself.
Exx Man outdid them all. It made it to more than 100 posts, had no competitors for attention while it ran, and actually absorbed previous stories from the story board, like Detective Drake, who finally came into his own when he was partnered with two special agents from the FBI who came to Markle City to investigate the bizarre chaos that had followed Exx Man around since his (or her) arrival.
As actual literature goes, the Exx Man story is awful, it's meretricious, and it deserves no place on the Internet. Still, it was a lot of fun to write, it remains the best example I've ever seen of what a collaborative story can be, and even if it is all those things I said — I still like it.
You'd be crazy to read it.
I shouldn't say I "found" it, since that makes it sound like I just happened to discover it purely by accident. The truth is that I went looking for it deliberately, because it suddenly occurred to me this morning that I had posted the entire thing to a Usenet newsgroup, a sort of predecessor to today's forums, in 1992 or so.
"Exx Man" was the high point of a collaborative story board on Lafayette's computer system. Begun my senior year, Exx Man was the sole story my senior year, after three separate stories competed for readership and participation during the second half of my junior year. It was also the most successful story, judging by audience participation and number of installments, ending with more than 100 parts and probably close to a dozen contributors.
It began simply enough as a superhero story, with the first part written by a fellow student named Frank Puskas. That held true for roughly one installment, Frank's own, before readers discovered that Exx Man actually was an inmate in an asylum and merely believed that he was a superhero. In the second part, where we made this discovery, David McCandless began the story's steady ascent into farce with the introduction of the supervillain Dragon Poker, named after a poker game played in the "Myth" series of fantasy novels.
And so it went. Before long, we discovered that Exx Man actually wasn't even a man — she was a woman who merely thought she was a man. When she made that discovery, her superhero days ended, and she became a hairdresser.
Around this time, Frank noticed that we had been messing about with his story, and he attempted to bring it all back into line by introducing a character named Dr. Dingle. Dingle was a mad scientist, experimenting on Exx Man and who was about to give him superpowers. All this stuff about being a hairdresser was just a delusion.
Frank stopped just short of that, though, leaving me a window to step in and reveal that the Dingle scene was merely a flashback, and that it was Dingle who accidentally had changed Exx Man into a woman.
For the next several weeks, Frank and I got into a minor power struggle over Dr. Dingle and his role in Exx Man's life. Frank brought him back in and tried to reassert his vision for the story, prompting me to turn Dingle into a squirrel, run him over with a truck, and serve him as the entrée on the college meal plan.
Frank then revealed that Dingle hadn't actually been so much killed as much as just stunned. I had him shot to pieces by a rowdy bunch of exterminators. I later was forced to annihilate Dingle when Frank had him cloned from a surviving tail fragment, but by that time, it had become so much killing Dingle off in new ways that I started bringing him back to life myself.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, we made fun of one another; offered extended commentary on college life; and shamelessly cribbed from M*A*S*H, Tom Stoppard, the "Terminator" movies, "Speed Racer" and other bits of pop culture; and just generally had a blast.
The story, I now realize, was more popular with the student body than I realized at the time. There were four of us who regularly contributed to it, but a surprising number of people offered one- or two-time additions, and I got feedback from other people who never contributed to it about what a riot it was. (As well as the standard, expected criticism from friends who wanted me to know how useless it really was.)
More than 12 years later, I'm amazed how many elements of "Exx Man" have stayed with me. Dr. Dingle and Markle City (named after Markle Hall, the administration building at Lafayette College) each carried over into the "Chicken Soup for the Soulless" writing McCandless and I have done for our Brothers Grinn project, currently on hiatus.
Other bits, like casting Spridle from Speed Racer as an evil genius on the level of Richard III, have stayed with me as a private sort of joke. Other characters — particularly the triad of Drake, Quince and Elwood — have shown up in one form or another in various bits of fiction I've written.
The other stories never fared as well. The day Paul Galvin launched the story board in 1990, another student and I posted story openers so close together that neither of us knew the other was doing it. The one I began was a Star Trek story, set aboard the U.S.S. James Kirk in the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It made it about seven parts before dying with no ending, but can still be found here and there on the Internet as "The Cardassian Confrontation," often linked with "Deep Space 9," although the story was written months before DS9 debuted.
The story Ron Dauphin began was a murder mystery set around a bumbling detective named Drake. Drake's story was pushed to a hasty wrap-up, after a dozen parts at most, and although it had funny moments — most notably when Drake killed the main character from a third, wholly unremarkable story someone had tried to start on the board — it never went anywhere either. To the best of my knowledge, the Drake stories don't exist anywhere anymore.
The year after I graduated, there was a meager attempt to start a new story based on the second-season Star Trek: TNG episode called "The Royale." It was later co-opted into a time-traveling secret agent story with overtures of Robin Hood and Star Wars, but it died pretty quickly itself.
Exx Man outdid them all. It made it to more than 100 posts, had no competitors for attention while it ran, and actually absorbed previous stories from the story board, like Detective Drake, who finally came into his own when he was partnered with two special agents from the FBI who came to Markle City to investigate the bizarre chaos that had followed Exx Man around since his (or her) arrival.
As actual literature goes, the Exx Man story is awful, it's meretricious, and it deserves no place on the Internet. Still, it was a lot of fun to write, it remains the best example I've ever seen of what a collaborative story can be, and even if it is all those things I said — I still like it.
You'd be crazy to read it.
pigs' ears and silk purses
It may sound odd, but early last year after we lost our son, I found renewed comfort in the book of Ecclesiastes.
The book of Ecclesiastes, known as Qohelet in Hebrew, is part of the Bible's wisdom literature, written by an author known only as "the preacher." In contrary to much religious writing, Ecclesiastes paints a fairly morose view of life, one where there is no advantage in being young, being wise, being strong or being wealthy. No matter how wonderful things are, hanging over all of it is the certainty of death to come, an ending that renders everything meaningless.
It's always been one of my favorite books in the Bible, but the preacher's brutal honesty helped me get through the darkest time of my life to date.
What did I take away from it? That popular platitudes notwithstanding, everything does not happen for a reason. Sometimes life is just so horrible, all you can do is crawl under the covers and ask why you didn't die the day you were born, and when you're done crying, get up and go through the motions of living, since that's all you have left to do.
And after a while, you start to see that even though to live is still to suffer, God has placed eternity in our hearts so that we can glimpse heaven and God's mercy in the world around us. We have friends who lie down with us to keep us warm (it's still cold, but someone is helping us make it through); we can still eat and drink, and enjoy what modest pleasures those bring us; and at the end of the day, we can escape our misery in a few blessed hours of sleep.
In the annoyingly oft-quoted Romans 8:28, Paul writes that God is working in all things for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purposes.
The way I came to understand that verse is that it's true that God can sew a silk purse out of a pig's ear. It may not change the fact that it's a pig's ear, but that doesn't change the fact that God made a silk purse out of it.
And lastly, of course, the preacher wrapped up his ruminations by saying, "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." A friend of mine once commented that he doesn't understand why the preacher says to fear God instead of saying to love him.
After what I went through, I think I understand: It's because it's not always possible to love God in the way that we usually understand it. Sometimes, all you can do is to live in fear and trembling of that dreadful joy, and follow the commands he has laid down.
Copyright © 2005 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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It's always been one of my favorite books in the Bible, but the preacher's brutal honesty helped me get through the darkest time of my life to date.
What did I take away from it? That popular platitudes notwithstanding, everything does not happen for a reason. Sometimes life is just so horrible, all you can do is crawl under the covers and ask why you didn't die the day you were born, and when you're done crying, get up and go through the motions of living, since that's all you have left to do.
And after a while, you start to see that even though to live is still to suffer, God has placed eternity in our hearts so that we can glimpse heaven and God's mercy in the world around us. We have friends who lie down with us to keep us warm (it's still cold, but someone is helping us make it through); we can still eat and drink, and enjoy what modest pleasures those bring us; and at the end of the day, we can escape our misery in a few blessed hours of sleep.
In the annoyingly oft-quoted Romans 8:28, Paul writes that God is working in all things for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purposes.
The way I came to understand that verse is that it's true that God can sew a silk purse out of a pig's ear. It may not change the fact that it's a pig's ear, but that doesn't change the fact that God made a silk purse out of it.
And lastly, of course, the preacher wrapped up his ruminations by saying, "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." A friend of mine once commented that he doesn't understand why the preacher says to fear God instead of saying to love him.
After what I went through, I think I understand: It's because it's not always possible to love God in the way that we usually understand it. Sometimes, all you can do is to live in fear and trembling of that dreadful joy, and follow the commands he has laid down.
Copyright © 2005 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Monday, January 17, 2005
A Christmas Thaw Brings Back the Fleas
The fleas returned this summer, the nematodes apparently having run their lives and died out.
We had a miserable time with them in the house again before I salted the rugs one night and let that desiccate their eggs. That killed the eggs, a bath washed them out of Sandy's fur, and then a flea collar ended up being what it took to keep them off her afterward. Can you believe that Frontline failed to kill the fleas on her, even when I waited a week after giving the dog a bath to apply the stuff?
It took until the onset of cold weather to kill the fleas in the yard, which meant we had to keep Sandy out of the yard and let her out only for walks on the street.
With the recent warm weather around Christmas, the fleas managed to re-enter the yard and we even found one inside the house today. Now that the ground is frozen solid again, I expect we'll have a break from them until springtime, when I'm adding more nematodes and planting a few bazillion marigolds to keep the groundhogs, insects and stray cats at bay.
With any luck, Sandy's flea collar will take care of the stragglers in the house, although I'm tempted to salt the carpet again.
I'm probably also going to check and see what I can do legally about cats wandering through my yard, since they bring fleas to the yard, dig in my flower beds and leave their disease-laden presents where my children can find them.
(I'm tempted to plant a bunch of catnip in the pesky neighbor's yard down the street, to draw all the cats there, but that would be low.)
We had a miserable time with them in the house again before I salted the rugs one night and let that desiccate their eggs. That killed the eggs, a bath washed them out of Sandy's fur, and then a flea collar ended up being what it took to keep them off her afterward. Can you believe that Frontline failed to kill the fleas on her, even when I waited a week after giving the dog a bath to apply the stuff?
It took until the onset of cold weather to kill the fleas in the yard, which meant we had to keep Sandy out of the yard and let her out only for walks on the street.
With the recent warm weather around Christmas, the fleas managed to re-enter the yard and we even found one inside the house today. Now that the ground is frozen solid again, I expect we'll have a break from them until springtime, when I'm adding more nematodes and planting a few bazillion marigolds to keep the groundhogs, insects and stray cats at bay.
With any luck, Sandy's flea collar will take care of the stragglers in the house, although I'm tempted to salt the carpet again.
I'm probably also going to check and see what I can do legally about cats wandering through my yard, since they bring fleas to the yard, dig in my flower beds and leave their disease-laden presents where my children can find them.
(I'm tempted to plant a bunch of catnip in the pesky neighbor's yard down the street, to draw all the cats there, but that would be low.)
'the matrix' at last
It took more than five years, but I finally saw "The Matrix" on Friday night. My best friend had bought himself the entire collector's set, and so he gave me all five of his Matrix DVDs -- the three movies, and two related projects.
All things considered, I thought it was a decent movie. The violence was a turnoff for me, meaning mainly the scene where Neo and Trinity enter the federal building and waste an entire platoon of military troops -- would even a secure building have that many combat-ready troops armed and prepped for battle? -- and the special effects now seem cliched, which is ironic since "The Matrix" is the one that introduced a lot of the moves and camera tricks "Shrek" was making fun of.
I'm not surprised many people saw it as a vehicle for Truth. A lot of Christians saw the movie as a spiritual allegory, where Satan has made a wasteland of the world and we only believe the pleasant lies of the Matrix because they're more comforting than the stark realities of the hellish world we actually live in. I could see that just from the conversation Morpheus and Neo have about how Neo always has known there is something fundamentally wrong with the world, let alone the more Christian-specific elements like Neo's resurrection (brought about by the love of Trinity, naturally), Cypher's act of betrayal, and so on, but I didn't see the movie in those terms primarily. The filmmakers definitely and deliberately tapped into those archetypes, but I saw it more in terms of a social commentary; i.e., the world around us keeps itself going at our expense, and trying to right the ills of our world puts us at odds with the rest of the order.
Maybe I've just become too liberal and earthly in my thinking, and no longer see spiritual truth unless it's delivered as a here-and-now package. :-)
The excessive violence was a disappointment, Neo's resurrection was inexplicable (but it was a resurrection, duh) and I think some of the FX were confusing (like where they stopped the bullets to show how fast Neo was moving, just before he deprogrammed Agent Smith), but overall it was a good flick. It was an action flick with some intelligence, which is better than the Van Damme and Schwarzeneggar action flicks my friends watched back in college, and it had some good thematic elements as well.
It was worth watching, even if it took me five years to see it. I'll probably watch "Matrix Reloaded" on Monday, or next Friday, after the girls have gone to sleep, followed by "Matrix Revolutions" soon after. I've been warned that I'll be disappointed, but then, I'm not expecting Matrix II. From what I've read and heard, the creators of the movie had a specific philosophy they were hoping to capture and express in their movies, following the three-part arc of the Hero Emergent, the Hero Victorious, and the Hero Vanquished.
Since it's not as interesting to read or write about the hero victorious, I imagine that the second movie is where they start to tell you more about their futuristic world, about Zion, how the Matrix came into existence, and so on -- and in the process start relaying their philosophy more than in the first movie, where they were just setting the stage.
So I'm not expecting the same sort of movie as the first one, but then again, I've also been told not to.
I have no idea when I'll get around to watching "Animatrix" and "The Matrix Revisited."
All things considered, I thought it was a decent movie. The violence was a turnoff for me, meaning mainly the scene where Neo and Trinity enter the federal building and waste an entire platoon of military troops -- would even a secure building have that many combat-ready troops armed and prepped for battle? -- and the special effects now seem cliched, which is ironic since "The Matrix" is the one that introduced a lot of the moves and camera tricks "Shrek" was making fun of.
I'm not surprised many people saw it as a vehicle for Truth. A lot of Christians saw the movie as a spiritual allegory, where Satan has made a wasteland of the world and we only believe the pleasant lies of the Matrix because they're more comforting than the stark realities of the hellish world we actually live in. I could see that just from the conversation Morpheus and Neo have about how Neo always has known there is something fundamentally wrong with the world, let alone the more Christian-specific elements like Neo's resurrection (brought about by the love of Trinity, naturally), Cypher's act of betrayal, and so on, but I didn't see the movie in those terms primarily. The filmmakers definitely and deliberately tapped into those archetypes, but I saw it more in terms of a social commentary; i.e., the world around us keeps itself going at our expense, and trying to right the ills of our world puts us at odds with the rest of the order.
Maybe I've just become too liberal and earthly in my thinking, and no longer see spiritual truth unless it's delivered as a here-and-now package. :-)
The excessive violence was a disappointment, Neo's resurrection was inexplicable (but it was a resurrection, duh) and I think some of the FX were confusing (like where they stopped the bullets to show how fast Neo was moving, just before he deprogrammed Agent Smith), but overall it was a good flick. It was an action flick with some intelligence, which is better than the Van Damme and Schwarzeneggar action flicks my friends watched back in college, and it had some good thematic elements as well.
It was worth watching, even if it took me five years to see it. I'll probably watch "Matrix Reloaded" on Monday, or next Friday, after the girls have gone to sleep, followed by "Matrix Revolutions" soon after. I've been warned that I'll be disappointed, but then, I'm not expecting Matrix II. From what I've read and heard, the creators of the movie had a specific philosophy they were hoping to capture and express in their movies, following the three-part arc of the Hero Emergent, the Hero Victorious, and the Hero Vanquished.
Since it's not as interesting to read or write about the hero victorious, I imagine that the second movie is where they start to tell you more about their futuristic world, about Zion, how the Matrix came into existence, and so on -- and in the process start relaying their philosophy more than in the first movie, where they were just setting the stage.
So I'm not expecting the same sort of movie as the first one, but then again, I've also been told not to.
I have no idea when I'll get around to watching "Animatrix" and "The Matrix Revisited."
Understanding and cultivating the unconditional love of God
I love to get a new trade paperback comic to read.
I'll sit for hours at night, reading the story over and over again. Each time I read it, I see new details that eluded me on the first reading — clues that foreshadowed the twist ending, intimations about relationships between characters, and clever little tidbits in the background art. I love the way creators weave the strands of a story together, and when the story is told well, I can enjoy the structure and telling of the story as much as I enjoy the story itself.
That's what I'm doing now with the notion of God's love. What God's love is about and what it means to be loved by him are questions I have puzzled over for years.
Part of the problem is that we often have a fatally flawed understanding of grace. We see divine grace as something that kicks in after we've made our best efforts and tried our hardest, but hat's not it at all. That would mean we have to earn grace, and grace that can be earned isn't really grace.
You could call it "the law of consequences." I'm sure you know how this goes. "If I do X, then by God's grace, Y will happen." The only problem is, that's not grace. It's law, and law never heals, it only kills.
Ask a divorcee. Chances are, they'll be able to tell you about the times they fell into this trap.
"If I had only been a better wife, he wouldn't have left me"; or "If I had been a more attentive husband, she wouldn't have felt neglected and wanted to start over with someone else." If I hadn't spent so many hours at work, if I hadn't been home so much, if I hadn't forgotten to fix the roof.
Parents'll do the same thing. "If I had been a better parent, my child wouldn't be gay." "If I hadn't been so strict, he would love me more."
If, if, if.
You'll also see the flip side. "Oh, it's all by the grace of God it worked out this way. We just followed the scriptural principles on how to raise our children, on how to keep our marriage vibrant, and on how to balance work and home life. Without the Lord, it would have been a disaster." (Notice the statement of pride? Although they're claiming to give God credit, they're also stressing how much they did to earn God's favor.)
The truth is, you can do your best job and still fail, or do a rotten job and have everything work out just fine. Influence still exists, but Christ died to free us from the law of consequence. The law of consequence, if we were under it, would result in utter failure for all of us, since none of us is capable of following the law and to break the least part is to be guilty of breaking it all.
But by living under the law of consequence, we subject ourselves to an immense, unbearable burden that steals our joy, keeps us from experiencing Christ's love, and leaves us miserable and alone.
Experiencing the joy of Christ's love often means letting go of our self-imposed performance expectations and allowing ourselves to act out of love rather than obligation. When James tells us that faith without works is dead, he means not that we do things because God still expects us to perform good deeds, but that our faith will express itself in tangible ways as we love those around us.
Being involved in a soup kitchen because "Christians care about the poor" is the first kind of act; it's law. Being involved in a soup kitchen because I want to help the people there springs from a different source, and is an act of love. Same action, different heart.
Another part of the question has to do with what God's love is and how he expresses it. It's only been in the last few years, as I've mourned the loss of my foster son, that I've really started to gain a mature understanding of God's love.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for the longest time, I don't think I loved God as much as I was just in love with him. An example from my own marriage: When my wife and I first started dating, and when we first married, we had periods marked by a giddy, heady feeling of euphoria. She was sensitive, charming, well-mannered, considerate; she enjoyed my jokes, shared my interests, and held the same deep convictions as me. All I could think about was how much I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. That's being in love.
Since we married six years ago, although my prior assessment of her remains good, there have been times I've wanted to scream. She's nagged me, criticized the way I fold the laundry, delivered withering critiques of projects I was proud of, and blown up at me for not being able to read her mind. Once, when I had got up early and done a number of things just for her, she left me in tears within an hour by complaining about how I had done each of those things without once stopping to thank me for doing them in the first place.
The sun and the moon still set on her, and the stars above still circle her, and I'm still amazed that she wants to spend the rest of her life with me, but our relationship has matured. There have been times for each of us when it would have been easier to walk out, but we stayed. That's not being "in love" -- that is love, and it's much more satisfying.
God's love is the same way, but infinitely moreso. It's so wild and difficult to explain, I think it's easy to understand why people might complain that he's either indifferent to our suffering, or just downright cruel.
Why do I say that? Let's take it from an example Paul provides us in Scripture. In his letter to the Roman church, Paul says that God demonstrates his mercy and compassion in sending rain to both the just and the unjust. Men as evil as Hitler knew what it was like to be in love; men as full of hatred as Osama bin Laden know the joy of holding their own newborn babies; and even a serial killer like Ted Bundy knew a thousand little delights every day, even after he denied those same delights to his victims. It's easy to see that God's mercy and compassion abound to even the most wicked.
That's a great sentiment, but it's hardly the best example Paul could use, in some senses. It's one thing if God shows great kindness to undeserving people, but he also allows really nice people to suffer hideously, such as the victims of men like Hitler, bin Laden and Bundy.
Elie Wiesel suffered horribly at Auschwitz and saw the desecration of everything he had believed about God and the struggle between good and evil.
In California in 2002, there was a 5-year-old girl who was abducted, kicking and screaming, from her front yard where she had been playing, and was raped and brutally murdered. In New Jersey, we had the horrifying case of Faheem and Raheem Williams, who were under state care yet still were locked inside a basement by their caretaker to starve. (Their DYFS caseworker had closed the case when she was unable to find the boys, rather than keep the case open and have to deal with the thorny problem of losing two abused children.)
Bruce Jackson, 18, weighed about 60 pounds when police found him rummaging for food through garbage cans. His foster parents, a churchgoing couple, were in the process of formally adopting him and other foster children. As far as their case records indicated, they were in a great home -- never mind the starvation, severe medical neglect, and what else.
Kick it this way, kick it that. God showers the wicked with great compassion while he sometimes seems to piss on the righteous and the innocent. Is he cruel, or merely capricious? Paul asserts he's good.
Paul's basis for that claim is the Cross, the lynchpin of human existence. This is where Christ became all the sin of the world, and took on himself all the suffering and torment that goes hand in hand with being human. Everything before the Cross pointed to its coming; everything after it points back to it.
If we rejoice and draw near to God, it is because Christ made it possible. If we suffer, whether for sin, for righteousness or just because, we find solidarity with Christ, who also suffered for each of those three reasons. If we have any righteousness before God, it is because he looks at us and sees his son instead, all because of the Cross.
So if the Cross is the fullest expression of God's love, and if it suffuses all human history with meaning, what does that mean?
It means that the whole of human history, from the day God breathed life into Adam down to the advent of the New Jerusalem (and far, far beyond that) is also an expression of God's love. It's not like any other form of love we've ever known as humans.
It's wild, and uncontainable, and it moves with the irresistible force of a river coursing down the rapids toward a waterfall, where it will dash us against the rocks if we let it carry us. We'll be buffeted and bruised, cold and unable to grip anything but water, and it'll toss us about and leave us gasping, but it'll never kill us -- at least, not in an important way. Instead, it makes us alive in indescribable ways.
I shared this with someone once, and her question was, but how do I experience it? First, we let ourselves live free of the demands of law. There's a joy in knowing that it doesn't all depend on your effort, and that your only obligation is to love. Secondly -- and this is the hardest thing -- we need to learn to love. Loving as Christ does means living in relationship with other people, no matter who they are, seeing people as people and not as projects or as beneficiaries of our attention.
Forget this hectic pace we whip ourselves into, and take the time to enjoy the people around you, and as you become aware of their needs, find ways that you can fill those needs. Cultivate relationships, and more than that -- cultivate relationships with other people as you work to help the world around you.
It's like the men's ministries that involve hanging out and watching football together. Some ministry.
There may be male bonding, but the way to experience God's love is to embody it and carry his love to the people around you, particularly the needy. Be involved in something like Habitat for Humanity, or foster care, and make connections with the people around you.
Do that, and you'll discover God in new and amazing ways.
I'll sit for hours at night, reading the story over and over again. Each time I read it, I see new details that eluded me on the first reading — clues that foreshadowed the twist ending, intimations about relationships between characters, and clever little tidbits in the background art. I love the way creators weave the strands of a story together, and when the story is told well, I can enjoy the structure and telling of the story as much as I enjoy the story itself.
That's what I'm doing now with the notion of God's love. What God's love is about and what it means to be loved by him are questions I have puzzled over for years.
Part of the problem is that we often have a fatally flawed understanding of grace. We see divine grace as something that kicks in after we've made our best efforts and tried our hardest, but hat's not it at all. That would mean we have to earn grace, and grace that can be earned isn't really grace.
You could call it "the law of consequences." I'm sure you know how this goes. "If I do X, then by God's grace, Y will happen." The only problem is, that's not grace. It's law, and law never heals, it only kills.
Ask a divorcee. Chances are, they'll be able to tell you about the times they fell into this trap.
"If I had only been a better wife, he wouldn't have left me"; or "If I had been a more attentive husband, she wouldn't have felt neglected and wanted to start over with someone else." If I hadn't spent so many hours at work, if I hadn't been home so much, if I hadn't forgotten to fix the roof.
Parents'll do the same thing. "If I had been a better parent, my child wouldn't be gay." "If I hadn't been so strict, he would love me more."
If, if, if.
You'll also see the flip side. "Oh, it's all by the grace of God it worked out this way. We just followed the scriptural principles on how to raise our children, on how to keep our marriage vibrant, and on how to balance work and home life. Without the Lord, it would have been a disaster." (Notice the statement of pride? Although they're claiming to give God credit, they're also stressing how much they did to earn God's favor.)
The truth is, you can do your best job and still fail, or do a rotten job and have everything work out just fine. Influence still exists, but Christ died to free us from the law of consequence. The law of consequence, if we were under it, would result in utter failure for all of us, since none of us is capable of following the law and to break the least part is to be guilty of breaking it all.
But by living under the law of consequence, we subject ourselves to an immense, unbearable burden that steals our joy, keeps us from experiencing Christ's love, and leaves us miserable and alone.
Experiencing the joy of Christ's love often means letting go of our self-imposed performance expectations and allowing ourselves to act out of love rather than obligation. When James tells us that faith without works is dead, he means not that we do things because God still expects us to perform good deeds, but that our faith will express itself in tangible ways as we love those around us.
Being involved in a soup kitchen because "Christians care about the poor" is the first kind of act; it's law. Being involved in a soup kitchen because I want to help the people there springs from a different source, and is an act of love. Same action, different heart.
Another part of the question has to do with what God's love is and how he expresses it. It's only been in the last few years, as I've mourned the loss of my foster son, that I've really started to gain a mature understanding of God's love.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for the longest time, I don't think I loved God as much as I was just in love with him. An example from my own marriage: When my wife and I first started dating, and when we first married, we had periods marked by a giddy, heady feeling of euphoria. She was sensitive, charming, well-mannered, considerate; she enjoyed my jokes, shared my interests, and held the same deep convictions as me. All I could think about was how much I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. That's being in love.
Since we married six years ago, although my prior assessment of her remains good, there have been times I've wanted to scream. She's nagged me, criticized the way I fold the laundry, delivered withering critiques of projects I was proud of, and blown up at me for not being able to read her mind. Once, when I had got up early and done a number of things just for her, she left me in tears within an hour by complaining about how I had done each of those things without once stopping to thank me for doing them in the first place.
The sun and the moon still set on her, and the stars above still circle her, and I'm still amazed that she wants to spend the rest of her life with me, but our relationship has matured. There have been times for each of us when it would have been easier to walk out, but we stayed. That's not being "in love" -- that is love, and it's much more satisfying.
God's love is the same way, but infinitely moreso. It's so wild and difficult to explain, I think it's easy to understand why people might complain that he's either indifferent to our suffering, or just downright cruel.
Why do I say that? Let's take it from an example Paul provides us in Scripture. In his letter to the Roman church, Paul says that God demonstrates his mercy and compassion in sending rain to both the just and the unjust. Men as evil as Hitler knew what it was like to be in love; men as full of hatred as Osama bin Laden know the joy of holding their own newborn babies; and even a serial killer like Ted Bundy knew a thousand little delights every day, even after he denied those same delights to his victims. It's easy to see that God's mercy and compassion abound to even the most wicked.
That's a great sentiment, but it's hardly the best example Paul could use, in some senses. It's one thing if God shows great kindness to undeserving people, but he also allows really nice people to suffer hideously, such as the victims of men like Hitler, bin Laden and Bundy.
Elie Wiesel suffered horribly at Auschwitz and saw the desecration of everything he had believed about God and the struggle between good and evil.
In California in 2002, there was a 5-year-old girl who was abducted, kicking and screaming, from her front yard where she had been playing, and was raped and brutally murdered. In New Jersey, we had the horrifying case of Faheem and Raheem Williams, who were under state care yet still were locked inside a basement by their caretaker to starve. (Their DYFS caseworker had closed the case when she was unable to find the boys, rather than keep the case open and have to deal with the thorny problem of losing two abused children.)
Bruce Jackson, 18, weighed about 60 pounds when police found him rummaging for food through garbage cans. His foster parents, a churchgoing couple, were in the process of formally adopting him and other foster children. As far as their case records indicated, they were in a great home -- never mind the starvation, severe medical neglect, and what else.
Kick it this way, kick it that. God showers the wicked with great compassion while he sometimes seems to piss on the righteous and the innocent. Is he cruel, or merely capricious? Paul asserts he's good.
Paul's basis for that claim is the Cross, the lynchpin of human existence. This is where Christ became all the sin of the world, and took on himself all the suffering and torment that goes hand in hand with being human. Everything before the Cross pointed to its coming; everything after it points back to it.
If we rejoice and draw near to God, it is because Christ made it possible. If we suffer, whether for sin, for righteousness or just because, we find solidarity with Christ, who also suffered for each of those three reasons. If we have any righteousness before God, it is because he looks at us and sees his son instead, all because of the Cross.
So if the Cross is the fullest expression of God's love, and if it suffuses all human history with meaning, what does that mean?
It means that the whole of human history, from the day God breathed life into Adam down to the advent of the New Jerusalem (and far, far beyond that) is also an expression of God's love. It's not like any other form of love we've ever known as humans.
It's wild, and uncontainable, and it moves with the irresistible force of a river coursing down the rapids toward a waterfall, where it will dash us against the rocks if we let it carry us. We'll be buffeted and bruised, cold and unable to grip anything but water, and it'll toss us about and leave us gasping, but it'll never kill us -- at least, not in an important way. Instead, it makes us alive in indescribable ways.
I shared this with someone once, and her question was, but how do I experience it? First, we let ourselves live free of the demands of law. There's a joy in knowing that it doesn't all depend on your effort, and that your only obligation is to love. Secondly -- and this is the hardest thing -- we need to learn to love. Loving as Christ does means living in relationship with other people, no matter who they are, seeing people as people and not as projects or as beneficiaries of our attention.
Forget this hectic pace we whip ourselves into, and take the time to enjoy the people around you, and as you become aware of their needs, find ways that you can fill those needs. Cultivate relationships, and more than that -- cultivate relationships with other people as you work to help the world around you.
It's like the men's ministries that involve hanging out and watching football together. Some ministry.
There may be male bonding, but the way to experience God's love is to embody it and carry his love to the people around you, particularly the needy. Be involved in something like Habitat for Humanity, or foster care, and make connections with the people around you.
Do that, and you'll discover God in new and amazing ways.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Do we want freedom of religion, or freedom from it?
Michael Newdow is obsessed.
Newdow, who made headlines when he sued to have the phrase "under God" dropped from the Pledge of Allegiance, is now suing to prevent any mention of God, including a prayer, from the presidential inauguration. His argument is that such references to religion constitute an unlawful endorsement of religion and relegates atheists to second-class status.
My initial reaction is that this latest lawsuit is nuts. Our society is pluralistic and our government is nonsectarian. Does that mean that our elected officials have to be areligious as well now? I'm sure that George Bush's choice of ministers to speak at his inauguration differs from those Bill Clinton chose (or would choose, if he were being installed today).
Surely if Newdow were elected president and chose not to have members of the clergy pray during the inauguration, or dropped the phrase "so help me God" from his oath, that would be his prerogative.
I'm not really sure I see the inhumanity or oppressiveness of Bush being able to invoke Deity during his inauguration. He's religious, and it's his a slap in the face to deny him his right to religious self-expression just because he's our president.
Not like anyone pays attention to the dang things anyway.
Newdow, who made headlines when he sued to have the phrase "under God" dropped from the Pledge of Allegiance, is now suing to prevent any mention of God, including a prayer, from the presidential inauguration. His argument is that such references to religion constitute an unlawful endorsement of religion and relegates atheists to second-class status.
My initial reaction is that this latest lawsuit is nuts. Our society is pluralistic and our government is nonsectarian. Does that mean that our elected officials have to be areligious as well now? I'm sure that George Bush's choice of ministers to speak at his inauguration differs from those Bill Clinton chose (or would choose, if he were being installed today).
Surely if Newdow were elected president and chose not to have members of the clergy pray during the inauguration, or dropped the phrase "so help me God" from his oath, that would be his prerogative.
I'm not really sure I see the inhumanity or oppressiveness of Bush being able to invoke Deity during his inauguration. He's religious, and it's his a slap in the face to deny him his right to religious self-expression just because he's our president.
Not like anyone pays attention to the dang things anyway.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Schooled at home, and all alone
Evangeline has been an obdurate little grumpy-butt the past couple weeks. She's been raising her voice at me quite a bit lately, has refused to do things or just done her own thing on occasion, and has taken to lying down on the floor and refusing to move.
Something's been eating at her, and while I'm trying to correct her behavior, I also have been trying to figure out what it is.
Tonight it finally came out. She hates being homeschooled. She was in preschool for two years, and really benefited from the environment with the other children. At home, as she complained this afternoon, it's just me, her and Rachel in class, and she misses her friends. And to top it all off, I'm not the most social of creatures, and sometimes like to withdraw into myself for a while. (I've been trying to set up playdates, but it's not as easy as I wish it were.)
So Evangeline told me today that she wants to go to kindergarten with her friends. Our problem is that we couldn't afford the private kindergarten at her preschool, and our public school district doesn't consider her old enough to be in kindergarten. (She can read, and knows her basics of history, math and geography, but they won't test her for kindergarten because she misses the cutoff date by a lousy two weeks.)
My wife and I have talked it over, and we're going to keep homeschooling her for now. She's already gained placement at the local charter school for the next school year, so we'll take advantage of that for 2005-06.
I have explained to Evangeline several times why we're homeschooling her for kindergarten, and did so again last Friday. When I explained that the school district wouldn't let us start her in kindergarten this year, she complained, "Well, they made a bad choice, and I hope they change their minds."
So do I, kiddo. So do I.
We've been making a tremendous effort to increase her socializing opportunities. She's enrolled at a weekly Spanish course for children in Metuchen; we recently started her with an hourlong weekly gymnastics class nearby; her formal instruction in drawing starts tonight; and I called the Girl Scouts today to see about enrolling her in Daisies. Plus I called a few other parents to see about play dates.
It just bites. Our society substitutes activity for involvement, mistakes chatter for communication, and settles for acquaintances when we could have friends. People are too busy just to stop, be and enjoy themselves and let their kids discover the world around them in a natural, meaningful way. It's like the people who hope to discover intimacy by having sex, and find themselves getting sex but all alone.
And in our bid to keep Evangeline from being all alone, we're falling into the same pit that I see already has swallowed many of her peers.
Something's been eating at her, and while I'm trying to correct her behavior, I also have been trying to figure out what it is.
Tonight it finally came out. She hates being homeschooled. She was in preschool for two years, and really benefited from the environment with the other children. At home, as she complained this afternoon, it's just me, her and Rachel in class, and she misses her friends. And to top it all off, I'm not the most social of creatures, and sometimes like to withdraw into myself for a while. (I've been trying to set up playdates, but it's not as easy as I wish it were.)
So Evangeline told me today that she wants to go to kindergarten with her friends. Our problem is that we couldn't afford the private kindergarten at her preschool, and our public school district doesn't consider her old enough to be in kindergarten. (She can read, and knows her basics of history, math and geography, but they won't test her for kindergarten because she misses the cutoff date by a lousy two weeks.)
My wife and I have talked it over, and we're going to keep homeschooling her for now. She's already gained placement at the local charter school for the next school year, so we'll take advantage of that for 2005-06.
I have explained to Evangeline several times why we're homeschooling her for kindergarten, and did so again last Friday. When I explained that the school district wouldn't let us start her in kindergarten this year, she complained, "Well, they made a bad choice, and I hope they change their minds."
So do I, kiddo. So do I.
We've been making a tremendous effort to increase her socializing opportunities. She's enrolled at a weekly Spanish course for children in Metuchen; we recently started her with an hourlong weekly gymnastics class nearby; her formal instruction in drawing starts tonight; and I called the Girl Scouts today to see about enrolling her in Daisies. Plus I called a few other parents to see about play dates.
It just bites. Our society substitutes activity for involvement, mistakes chatter for communication, and settles for acquaintances when we could have friends. People are too busy just to stop, be and enjoy themselves and let their kids discover the world around them in a natural, meaningful way. It's like the people who hope to discover intimacy by having sex, and find themselves getting sex but all alone.
And in our bid to keep Evangeline from being all alone, we're falling into the same pit that I see already has swallowed many of her peers.
Spare me literary elitism; if it's fun to read, then read it
Someone recently had the misfortune to badmouth Harry Potter in my presence, since he believes the "gateway" literature argument is specious, and teens should be reading Kafka, not Rowling.
In my experience this is foolish and shortsighted. Some of my favorite books to read as a teen were various Doctor Who and Star Trek novels, and I usually spent a small fortune on comic books. I'm more discriminating about what I read, but my only qualification is that it be well written, not that it have the seal of approval of my old English professors.
I've read and enjoyed a compendious amount of world literature. Would I have read "The Brothers Karamazov" when I was 22 if I hadn't already learned to enjoy reading with "Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster" 10 years earlier? Or that I would have read and enjoyed "Paradise Lost" before I graduated from high school if Spider-man and the Fantastic Four hadn't entertained me and stimulated my imagination years before?
I've read literature from France, Russia, America, England, Wales, Ireland and Iceland. I've read mythologies from Europe, the Mediterranean, the Americas, Africa and Polynesia, and I've steeped myself in stories told from the dawn of civilization in Sumer to stuff written in the last five years.
I've chased stories like King Arthur all the way down their histories, visiting and revisiting the tales as related by men like John Steinbeck, T.H. White, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sir Thomas Mallory, Cretien de Troyes, Geoffrey of Monmouth and even earlier, back to pre-Christian Britain. I may never have done that if people had insisted I only read "the right" books.
Harry Potter probably could prove to be nowhere as enduring as some of these other stories I've mentioned, but he's still worth reading, even at the age of 34. (And worth re-reading too, I'll add.)
My grandmother was a literary purist, and probably felt that "gateway literature" was a hoax. I'm glad my mother didn't agree with her. I've had a blast reading, and if it weren't for some of the cheesy fun stuff, I never would have had the steam to tackle an unabridged "Don Quixote."
I don't think I've ever read Kafka. From what I hear he's an acquired taste.
Even if he is as good as some people say, that doesn't make him any better or more worthy of reading than something new and popular. Many writers churn out crap, but even they, if they fire the imagination and teach children that reading is worth the time it takes, are worth the paper they're printed on.
In my experience this is foolish and shortsighted. Some of my favorite books to read as a teen were various Doctor Who and Star Trek novels, and I usually spent a small fortune on comic books. I'm more discriminating about what I read, but my only qualification is that it be well written, not that it have the seal of approval of my old English professors.
I've read and enjoyed a compendious amount of world literature. Would I have read "The Brothers Karamazov" when I was 22 if I hadn't already learned to enjoy reading with "Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster" 10 years earlier? Or that I would have read and enjoyed "Paradise Lost" before I graduated from high school if Spider-man and the Fantastic Four hadn't entertained me and stimulated my imagination years before?
I've read literature from France, Russia, America, England, Wales, Ireland and Iceland. I've read mythologies from Europe, the Mediterranean, the Americas, Africa and Polynesia, and I've steeped myself in stories told from the dawn of civilization in Sumer to stuff written in the last five years.
I've chased stories like King Arthur all the way down their histories, visiting and revisiting the tales as related by men like John Steinbeck, T.H. White, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sir Thomas Mallory, Cretien de Troyes, Geoffrey of Monmouth and even earlier, back to pre-Christian Britain. I may never have done that if people had insisted I only read "the right" books.
Harry Potter probably could prove to be nowhere as enduring as some of these other stories I've mentioned, but he's still worth reading, even at the age of 34. (And worth re-reading too, I'll add.)
My grandmother was a literary purist, and probably felt that "gateway literature" was a hoax. I'm glad my mother didn't agree with her. I've had a blast reading, and if it weren't for some of the cheesy fun stuff, I never would have had the steam to tackle an unabridged "Don Quixote."
I don't think I've ever read Kafka. From what I hear he's an acquired taste.
Even if he is as good as some people say, that doesn't make him any better or more worthy of reading than something new and popular. Many writers churn out crap, but even they, if they fire the imagination and teach children that reading is worth the time it takes, are worth the paper they're printed on.
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Reconciling hell with the love of God
One of the most frequent criticisms I hear leveled against orthodox Christianity concerns the doctrine of hell. The question is, "How can a loving God send people to hell?" The answer to that, I suppose, depends on what we mean by "a loving God" and what we mean by "send people to hell."
There was a fairly forgettable movie in 1998 called "What Dreams May Come," starring Robin Williams as a doctor who finds himself in heaven after a car accident. One scene in particular, set shortly after Williams' character arrives in heaven, illustrates what I think most people mean when they talk about God's love. Cuba Gooding is showing Williams around an idyllic heaven, lit from above by celestial brilliance. Floating through the sky overhead are choirs of angels singing blissful hosannas.
"Where's God?" Williams asks. Gooding responds: "He's up there, somewhere, shouting 'I love you.'"
That's it. God is somewhere out there, loving us so effectively that we need to ask where he is.
As love goes, that's pretty bland, pretty empty and pretty useless. It reminds of what Coleridge described as a religion of no particular creed or sect, but merely filling oneself with charitable feelings to all men: an indiscriminate and blaise warm fuzzy, a sort of doddering senility that leaves the person so loved with no desire to stick around.
Loving someone like that means having no appreciation for what makes them tick or what matters to them. It means not knowing them, not connecting with them, and failing utterly to relate to them in any real or meaningful way.
A God who does that and claims to love people doesn't understand the emotion at all. At best, that's merely liking someone, and it's not even enough to make me want to go out for pizza with him.
Scripture reveals a God who is intimately and dynamically involved in every aspect of his creation. He not only knows what makes us tick, he cares immensely about the things that matter to us, whether it's how to pay the bills, whether we pass the big exam, or how we're going to make it through another joyless day, or a long and lonely night. When we bleed, he cries real tears. When we love, he rejoices.
So if God loves us that passionately, how does hell fit into everything?
An illustration from human life: I have a daughter, E. Let's say that in another 30 years, E decides to end her relationship with me. All her life she's had to endure stupid jokes about her name only being one letter long, and she blames me.
That hurts me terribly, so because I love her, I try to mend the relationship. I call E on her birthday, hoping for reconciliation, and she tells me to go to hell. On Christmas, my cards are returned unopened, and I can't even track her down. She's moved, and left no forwarding address or telephone number that I can use. I have no way to get hold of her.
Do I still love her? Absolutely, with all my heart. She's my daughter. How could I not love her? All I want is for her to come back to me, but she won't even acknowledge that we're related. More time goes by. Eventually, I'm 83 years old and on my deathbed. Still she doesn't come back, and my last words are, "Tell E I love her."
For the rest of her life, E will stew in her own bitterness and resentment because of the tattered mess she made of our relationship. Tell me, who is responsible for this divide? Is it I, who did everything I could to find my daughter and restore the relationship; or is it my daughter, who rejected every olive branch I extended and determined never to see me again?
It's the same way with sin. Our sin is a rejection of God. He never stops loving us or waiting for us to come back, but our sin -- the lies we tell, both small and great; the blind eye we turn to others in need, both near and far; the self-absorption that mars our souls; the thoughtless anger; the pride; the thoughtless greed and hate; or any number of other behaviors -- our sin is our way of running away from him.
For our entire lives, we push God away by refusing to live the way he calls us to -- and even the best of us know what rotten stinkers we are deep inside -- and then when we die, we discover how great the divide is that we have made, and we complain that God is unjust and unloving.
Judgment Day isn't a day when God will pass sentence on people and toss us by the forkload into eternal fire. It's a day when everything will be revealed, and we will see for ourselves where we stand in relationship to him. The gospel of John says that "he who does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son" (3:18, if you're keeping track).
I'm not going to be with God in the great hereafter because I belong to an elect club, nor because I attained some deep spiritual awareness. It's because I'm in a relationship with him.
Those of us who have refused to live in community with him and one another, who insisted on being alone, are going to find out in the end just how alone we are, only this time we won't be able to blame someone else.
"Where's God?" Williams asks. Gooding responds: "He's up there, somewhere, shouting 'I love you.'"
That's it. God is somewhere out there, loving us so effectively that we need to ask where he is.
As love goes, that's pretty bland, pretty empty and pretty useless. It reminds of what Coleridge described as a religion of no particular creed or sect, but merely filling oneself with charitable feelings to all men: an indiscriminate and blaise warm fuzzy, a sort of doddering senility that leaves the person so loved with no desire to stick around.
Loving someone like that means having no appreciation for what makes them tick or what matters to them. It means not knowing them, not connecting with them, and failing utterly to relate to them in any real or meaningful way.
A God who does that and claims to love people doesn't understand the emotion at all. At best, that's merely liking someone, and it's not even enough to make me want to go out for pizza with him.
Scripture reveals a God who is intimately and dynamically involved in every aspect of his creation. He not only knows what makes us tick, he cares immensely about the things that matter to us, whether it's how to pay the bills, whether we pass the big exam, or how we're going to make it through another joyless day, or a long and lonely night. When we bleed, he cries real tears. When we love, he rejoices.
So if God loves us that passionately, how does hell fit into everything?
An illustration from human life: I have a daughter, E. Let's say that in another 30 years, E decides to end her relationship with me. All her life she's had to endure stupid jokes about her name only being one letter long, and she blames me.
That hurts me terribly, so because I love her, I try to mend the relationship. I call E on her birthday, hoping for reconciliation, and she tells me to go to hell. On Christmas, my cards are returned unopened, and I can't even track her down. She's moved, and left no forwarding address or telephone number that I can use. I have no way to get hold of her.
Do I still love her? Absolutely, with all my heart. She's my daughter. How could I not love her? All I want is for her to come back to me, but she won't even acknowledge that we're related. More time goes by. Eventually, I'm 83 years old and on my deathbed. Still she doesn't come back, and my last words are, "Tell E I love her."
For the rest of her life, E will stew in her own bitterness and resentment because of the tattered mess she made of our relationship. Tell me, who is responsible for this divide? Is it I, who did everything I could to find my daughter and restore the relationship; or is it my daughter, who rejected every olive branch I extended and determined never to see me again?
It's the same way with sin. Our sin is a rejection of God. He never stops loving us or waiting for us to come back, but our sin -- the lies we tell, both small and great; the blind eye we turn to others in need, both near and far; the self-absorption that mars our souls; the thoughtless anger; the pride; the thoughtless greed and hate; or any number of other behaviors -- our sin is our way of running away from him.
For our entire lives, we push God away by refusing to live the way he calls us to -- and even the best of us know what rotten stinkers we are deep inside -- and then when we die, we discover how great the divide is that we have made, and we complain that God is unjust and unloving.
Judgment Day isn't a day when God will pass sentence on people and toss us by the forkload into eternal fire. It's a day when everything will be revealed, and we will see for ourselves where we stand in relationship to him. The gospel of John says that "he who does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son" (3:18, if you're keeping track).
I'm not going to be with God in the great hereafter because I belong to an elect club, nor because I attained some deep spiritual awareness. It's because I'm in a relationship with him.
Those of us who have refused to live in community with him and one another, who insisted on being alone, are going to find out in the end just how alone we are, only this time we won't be able to blame someone else.
Friday, December 31, 2004
Joe Straczynski rocks my comic collection
I just finished reading three trade paperback comics my wife bought me for Christmas, from Joe Straczynski's run on "Amazing Spider-man." At this point, I've declared open season on anything he's written and am preparing to admit that I might have misjudged "Babylon 5." His comics take a little while to get going, but when they take off, they're nothing short of incredible.
In the first ASM trade, Straczynski basically reinvents Spider-man's origins by suggesting it wasn't the radiation that gave Peter Parker his power, but the spider itself. From there he ventures into a story that explores the totemic nature not only of Spider-man but of a number of heroes and their villains. (That's why Captain America, a hero emblematic of America, has for an arch-enemy the Red Skull, who embodies Nazism, and so on.)
From there he goes on to reinvent the entire Spider-man mythos, in an entirely believable way. He revisits the guilt that drives the hero, completely alters his relationship with his aunt, and then gives the unassuming Peter Parker a long overdue measure of heroism, by having him become an inner-city high school science teacher.
That last part is one of the things I really enjoy about Straczynski's writing. In addition to his creativity in exploring the mythic aspects of his subject -- and changing Spider-man from a purely juvenile adventure comic to a more adult one -- he doesn't shy away from some of the more unpleasant parts of city life. Superhero comics all too often earn the rep as kiddie comics because they're fighting a different supervillain each month, dressed in costumes as silly as the ones the heroes themselves wear, and usually with some melodramatic and obviously evil goal, like conquering the world.
In Straczynski's comic, Parker is faced with serious issues like students coming to school with guns, with drug addiction and homelessness, and with society's indifference to those problems.
A few months ago I read another comic Straczynski wrote, called "Midnight Nation." It's published by Top Cow Comics (a division of Image) under the imprint Joe's Comics. It follows the experiences of an L.A. cop named David Grey after his soul is stolen by the Devil and he walks across the nation to New York (naturally) to get it back.
The only people Grey can see, and the only things he can use, are whatever has been abandoned. And there are plenty of people he meets: families with children, downsized manufacturing workers, runaways, ex-cons, and others of society's cast-offs.
I found the comic deeply moving on a spiritual level, particularly at the end, when the protagonist comes face to face with the Devil, hears the Devil's argument about why the rebellion against heaven is needed -- rather nicely, the Devil's argument is one based on compassion, that he can't stand the misery contained in God's creation -- and Grey has to decide whether he still wants his soul and which side of the war he wants to be on. It's not wholly biblical, as Christian orthodoxy holds that Satan's rebellion predates the Fall and the coming of death and misery into the world, but it is an excellent read, and you've got to give Straczynski kudos for dealing with these questions so honestly, even if the exact storyline he uses to raise them are debatable.
In the first ASM trade, Straczynski basically reinvents Spider-man's origins by suggesting it wasn't the radiation that gave Peter Parker his power, but the spider itself. From there he ventures into a story that explores the totemic nature not only of Spider-man but of a number of heroes and their villains. (That's why Captain America, a hero emblematic of America, has for an arch-enemy the Red Skull, who embodies Nazism, and so on.)
From there he goes on to reinvent the entire Spider-man mythos, in an entirely believable way. He revisits the guilt that drives the hero, completely alters his relationship with his aunt, and then gives the unassuming Peter Parker a long overdue measure of heroism, by having him become an inner-city high school science teacher.
That last part is one of the things I really enjoy about Straczynski's writing. In addition to his creativity in exploring the mythic aspects of his subject -- and changing Spider-man from a purely juvenile adventure comic to a more adult one -- he doesn't shy away from some of the more unpleasant parts of city life. Superhero comics all too often earn the rep as kiddie comics because they're fighting a different supervillain each month, dressed in costumes as silly as the ones the heroes themselves wear, and usually with some melodramatic and obviously evil goal, like conquering the world.
In Straczynski's comic, Parker is faced with serious issues like students coming to school with guns, with drug addiction and homelessness, and with society's indifference to those problems.
A few months ago I read another comic Straczynski wrote, called "Midnight Nation." It's published by Top Cow Comics (a division of Image) under the imprint Joe's Comics. It follows the experiences of an L.A. cop named David Grey after his soul is stolen by the Devil and he walks across the nation to New York (naturally) to get it back.
The only people Grey can see, and the only things he can use, are whatever has been abandoned. And there are plenty of people he meets: families with children, downsized manufacturing workers, runaways, ex-cons, and others of society's cast-offs.
I found the comic deeply moving on a spiritual level, particularly at the end, when the protagonist comes face to face with the Devil, hears the Devil's argument about why the rebellion against heaven is needed -- rather nicely, the Devil's argument is one based on compassion, that he can't stand the misery contained in God's creation -- and Grey has to decide whether he still wants his soul and which side of the war he wants to be on. It's not wholly biblical, as Christian orthodoxy holds that Satan's rebellion predates the Fall and the coming of death and misery into the world, but it is an excellent read, and you've got to give Straczynski kudos for dealing with these questions so honestly, even if the exact storyline he uses to raise them are debatable.
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
random memory
My first-grade teacher made me write with my left hand. It wasn't until partway through the year that my parents discovered I was writing with one hand at home and with the other at school, and intervened.
I have no idea why she did this. My older brother is a lefty; perhaps she thought that meant I should be one too.
The possibility also has occurred to me from time to time, especially when my stutter is especially bad, that maybe she actually succeeded: that I actually was left-handed, but she managed to convince me that I was right-handed.
Mrs. Hlavsa was a witch. (No offense to Wiccans, past or present.) All I remember clearly about this particular issue is that one night at dinner my father had me write something with my left hand, and then with my right hand. After that he asked me which hand I preferred to write with, and I chose my right hand. That could be because I was right-handed, or it could be because Mrs. Hlavsa had me convinced that was the hand I was "supposed" to write with.
I mean what I said, though: She has got to be the all-time worst teacher I've ever had. It took me until last year to admit, however begrudgingly, that I do owe her some modicum of gratitude for teaching me how to read.
I have no idea why she did this. My older brother is a lefty; perhaps she thought that meant I should be one too.
The possibility also has occurred to me from time to time, especially when my stutter is especially bad, that maybe she actually succeeded: that I actually was left-handed, but she managed to convince me that I was right-handed.
Mrs. Hlavsa was a witch. (No offense to Wiccans, past or present.) All I remember clearly about this particular issue is that one night at dinner my father had me write something with my left hand, and then with my right hand. After that he asked me which hand I preferred to write with, and I chose my right hand. That could be because I was right-handed, or it could be because Mrs. Hlavsa had me convinced that was the hand I was "supposed" to write with.
I mean what I said, though: She has got to be the all-time worst teacher I've ever had. It took me until last year to admit, however begrudgingly, that I do owe her some modicum of gratitude for teaching me how to read.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
god and morality
In a discussion thread over at CHRefugee, a friend asked, "Do actions contain an inherent moral value if God is not part of the equation?" His question was precipitated by an often-amusing and thought-provoking comic strip called Tom the Dancing Bug.
My understanding is that we can have morality without any sort of religious underpinnings, but unless morality is based on the character of Deity, then it is wholly arbitrary and relative.
In the Judeo-Christian worldview, it's God himself who is the standard by which we measure whether things are good or not. It's not a matter of a divine police officer or heavenly lawmaker saying "Do this" and "Don't do that." Goodness is neither laid down by God nor something that he appeals to; it is a self-evident characteristic of his, so that all things can be measured against him. Where our hearts deviate from his, we call that evil, or sin; when we conform to his likeness, we call it good.
Remove God from the equation, and there still can be good and evil, but they're a far paler and less hardy substitute. Do we determine goodness by man? Men change; we are fickle and capricious and what is good to us one day may not seem good to us the next. Do we determine good by common consensus? That's what society has chosen to do, and as a result, every moral compass we have is thrown out of whack and every person is left to follow an individual guide, to go along with the shifting sands of morality the rest of us make in aggregate, or to try to redefine morality for our generation by pushing the envelope in whatever direction suits us.
Even if there arises a great person, and all of us flock to him or her for a generation, and define our morals on that person, sooner or later that person dies, and we are left either to elect a new standard to follow, or to reinterpret the morals left us by the departed leader.
So while morals have nothing to do with Christianity -- Christ's concern is with our salvation and with the love we show for one another, not for our behaviors -- I don't think you can divorce morality from God in such a manner.
My understanding is that we can have morality without any sort of religious underpinnings, but unless morality is based on the character of Deity, then it is wholly arbitrary and relative.
In the Judeo-Christian worldview, it's God himself who is the standard by which we measure whether things are good or not. It's not a matter of a divine police officer or heavenly lawmaker saying "Do this" and "Don't do that." Goodness is neither laid down by God nor something that he appeals to; it is a self-evident characteristic of his, so that all things can be measured against him. Where our hearts deviate from his, we call that evil, or sin; when we conform to his likeness, we call it good.
Remove God from the equation, and there still can be good and evil, but they're a far paler and less hardy substitute. Do we determine goodness by man? Men change; we are fickle and capricious and what is good to us one day may not seem good to us the next. Do we determine good by common consensus? That's what society has chosen to do, and as a result, every moral compass we have is thrown out of whack and every person is left to follow an individual guide, to go along with the shifting sands of morality the rest of us make in aggregate, or to try to redefine morality for our generation by pushing the envelope in whatever direction suits us.
Even if there arises a great person, and all of us flock to him or her for a generation, and define our morals on that person, sooner or later that person dies, and we are left either to elect a new standard to follow, or to reinterpret the morals left us by the departed leader.
So while morals have nothing to do with Christianity -- Christ's concern is with our salvation and with the love we show for one another, not for our behaviors -- I don't think you can divorce morality from God in such a manner.
Monday, December 27, 2004
an end to abortion
A friend of mine and I recently got into a spirited debate about the role of Christians in the political arena, which is why there are a few entries on the subject here. Greg made the claim that since the abortion issue flared up in the legal arena first, that the courts are where the push to stop abortion should take place. (Just to explain his argument, it was Roe v. Wade that made abortion a constitutional right in the United States, not a law passed by Congress or a state legislative body. It was entirely by judicial fiat, although later abortion laws have come from legislators.)
My take? The rot in America's soul that led to Roe v. Wade didn't begin in the court. It began in the American people, and it's among the American people that we have to fight to reverse Roe v. Wade -- not through legislative means, but through the spiritual weapons Christ gave us, namely prayer, fasting and love -- again, not the charitable feeling sort of love, but the hardcore love that allows us to open up our homes and lives to people in crisis pregnancies.
Lobbying is about mustering political muscle and getting politicians to vote a certain way because they hear one set of voices screaming the loudest. That's a lousy way to make changes, because other people can scream loudly too, and when all the screaming is finally done, you're left with hurt and division where there didn't used to be. Heck, I'm pro-life and I get turned off by the blistering pro-life comments I hear and read.
If we -- the church, pro-lifers, sanctity of marriage people, whatever label we affix for the sake of argument -- get things changed legally without winning the hearts of the people, we've lost more ground than we've gained in the most important battle before us.
I won't say political effort is wrong, but I am concerned -- deeply concerned -- that it seems like so much effort, and such a loud effort at that, goes into politics these days, when the church is at its most effective when it quietly goes about doing God's work and allows that sort of committed lifestyle to rock society to its core.
My take? The rot in America's soul that led to Roe v. Wade didn't begin in the court. It began in the American people, and it's among the American people that we have to fight to reverse Roe v. Wade -- not through legislative means, but through the spiritual weapons Christ gave us, namely prayer, fasting and love -- again, not the charitable feeling sort of love, but the hardcore love that allows us to open up our homes and lives to people in crisis pregnancies.
Lobbying is about mustering political muscle and getting politicians to vote a certain way because they hear one set of voices screaming the loudest. That's a lousy way to make changes, because other people can scream loudly too, and when all the screaming is finally done, you're left with hurt and division where there didn't used to be. Heck, I'm pro-life and I get turned off by the blistering pro-life comments I hear and read.
If we -- the church, pro-lifers, sanctity of marriage people, whatever label we affix for the sake of argument -- get things changed legally without winning the hearts of the people, we've lost more ground than we've gained in the most important battle before us.
I won't say political effort is wrong, but I am concerned -- deeply concerned -- that it seems like so much effort, and such a loud effort at that, goes into politics these days, when the church is at its most effective when it quietly goes about doing God's work and allows that sort of committed lifestyle to rock society to its core.
jesus and politics
There's a piece in Boundless magazine by a J. Budziszewski that deals with the issue of whether Jesus should be considered a liberal. Budziszewski makes several points, which I'm going to address one at a time:
1) Jesus cannot be described solely as liberal nor solely as conservative. Absolutely. I've said that before, but it's also a rather facile statement, as the writer makes the point of later on. On most core values, conservatives and liberals in America generally are in agreement. Few conservatives favor segregation, letting the homeless starve, or beating gays to death. Those who do are regarded as a fringe group or (with the exception of indifference to the poor) are regarded as criminal. Similarly, I think it's safe to say that most liberals do not regard abortion as a Good Thing -- safe, rare, legal and rare is the mantra -- and neither do they hate Christmas and Easter, nor believe pornography should be in the hands of everyone.
Jesus' defining personality trait was compassion. He regarded compassion for the suffering as so holy that it was the best way to honor the sabbath; he gave of himself even when he was exhausted and had gone away to get a moment's rest; and his followers included a motley bunch of insurrectionists, traitors, religious zealots, the educated, working class laborers and so on. He would go out of his way to spend time with a tax-collecting Gentile female prostitute with leprosy.
As far as Christians go, the chief distinction between Right and Left is the question of how to demonstrate that compassion. Like many conservatives, I believe that the best response to the growing disparity between haves and have-nots is personal relationships and involvement with other people. Unlike me, many conservatives consider increased government effort in that arena to be wrong, because of the risk of an entitlement mentality. (I don't consider it very good, but I think it beats the pants off letting people languish without what they need.)
2) "Good" Christians. I'm uncomfortable with Budziszewski's statements about what someone can do and be a "good Christian." Yes, choosing a political philosophy or lifestyle that is in conflict with Christ's character eventually will force a person to choose between the two, but the assignation of "good Christian" and "bad Christian" based on belief usually matches up with our own personal biases. There are degrees of maturity, but that maturity usually comes in different areas of our life at different rates. It strikes me as proud and judgmental to designate others as "good Christians" or "bad Christians" based on bits of their behavior that we can see, especially in as sweeping a manner as Budziszewski does here.
I'll probably lose points for this, but a person's position in Christ is unaffected even by being a Nazi, being a slave-owner and supporting abortion on demand. It's Christ alone who makes any of us good Christians.
While it's a fair statement to say those things are grossly inconsistent with the character of Christ and that someone who is following Christ eventually is going to find a conflict between faith and practice, if those practices make someone "not a good Christian," then I have no basis for saying that I'm a good Christian because my own sins are pretty foul, themselves.
My point is that all of us are sinners, whether we're Nazis, Republicans, Democrats or unable to tell a difference. If I say that you're not as good a Christian as I because you commit a sin that I don't sin, I'm forgetting my place.
Obviously everyone who is following Christ wants to be in his will. My experience has taught me that being in his will often has less to do with external circumstances (the touted "calling") than with the inward heart and how it aligns with Christ. Working for Acme or Friz Cola often is less of an issue to God than how I serve Christ during my employment at either of those places.
So can you be a Nazi, a slave owner, or an abortionist and be a good Christian? As surely as you can commit adultery and be a good Christian, get a divorce and be a good Christian, tell a lie and be a good Christian, or hold a grudge and be a good Christian. It's only by the grace of God that any of us may hope to be considered good in heaven's eyes.
3) The abortion issue. No dispute here -- almost. I think Budziszewski is oversimplifying the position. I'm against abortion, except when it is medically necessary to save the mother, but I remain unconvinced that the massive political effort we've put in through the pro-life movement is the best way to end abortion. One of Bush's best position statements on abortion was that a country that can pass a constitutional ban on abortion doesn't need one.
It's possible, although fairly unlikely at this point, I think, that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. That is not going to change the predominantly pro-choice belief of America, particularly in states like New Jersey where ANY attempt at modulation is seen as undermining abortion rights. That's because Americans by and large haven't had the spiritual awakening to see abortion for what it is, and such moral and spiritual strengths not only must be earned instead of being legislated, they are undermined when we attempt to mandate a policy through legislation.
So yes, I'm pro-life. I've attended marches on Washington. I've marched in front of a hospital that performs abortions in Allentown, Pa., and I pray for abortion to end. I've yet to be convinced by anyone that the ongoing political effort to end abortion is going to accomplish that goal, nor that it won't cost us dearly on many other fronts.
A far superior way to that end is through compassion and personal involvement. That's how the first-century Church ended infanticide in the Roman Empire, after all. Not by getting the Senate to condemn the practice, but by making nightly trips through the city and rescuing abandoned infants, and then raising them.
Compassion has a moral force that politics can't even come close to.
4) The judgment issue. Okay, here's the part that mildly cheeses me off even as I acknowledge there is some truth in what the professor says. It's a writing issue. Yes, a liberal could be saying "Jesus was a liberal, because liberals are more than those no-good stinking conservatives." However, the professor character, who appears to speak for Budziszewski, never acknowledges the flip side of the coin: A conservative could say, "Jesus was a conservative, because conservatives are ore than those no-good stinking liberals." And because the liberal character the top is knocked down easily here with no chance for reasonable representation, I see him as a caricature, and find that the article is less reasonable/balanced than it pretends to be.
What's the message readers are going to take away from this article? I see three of them in this section: Liberals don't have a good reason for supporting the social programs they do; liberals don't have a good reason for opposing war; and liberals are judgmental hypocrites (although I'll allow that I'm overstating that one myself).
To sum up, my reading of the article is that, although it claims to present a balanced view of things, it still reflects a brias toward one side of the debate. As I said, I could easily write a piece where the grad student -- who really does act like he's in high school -- is confused because a friend of his had a bumper sticker that says, "Jesus was a conservative."
And really, what prompted this piece? It's the growing number of people in the U.S. like me who identify themselves as liberals and as Christians -- and the reminder that Jesus doesn't belong to the Religious Right, which I think is the presumption we've seen played out for the past few presidential elections. The truth of course is that both Religious Left and Religious Right belong to the Lord, and woe to any of us who try to own him.
1) Jesus cannot be described solely as liberal nor solely as conservative. Absolutely. I've said that before, but it's also a rather facile statement, as the writer makes the point of later on. On most core values, conservatives and liberals in America generally are in agreement. Few conservatives favor segregation, letting the homeless starve, or beating gays to death. Those who do are regarded as a fringe group or (with the exception of indifference to the poor) are regarded as criminal. Similarly, I think it's safe to say that most liberals do not regard abortion as a Good Thing -- safe, rare, legal and rare is the mantra -- and neither do they hate Christmas and Easter, nor believe pornography should be in the hands of everyone.
Jesus' defining personality trait was compassion. He regarded compassion for the suffering as so holy that it was the best way to honor the sabbath; he gave of himself even when he was exhausted and had gone away to get a moment's rest; and his followers included a motley bunch of insurrectionists, traitors, religious zealots, the educated, working class laborers and so on. He would go out of his way to spend time with a tax-collecting Gentile female prostitute with leprosy.
As far as Christians go, the chief distinction between Right and Left is the question of how to demonstrate that compassion. Like many conservatives, I believe that the best response to the growing disparity between haves and have-nots is personal relationships and involvement with other people. Unlike me, many conservatives consider increased government effort in that arena to be wrong, because of the risk of an entitlement mentality. (I don't consider it very good, but I think it beats the pants off letting people languish without what they need.)
2) "Good" Christians. I'm uncomfortable with Budziszewski's statements about what someone can do and be a "good Christian." Yes, choosing a political philosophy or lifestyle that is in conflict with Christ's character eventually will force a person to choose between the two, but the assignation of "good Christian" and "bad Christian" based on belief usually matches up with our own personal biases. There are degrees of maturity, but that maturity usually comes in different areas of our life at different rates. It strikes me as proud and judgmental to designate others as "good Christians" or "bad Christians" based on bits of their behavior that we can see, especially in as sweeping a manner as Budziszewski does here.
I'll probably lose points for this, but a person's position in Christ is unaffected even by being a Nazi, being a slave-owner and supporting abortion on demand. It's Christ alone who makes any of us good Christians.
While it's a fair statement to say those things are grossly inconsistent with the character of Christ and that someone who is following Christ eventually is going to find a conflict between faith and practice, if those practices make someone "not a good Christian," then I have no basis for saying that I'm a good Christian because my own sins are pretty foul, themselves.
My point is that all of us are sinners, whether we're Nazis, Republicans, Democrats or unable to tell a difference. If I say that you're not as good a Christian as I because you commit a sin that I don't sin, I'm forgetting my place.
Obviously everyone who is following Christ wants to be in his will. My experience has taught me that being in his will often has less to do with external circumstances (the touted "calling") than with the inward heart and how it aligns with Christ. Working for Acme or Friz Cola often is less of an issue to God than how I serve Christ during my employment at either of those places.
So can you be a Nazi, a slave owner, or an abortionist and be a good Christian? As surely as you can commit adultery and be a good Christian, get a divorce and be a good Christian, tell a lie and be a good Christian, or hold a grudge and be a good Christian. It's only by the grace of God that any of us may hope to be considered good in heaven's eyes.
3) The abortion issue. No dispute here -- almost. I think Budziszewski is oversimplifying the position. I'm against abortion, except when it is medically necessary to save the mother, but I remain unconvinced that the massive political effort we've put in through the pro-life movement is the best way to end abortion. One of Bush's best position statements on abortion was that a country that can pass a constitutional ban on abortion doesn't need one.
It's possible, although fairly unlikely at this point, I think, that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. That is not going to change the predominantly pro-choice belief of America, particularly in states like New Jersey where ANY attempt at modulation is seen as undermining abortion rights. That's because Americans by and large haven't had the spiritual awakening to see abortion for what it is, and such moral and spiritual strengths not only must be earned instead of being legislated, they are undermined when we attempt to mandate a policy through legislation.
So yes, I'm pro-life. I've attended marches on Washington. I've marched in front of a hospital that performs abortions in Allentown, Pa., and I pray for abortion to end. I've yet to be convinced by anyone that the ongoing political effort to end abortion is going to accomplish that goal, nor that it won't cost us dearly on many other fronts.
A far superior way to that end is through compassion and personal involvement. That's how the first-century Church ended infanticide in the Roman Empire, after all. Not by getting the Senate to condemn the practice, but by making nightly trips through the city and rescuing abandoned infants, and then raising them.
Compassion has a moral force that politics can't even come close to.
4) The judgment issue. Okay, here's the part that mildly cheeses me off even as I acknowledge there is some truth in what the professor says. It's a writing issue. Yes, a liberal could be saying "Jesus was a liberal, because liberals are more
What's the message readers are going to take away from this article? I see three of them in this section: Liberals don't have a good reason for supporting the social programs they do; liberals don't have a good reason for opposing war; and liberals are judgmental hypocrites (although I'll allow that I'm overstating that one myself).
To sum up, my reading of the article is that, although it claims to present a balanced view of things, it still reflects a brias toward one side of the debate. As I said, I could easily write a piece where the grad student -- who really does act like he's in high school -- is confused because a friend of his had a bumper sticker that says, "Jesus was a conservative."
And really, what prompted this piece? It's the growing number of people in the U.S. like me who identify themselves as liberals and as Christians -- and the reminder that Jesus doesn't belong to the Religious Right, which I think is the presumption we've seen played out for the past few presidential elections. The truth of course is that both Religious Left and Religious Right belong to the Lord, and woe to any of us who try to own him.
Religion and politics don't go together
Faith and politics make poor bedfellows.
Political maneuvering reforms society with all the grace and delicacy that a sledgehammer brings to fine sculpture. We set up certain rules that require certain forms of behavior, and force everyone into that mold whether they will or no. Control and requirements are the world's way of doing things.
That's not how the kingdom of God does business.
A rule that is fine for one situation will not work in another, and love is to be our law -- not the disinterested sort Plato wrote about, but the up-close and personal kind that Christ modeled. The world uses legislation and judicial fiat and such because control is what the world understands; as children of God, we are called to get to love the people in this miserable world and through the force of Christ's love, change them and the societies we live in.
I have little to no faith in political action committees, lobbyists or any other agency to stop abortion or to right the other wrongs facing our society, and I get concerned when I see the amount of effort Christians, churches and parachurches put into the political process.
We could elect thousands of Christians into office, and it won't move our country away from a spiritual precipice, or we could pass thousands of laws to enforce our notions of morality, and nothing would change.
People would still go to hell, only now they'd curse us as they do it.
Political maneuvering reforms society with all the grace and delicacy that a sledgehammer brings to fine sculpture. We set up certain rules that require certain forms of behavior, and force everyone into that mold whether they will or no. Control and requirements are the world's way of doing things.
That's not how the kingdom of God does business.
A rule that is fine for one situation will not work in another, and love is to be our law -- not the disinterested sort Plato wrote about, but the up-close and personal kind that Christ modeled. The world uses legislation and judicial fiat and such because control is what the world understands; as children of God, we are called to get to love the people in this miserable world and through the force of Christ's love, change them and the societies we live in.
I have little to no faith in political action committees, lobbyists or any other agency to stop abortion or to right the other wrongs facing our society, and I get concerned when I see the amount of effort Christians, churches and parachurches put into the political process.
We could elect thousands of Christians into office, and it won't move our country away from a spiritual precipice, or we could pass thousands of laws to enforce our notions of morality, and nothing would change.
People would still go to hell, only now they'd curse us as they do it.
Friday, December 24, 2004
Practicing the fine art of holiday torture
When I was growing up, my parents had a Christmas tree ornament that would chirp like a bird every five seconds. To whoever bought it, this must have been a mildly entertaining amusement. In the hands of myself and my brothers, it was an instrument of the keenest torture.
We would hide the ornament some place near the tree but maddeningly out of sight, plug it in and then take the dog out for a walk. By the time we returned, the entire house would have been turned upside-down in a futile attempt to find the ornament and stop the chirp-chirp-chirping before it drove everyone mad.
Remember how the steady drip of water is said to break the mind of even the strongest prisoner? Compared to Tweety, it's a dip in the kiddie pool. The tolling of the Edgar Allen Poe's bells, bells, bells that fills the city with fear? A light tinkling of brass.
This ornament was the surest way to drive anyone to the brink of madness, and we all used it to that end for many years. At last Tweety took a mysterious trip out of the house in the bottom of the wastebasket and was seen no more. For the first time in years, there was something resembling peace in the Learn household on Christmas Day.
In the aftermath, we all agreed on one important point: That was as bad as it got. There was no Christmas ornament imaginable that could top the bulb for pure irritation.
Fortunately, for those of us who revel in irritating one another, there is good news. The good people at research and development have not stopped producing new Christmas decorations. Whether it's inflatable Santas of nightmarish proportions who threaten to block out the sun, or a singing and dancing Grinch, the opportunities to irritate brothers, to annoy friends and to scar young children for life are better than ever.
Let's start with the inflatable colossus now seen in front yards across the state. There are those who, correctly believing a 900-foot blow-up ornament to be tacky, see no use for the thing. The problem here is not with a snowman big enough to qualify for its own ZIP code, it is a lack of imagination.
Gemmy, which markets the inflatable mammoths, sells no fewer than 47 of them on its Web site. In addition to the Santa and snowman monoliths, the collection features other holiday stalwarts like Scooby Doo and SpongeBob SquarePants. As a special literary treat, the assortment also includes something that once might have been a reindeer before it stumbled upon the secret isle of Dr. Moreau.
A smaller one nicely blocks all view of the street from your front windows. Plant one of the larger models out front, and you'll have complete privacy and may not be able to see the sun. Pesky neighbors, uninvited relatives and bill collectors won't be able to find your house. Best of all, you'll be providing the perfect cover for the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man if he ever comes to town.
For maximum scare effect, set up some lighting behind the beastie — this works especially well with the unfortunate reindeer — and wait until dark. Now as little Timmy comes over to see if your son can play, turn the lights on, give the goliath a push and make the appropriate growl from deep in your throat. Watch as little Timmy jumps into the air and runs around the front yard three times before conking out under the oak tree. This is the life.
True, you can still get fairly traditional Christmas decorations like a light-up snowman, but why would you want to? They're not nearly as much fun.
From time to time, despite your best interventions, someone will make it inside the house. Your children, for example. For maximum damage, and to give them something interesting to tell their therapists in 30 years, it's important to go for the big guns.
First, get the kids as they come in the door with a 5-foot Dancing Grinch. There's no better way to keep the Christmas spirit than to have the Grinch twisting away and crooning the words to his theme song. Better yet, flank the door with the Grinch and his partner in crime, a 5-foot bear who sings your favorite Christmas jingles from hell, including "Winter Wonderland," "Up on the Rooftop" and "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year."
Next fill the house liberally with more musical toys. For $13, you can get a Holiday Time Sing and Dance Santa who joyfully croons, "I'm Santa Claus" to the tune of "The Wanderer" like a woebegotten Deion Sanders. Other marvels include a singing dog who howls his way through "O Christmas Tree" and "Deck the Halls," and a Coca-Cola polar bear who wails on the saxophone in a way to make even the staunchest Republican yearn for the days of President Clinton's inaugural performance.
Don't worry — even if they play the same song, they're guaranteed to play it at slightly different pitches and slightly different speeds.
Even though everyone knows what will happen, no one can resist the siren call of the buttons that activate the singing. If you're really good with eBay, you might be able to dig up one of the motion-activated talking Christmas trees from the early 1990s. In no time at all, you'll be creating Christmas memories that will last a lifetime.
If you're lucky, you might even survive the experience.
We would hide the ornament some place near the tree but maddeningly out of sight, plug it in and then take the dog out for a walk. By the time we returned, the entire house would have been turned upside-down in a futile attempt to find the ornament and stop the chirp-chirp-chirping before it drove everyone mad.
Remember how the steady drip of water is said to break the mind of even the strongest prisoner? Compared to Tweety, it's a dip in the kiddie pool. The tolling of the Edgar Allen Poe's bells, bells, bells that fills the city with fear? A light tinkling of brass.
This ornament was the surest way to drive anyone to the brink of madness, and we all used it to that end for many years. At last Tweety took a mysterious trip out of the house in the bottom of the wastebasket and was seen no more. For the first time in years, there was something resembling peace in the Learn household on Christmas Day.
In the aftermath, we all agreed on one important point: That was as bad as it got. There was no Christmas ornament imaginable that could top the bulb for pure irritation.
Fortunately, for those of us who revel in irritating one another, there is good news. The good people at research and development have not stopped producing new Christmas decorations. Whether it's inflatable Santas of nightmarish proportions who threaten to block out the sun, or a singing and dancing Grinch, the opportunities to irritate brothers, to annoy friends and to scar young children for life are better than ever.
Let's start with the inflatable colossus now seen in front yards across the state. There are those who, correctly believing a 900-foot blow-up ornament to be tacky, see no use for the thing. The problem here is not with a snowman big enough to qualify for its own ZIP code, it is a lack of imagination.
Gemmy, which markets the inflatable mammoths, sells no fewer than 47 of them on its Web site. In addition to the Santa and snowman monoliths, the collection features other holiday stalwarts like Scooby Doo and SpongeBob SquarePants. As a special literary treat, the assortment also includes something that once might have been a reindeer before it stumbled upon the secret isle of Dr. Moreau.
A smaller one nicely blocks all view of the street from your front windows. Plant one of the larger models out front, and you'll have complete privacy and may not be able to see the sun. Pesky neighbors, uninvited relatives and bill collectors won't be able to find your house. Best of all, you'll be providing the perfect cover for the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man if he ever comes to town.
For maximum scare effect, set up some lighting behind the beastie — this works especially well with the unfortunate reindeer — and wait until dark. Now as little Timmy comes over to see if your son can play, turn the lights on, give the goliath a push and make the appropriate growl from deep in your throat. Watch as little Timmy jumps into the air and runs around the front yard three times before conking out under the oak tree. This is the life.
True, you can still get fairly traditional Christmas decorations like a light-up snowman, but why would you want to? They're not nearly as much fun.
From time to time, despite your best interventions, someone will make it inside the house. Your children, for example. For maximum damage, and to give them something interesting to tell their therapists in 30 years, it's important to go for the big guns.
First, get the kids as they come in the door with a 5-foot Dancing Grinch. There's no better way to keep the Christmas spirit than to have the Grinch twisting away and crooning the words to his theme song. Better yet, flank the door with the Grinch and his partner in crime, a 5-foot bear who sings your favorite Christmas jingles from hell, including "Winter Wonderland," "Up on the Rooftop" and "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year."
Next fill the house liberally with more musical toys. For $13, you can get a Holiday Time Sing and Dance Santa who joyfully croons, "I'm Santa Claus" to the tune of "The Wanderer" like a woebegotten Deion Sanders. Other marvels include a singing dog who howls his way through "O Christmas Tree" and "Deck the Halls," and a Coca-Cola polar bear who wails on the saxophone in a way to make even the staunchest Republican yearn for the days of President Clinton's inaugural performance.
Don't worry — even if they play the same song, they're guaranteed to play it at slightly different pitches and slightly different speeds.
Even though everyone knows what will happen, no one can resist the siren call of the buttons that activate the singing. If you're really good with eBay, you might be able to dig up one of the motion-activated talking Christmas trees from the early 1990s. In no time at all, you'll be creating Christmas memories that will last a lifetime.
If you're lucky, you might even survive the experience.
Monday, December 20, 2004
harry potter and magic
I've pointed out to some people that the magic in Harry Potter has no resemblance to actual magick as it is practiced in the real world. (It includes ingredients such as powdered unicorn horn, phoenix feathers, and similarly fantastic ingredients. I mean, really, if we're going to be that wary of Harry Potter, we need to be wary of Greco-Roman mythology too.) The main magic of Harry Potter is the imagination that it fires in its readers, a witchcraft we need more of.
A second point is the virtues it teaches. Children who read Harry Potter are going to see courage, loyalty, friendship and sacrificial love played out in a very dramatic and believable way. It's easier for us to believe in virtue and bravery when we've seen them lived out, even if the person living them out was fictional.
Third, Harry Potter (like any good fantasy) awakens in all of us an awareness of the spiritual world. I'd say that's important in a world as material as ours. The person who is dead to the spiritual world and lives consumed with thoughts of daily bread and self-indulgence is not a person who is going to think about the sublime wonders that surround him on a day-to-day basis, and will forget Beauty and other spiritual things. A person who is aware of the spirit also is open to the Spirit.
Fourthly, I stress the Christian imagery contained in the novels. I have no idea if that's deliberate on Rowling's part, or if it's just because she's writing within a culture that has over two thousand years of Christian influence and in a language shaped by the Bible, but either way there's some heady stuff, such as the way Harry's mother died to save him, thus destroying Voldemort's reign of terror and giving Harry an immunity to Voldemort (sacrificial love that parallels Christ's sacrifice.) In "Chamber of Secrets," there's even more symbolism, as Harry descends into Tom Riddle (Voldemort's) lair to save Ginny Weasley, fights and defeats a basilisk, drawing aid and comfort by professing his faith in Albus Dumbledore.
Lastly, I just accept that some people are going to disagree. I knew one woman who was aghast that I saw nothing wrong with Spider-man. (He walks on walls.) That's their prerogative. When my grandmother saw me reading comic books, and expressed her disapproval to my mother, my mom responded that at least I was reading. I've applied that principle myself a few times: You raised me, and now I'm raising my children.
If I'm feeling really ornery, I might point out that people who are scared of being led into the occult by the Harry Potter novels probably should stay away from the Bible. In just the first 50 chapters, I find people engaging in adultery, incest, rape, genocide, rank deceit, murder, inhospitality and attempted fratricide. This is a pattern of behavior that repeats throughout the rest of canon, with the worst offenders often held up as role models.
In other words, it's a meaningless objection.
A second point is the virtues it teaches. Children who read Harry Potter are going to see courage, loyalty, friendship and sacrificial love played out in a very dramatic and believable way. It's easier for us to believe in virtue and bravery when we've seen them lived out, even if the person living them out was fictional.
Third, Harry Potter (like any good fantasy) awakens in all of us an awareness of the spiritual world. I'd say that's important in a world as material as ours. The person who is dead to the spiritual world and lives consumed with thoughts of daily bread and self-indulgence is not a person who is going to think about the sublime wonders that surround him on a day-to-day basis, and will forget Beauty and other spiritual things. A person who is aware of the spirit also is open to the Spirit.
Fourthly, I stress the Christian imagery contained in the novels. I have no idea if that's deliberate on Rowling's part, or if it's just because she's writing within a culture that has over two thousand years of Christian influence and in a language shaped by the Bible, but either way there's some heady stuff, such as the way Harry's mother died to save him, thus destroying Voldemort's reign of terror and giving Harry an immunity to Voldemort (sacrificial love that parallels Christ's sacrifice.) In "Chamber of Secrets," there's even more symbolism, as Harry descends into Tom Riddle (Voldemort's) lair to save Ginny Weasley, fights and defeats a basilisk, drawing aid and comfort by professing his faith in Albus Dumbledore.
Lastly, I just accept that some people are going to disagree. I knew one woman who was aghast that I saw nothing wrong with Spider-man. (He walks on walls.) That's their prerogative. When my grandmother saw me reading comic books, and expressed her disapproval to my mother, my mom responded that at least I was reading. I've applied that principle myself a few times: You raised me, and now I'm raising my children.
If I'm feeling really ornery, I might point out that people who are scared of being led into the occult by the Harry Potter novels probably should stay away from the Bible. In just the first 50 chapters, I find people engaging in adultery, incest, rape, genocide, rank deceit, murder, inhospitality and attempted fratricide. This is a pattern of behavior that repeats throughout the rest of canon, with the worst offenders often held up as role models.
In other words, it's a meaningless objection.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
A post of no value
About two weeks ago, we were at a birthday party for the son of some friends ours, and the son's older sisters and cousins were putting on makeup. Evangeline asked what it was, they told her, and the look on her face remained utterly clueless.
My wife doesn't wear any makeup, so naturally Evangeline has virtually no interest in it.
I find the idea of makeup to be generally gross, but it doesn't bother me when it's applied decently. Bright and garish makeup, as has been the custom in our culture at various points in my life, just turns me off.
My wife doesn't wear any makeup, so naturally Evangeline has virtually no interest in it.
I find the idea of makeup to be generally gross, but it doesn't bother me when it's applied decently. Bright and garish makeup, as has been the custom in our culture at various points in my life, just turns me off.
Saturday, December 18, 2004
losing man's best friend
"Of course you have to work hard to offend Christians. By nature Christians are the most forgiving, understanding and thoughtful group of people I've ever dealt with. They never assume the worst at the get-go, they appreciate the importance of having different perspectives, they're slow to anger, quick to forgive and almost never make rash judgments or act in anything less than a spirit of total love.
"No, wait -- I'm thinking of Labrador retrievers."
I wrote that in 1998, after a friend of mine was catching grief over the jokes he had been including in his "Fishers of Grin" humor mailing for About.com. Everyone gets the dig about Christians and our often-graceless manner, but what I've always enjoyed about it is its dead-on depictions of Labs. They really are a saintly breed.
I bought my second black Lab in late 1994, when I was living in Bethlehem, Pa. I recently had returned from living as a missionary in Haiti, where I had been forced to leave behind my previous dog, also a black Lab.
Once I bought Hamlet, we were inseparable. I took him with me all around the Lehigh Valley. He accompanied me when I went to visit my family in Pittsburgh, and he always came up to Lafayette College from 1995 to 1997, when we would visit my girlfriend during her undergraduate days there. Everybody knew him as the dog who spoke Haitian Kreyol, because that was the language I had used to train him.
Hamlet was the first dog of mine ever to have his own entry in the phone book -- Ma Bell gave me two entries for the same flat rate, and who was I to waste one of them? -- and also the first dog of mine ever to be listed as a friend of a church I was attending. (I don't think the elders were amused when they found out.)
He was a brilliant, stubborn, energetic and often destructive dog. He chewed holes in furniture, ripped up favorite books of mine, and broke out of his cage I don't know how many times, even when it was padlocked.
He also played a part in my romance with my girlfriend, whom I later married. One time the three of us were walking along a stream in Bethlehem, and Hamlet -- off his leash and galavanting along the streambed as he was wont to do -- wouldn't come back. So I threatened that if he didn't come back, I would push her into the water. She had enough time to voice a quick protest, and then I delivered on what I had promised.
Walking him was an experience -- I swear he made my arm a good six inches longer as he pulled at the leash with all the force of a man o'war -- but it was also invariably a pleasant one, since through Hamlet I discovered the other inhabitants of Easton, from the other dog owners out for a stroll in the morning, to the children who wanted to play with him, to the homeless man who stopped to scratch him behind the ears.
I don't think I've ever loved a dog more than I loved him.
About six years ago, when my wife and I got an apartment here in Nova Bastille, we realized we didn't have enough space for him. Labs are made to run, and our apartment had no yard and even less free space inside.
So Hamlet moved in with my parents, who have a huge yard and who discovered they enjoyed having a dog again. If he had a good life with me, he's had a great one with my parents, and they've enjoyed having him around as well.
Because Hamlet was born on Halloween, my father has developed a tradition of having trick-or-treaters sing "Happy birthday" to Hamlet before they can have any of the treats being passed out to celebrate. I'm told Hamlet's birthday is a hit with children all around the neighborhood.
Nothing good lasts forever. Now a little more than 10 years old, Hamlet has been in a lot of pain lately. He has no interest in eating, doesn't like to walk, and spends most of his time lying around and licking his leg. Friday night, the vet announced he had found a malignant and inoperable cancer behind one of Hamlet's hips.
I love him, and can't let him go on suffering each day. I'm probably going to call my parents on Saturday and tell them to go ahead and have him put down.
We're planning to visit my parents for Christmas, and my daughter loves seeing Hamlet, who admittedly is a lot more fun to play with than our dog Sandy, the dog we have here in our home.
I don't want to have to tell her that Hamlet has died, and that he won't be there for her on Christmas. I want to give her one last time to see him and play with him, and I want that for myself too. I want to be there with him, and hold him one last time as he goes to sleep, so he knows that he's loved, even as he drifts off.
It's not going to happen, and that really bites.
Copyright © 2004 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Psst! I totally stole this from Brucker.
"No, wait -- I'm thinking of Labrador retrievers."
I wrote that in 1998, after a friend of mine was catching grief over the jokes he had been including in his "Fishers of Grin" humor mailing for About.com. Everyone gets the dig about Christians and our often-graceless manner, but what I've always enjoyed about it is its dead-on depictions of Labs. They really are a saintly breed.
I bought my second black Lab in late 1994, when I was living in Bethlehem, Pa. I recently had returned from living as a missionary in Haiti, where I had been forced to leave behind my previous dog, also a black Lab.
Once I bought Hamlet, we were inseparable. I took him with me all around the Lehigh Valley. He accompanied me when I went to visit my family in Pittsburgh, and he always came up to Lafayette College from 1995 to 1997, when we would visit my girlfriend during her undergraduate days there. Everybody knew him as the dog who spoke Haitian Kreyol, because that was the language I had used to train him.
Hamlet was the first dog of mine ever to have his own entry in the phone book -- Ma Bell gave me two entries for the same flat rate, and who was I to waste one of them? -- and also the first dog of mine ever to be listed as a friend of a church I was attending. (I don't think the elders were amused when they found out.)
He was a brilliant, stubborn, energetic and often destructive dog. He chewed holes in furniture, ripped up favorite books of mine, and broke out of his cage I don't know how many times, even when it was padlocked.
He also played a part in my romance with my girlfriend, whom I later married. One time the three of us were walking along a stream in Bethlehem, and Hamlet -- off his leash and galavanting along the streambed as he was wont to do -- wouldn't come back. So I threatened that if he didn't come back, I would push her into the water. She had enough time to voice a quick protest, and then I delivered on what I had promised.
Walking him was an experience -- I swear he made my arm a good six inches longer as he pulled at the leash with all the force of a man o'war -- but it was also invariably a pleasant one, since through Hamlet I discovered the other inhabitants of Easton, from the other dog owners out for a stroll in the morning, to the children who wanted to play with him, to the homeless man who stopped to scratch him behind the ears.
I don't think I've ever loved a dog more than I loved him.
About six years ago, when my wife and I got an apartment here in Nova Bastille, we realized we didn't have enough space for him. Labs are made to run, and our apartment had no yard and even less free space inside.
So Hamlet moved in with my parents, who have a huge yard and who discovered they enjoyed having a dog again. If he had a good life with me, he's had a great one with my parents, and they've enjoyed having him around as well.
Because Hamlet was born on Halloween, my father has developed a tradition of having trick-or-treaters sing "Happy birthday" to Hamlet before they can have any of the treats being passed out to celebrate. I'm told Hamlet's birthday is a hit with children all around the neighborhood.
Nothing good lasts forever. Now a little more than 10 years old, Hamlet has been in a lot of pain lately. He has no interest in eating, doesn't like to walk, and spends most of his time lying around and licking his leg. Friday night, the vet announced he had found a malignant and inoperable cancer behind one of Hamlet's hips.
I love him, and can't let him go on suffering each day. I'm probably going to call my parents on Saturday and tell them to go ahead and have him put down.
We're planning to visit my parents for Christmas, and my daughter loves seeing Hamlet, who admittedly is a lot more fun to play with than our dog Sandy, the dog we have here in our home.
I don't want to have to tell her that Hamlet has died, and that he won't be there for her on Christmas. I want to give her one last time to see him and play with him, and I want that for myself too. I want to be there with him, and hold him one last time as he goes to sleep, so he knows that he's loved, even as he drifts off.
It's not going to happen, and that really bites.
Copyright © 2004 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Psst! I totally stole this from Brucker.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
thematic progressions in mark
Being going through the gospel of Mark again, not for a formal study this time but to get a sense of its overview, for a project I'm working on. I'm looking for the themes and events as they develop and unfold in the gospel, and I noticed some stuff on Sunday that really caught me by surprise.
It's the progression. Jesus starts out fairly simply; he arrives back in town from being in the wilderness for 40 days, and picks a couple disciples. They're fairly respectable, hardworking chaps too: the sons of a priest, and a couple brothers who work as fishermen. He goes into Capernaum, casts out a demon and performs a bunch of healings. Fairly (ahem) unremarkable stuff.
But the next day, after he has spent some time in prayer, his ministry takes a new approach. In Capernaum again, he doesn't heal a paralytic -- he starts out by saying, "Your sins are forgiven" -- and then heals the man. The religious leaders, who surely were intrigued by his miracles, now are mortified.
And then he steps it up again. He picks a new disciple -- someone who has been collaborating with the Roman occupiers and making himself wealthy by extorting money from his countrymen.
Now he starts breaking the Sabbath laws of the day. His disciples pick grain on the Sabbath to eat, and he defends them. He heals a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. Now there are plots to kill him, so what does he do? He go and picks out 12 apostles, a move that is surely going to drive people bonkers with the seditious overtones of a new (or renewed) Israel. Sure enough, the priests claim he's in league with the Devil and his own mother tries to stop him, apologetically telling everyone, "He's out of his mind."
Now that he has everyone's attention, Jesus launches into a number of parables about what the Kingdom of God is like -- and then demonstrates what it is, by violating the established order and heading into the most unclean region possible for a Jew -- a cemetery in Gentile territory, where a man is kept captive by a thousand demons, and near a herd of swine. After that, the gospel mentions that Jesus returned to Judea and raised Jairus' daughter Tamar from the dead.
In those opening chapters, Mark set the tone for the rest of his gospel, from the coming of Christ and the failure of the priests to recognize him as the fulfillment of the Law, down to his descent into hell (a symbolic interpretation of the madman of Ganesseret) and the defeat of Satan, followed by his rescuing the prisoners in hell and ultimate triumph over death.
It's interesting. I never saw this progression before. I should try skimming the New Testament more frequently.
It's the progression. Jesus starts out fairly simply; he arrives back in town from being in the wilderness for 40 days, and picks a couple disciples. They're fairly respectable, hardworking chaps too: the sons of a priest, and a couple brothers who work as fishermen. He goes into Capernaum, casts out a demon and performs a bunch of healings. Fairly (ahem) unremarkable stuff.
But the next day, after he has spent some time in prayer, his ministry takes a new approach. In Capernaum again, he doesn't heal a paralytic -- he starts out by saying, "Your sins are forgiven" -- and then heals the man. The religious leaders, who surely were intrigued by his miracles, now are mortified.
And then he steps it up again. He picks a new disciple -- someone who has been collaborating with the Roman occupiers and making himself wealthy by extorting money from his countrymen.
Now he starts breaking the Sabbath laws of the day. His disciples pick grain on the Sabbath to eat, and he defends them. He heals a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. Now there are plots to kill him, so what does he do? He go and picks out 12 apostles, a move that is surely going to drive people bonkers with the seditious overtones of a new (or renewed) Israel. Sure enough, the priests claim he's in league with the Devil and his own mother tries to stop him, apologetically telling everyone, "He's out of his mind."
Now that he has everyone's attention, Jesus launches into a number of parables about what the Kingdom of God is like -- and then demonstrates what it is, by violating the established order and heading into the most unclean region possible for a Jew -- a cemetery in Gentile territory, where a man is kept captive by a thousand demons, and near a herd of swine. After that, the gospel mentions that Jesus returned to Judea and raised Jairus' daughter Tamar from the dead.
In those opening chapters, Mark set the tone for the rest of his gospel, from the coming of Christ and the failure of the priests to recognize him as the fulfillment of the Law, down to his descent into hell (a symbolic interpretation of the madman of Ganesseret) and the defeat of Satan, followed by his rescuing the prisoners in hell and ultimate triumph over death.
It's interesting. I never saw this progression before. I should try skimming the New Testament more frequently.
Terry Moore's 'Strangers in Paradise'
I lost interest in "Strangers in Paradise" for a while.
"Strangers in Paradise" is an independent comic book written and illustrated by Terry Moore, and published by his privately owned Abstract Studios. It tells the story principally of two women, Katchoo and Francine, and their friend David. The comic won an Eisner Award in 1996 for its second collected volume, "I Dream of You," so it is a pretty impressive comic.
I lost interest somewhere around the time of volume 10, "Tropic of Desire," since the story seemed to be going nowhere. It had settled into the same old back-and-forth, with loads of Francine introspection and internal growth but very little change in her situation, and loads of plot threads Terry had dropped in the middle, as if he had forgotten about them.
One was Francine's job with an ad agency. Another centered on the former secretary of Francine's ex-boyfriend, Freddie Femur. The former secretary was letting Francine and Katchoo stay in her garage apartment, and it was implied she had a crush on Katchoo, who is gay or bisexual and in love with Francine.
There were other loose or dropped threads too.
Moore also kept trying to top the story in "I Dream of You," which revealed that David's sister Darcy was the head of an international crime syndicate. The result? Things kept getting more and more melodramatic and further and further from what originally had attracted me the comic.
That's not to say the comic didn't still have some strengths. There was an issue involving a plane crash, and the opening page was absolutely brutal. I'll also never forget the issue that made Freddie some depth by showing how devastated he was when his wife left him. But overall I felt the quality had declined, and my interest was waning.
Enter my wife.
Although she has read several other comics I've encouraged her to -- Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" being the most notable -- she remains a fan of "Strangers and Paradise" and continues to read it. At times she has hounded me to get the latest trade paperback.
Last Christmas, she bought me three new trade paperback collections for herself for Christmas, and I discovered that things have been moving. Moore brought Francine's story arc to its conclusion, did something interesting with Casey Femur, changed Katchoo's situation from the bored artist waiting for Francine and really developed David Qin's character.
So, long story short, I'm reading it again.
"Strangers in Paradise" is an independent comic book written and illustrated by Terry Moore, and published by his privately owned Abstract Studios. It tells the story principally of two women, Katchoo and Francine, and their friend David. The comic won an Eisner Award in 1996 for its second collected volume, "I Dream of You," so it is a pretty impressive comic.
I lost interest somewhere around the time of volume 10, "Tropic of Desire," since the story seemed to be going nowhere. It had settled into the same old back-and-forth, with loads of Francine introspection and internal growth but very little change in her situation, and loads of plot threads Terry had dropped in the middle, as if he had forgotten about them.
One was Francine's job with an ad agency. Another centered on the former secretary of Francine's ex-boyfriend, Freddie Femur. The former secretary was letting Francine and Katchoo stay in her garage apartment, and it was implied she had a crush on Katchoo, who is gay or bisexual and in love with Francine.
There were other loose or dropped threads too.
Moore also kept trying to top the story in "I Dream of You," which revealed that David's sister Darcy was the head of an international crime syndicate. The result? Things kept getting more and more melodramatic and further and further from what originally had attracted me the comic.
That's not to say the comic didn't still have some strengths. There was an issue involving a plane crash, and the opening page was absolutely brutal. I'll also never forget the issue that made Freddie some depth by showing how devastated he was when his wife left him. But overall I felt the quality had declined, and my interest was waning.
Enter my wife.
Although she has read several other comics I've encouraged her to -- Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" being the most notable -- she remains a fan of "Strangers and Paradise" and continues to read it. At times she has hounded me to get the latest trade paperback.
Last Christmas, she bought me three new trade paperback collections for herself for Christmas, and I discovered that things have been moving. Moore brought Francine's story arc to its conclusion, did something interesting with Casey Femur, changed Katchoo's situation from the bored artist waiting for Francine and really developed David Qin's character.
So, long story short, I'm reading it again.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Understanding the temptations of Christ and what they mean for us
After his baptism, the gospel of Matthew tells us, Jesus went into the wilderness and fasted for 40 days. After that, the devil appeared and tempted him.
I've been thinking lately about the nature of those temptations. Because while we may gain some insight into Christ from the nature of the temptations he faced, we also should be able to draw some application for ourselves, beyond the merely obvious, that "Christ was tempted just like us, but did not sin." It's not as easy as I would like to think it would be.
The first temptation Satan brought before Christ was to turn stones into bread. By this time, Jesus had been fasting for 40 days. If he's hungry now, it's because he's begun to starve. It's no sin to feed yourself to hold of starving to death. (Well, it might be stupid to eat bread if it's been 40 days since you've eaten, but I don't think Satan was tempting Jesus toward constipation or vomiting.)
Given Jesus' response — "Man does not live on bread alone" — the appeal of this temptation was to indulge earthly needs before the pressing spiritual need before him, the question of his identity and emerging life purpose, "Who am I, and what is this incredible stirring within my soul that drove me out here forty days ago?"
The application for us should lie along a similar theme, allowing an earthly need -- even a pressing one -- to take precedence over a spiritual need that must be addressed immediately. Especially when the answer is so close.
The second temptation Christ faced was to throw himself down from the Temple, so that the angels would catch him. Fyodr Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," the movie "The Miracle Maker" and in Graham Green's "Monsignor Quixote" all suggest that this was an assault on the nature of faith.
Jesus was an unremarkable person, like anyone else on the street. Being caught by angels as he fell in front of a presumably crowded Temple would make it obvious that he had God's seal of approval. No faith means no salvation, for "It is by grace you have been saved, through faith." In his chapter "The Grand Inquisitor," Dostoevsky makes a similar argument about turning stones to bread.
But what is the application of this reading to us? Is it just a temptation to take the easy road out? That feels unsatisfactory.
The third and final temptation is when Satan offers to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. The connection for us is easy to see. It's fame, success and power. It's having the ability to order things the way we want them ordered. In many ways this the most powerful temptation of all. Witness its appeal to humans throughout history, and in the present moment to the Christian Right.
It's also easily the most shallow. If Satan really does have the kingdoms of the world and can give them to whomever he pleases in exchange for worship, the he really doesn't lose anything by giving them away.
He just gains us, for an illusion.
I've been thinking lately about the nature of those temptations. Because while we may gain some insight into Christ from the nature of the temptations he faced, we also should be able to draw some application for ourselves, beyond the merely obvious, that "Christ was tempted just like us, but did not sin." It's not as easy as I would like to think it would be.
The first temptation Satan brought before Christ was to turn stones into bread. By this time, Jesus had been fasting for 40 days. If he's hungry now, it's because he's begun to starve. It's no sin to feed yourself to hold of starving to death. (Well, it might be stupid to eat bread if it's been 40 days since you've eaten, but I don't think Satan was tempting Jesus toward constipation or vomiting.)
Given Jesus' response — "Man does not live on bread alone" — the appeal of this temptation was to indulge earthly needs before the pressing spiritual need before him, the question of his identity and emerging life purpose, "Who am I, and what is this incredible stirring within my soul that drove me out here forty days ago?"
The application for us should lie along a similar theme, allowing an earthly need -- even a pressing one -- to take precedence over a spiritual need that must be addressed immediately. Especially when the answer is so close.
The second temptation Christ faced was to throw himself down from the Temple, so that the angels would catch him. Fyodr Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," the movie "The Miracle Maker" and in Graham Green's "Monsignor Quixote" all suggest that this was an assault on the nature of faith.
Jesus was an unremarkable person, like anyone else on the street. Being caught by angels as he fell in front of a presumably crowded Temple would make it obvious that he had God's seal of approval. No faith means no salvation, for "It is by grace you have been saved, through faith." In his chapter "The Grand Inquisitor," Dostoevsky makes a similar argument about turning stones to bread.
But what is the application of this reading to us? Is it just a temptation to take the easy road out? That feels unsatisfactory.
The third and final temptation is when Satan offers to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. The connection for us is easy to see. It's fame, success and power. It's having the ability to order things the way we want them ordered. In many ways this the most powerful temptation of all. Witness its appeal to humans throughout history, and in the present moment to the Christian Right.
It's also easily the most shallow. If Satan really does have the kingdoms of the world and can give them to whomever he pleases in exchange for worship, the he really doesn't lose anything by giving them away.
He just gains us, for an illusion.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
rathergate
The big two enemies of quality in journalism are, ironically, deadline and competition. You see, everyone wants to get The Story, and to get it, we have to get it first. That means we scramble to get the information pulled together, and if it seems like it's credible, we run with it.
If it's big, we let our excitement get the better of us sometimes, and we don't stop to consider how noncredible it might be, especially if we hear that somebody else is working on the same story. Even working at weeklies, I've fallen guilty to this, to my shame, just because I knew that a reporter from a daily newspaper was there.
So, despite his years of experience, I think Rather made a really stupid mistake because he wanted to get it first and he didn't bother to take the time to make sure his source was reliable and his information was accurate before he went to press with it.
And then, like every other human being on this planet, his pride got in the way and he refused to admit that he had made a mistake. He stuck by his story, even though I'm sure he realized there was reason not to. His supervisors stuck by his story, even though they had to realize there was reason not to. Why? Because of stupid human pride and an unwillingness to admit that even as one of the highest-profile telejournalists in the world, you can make really stupid mistakes, just like a first-year reporter, because you got all excited over an exclusive and forgot to get it right before you got it first.
Remember Alexandra Polier? There was a big sex scandal surrounding her and Kerry back during the primary, claiming that she and Kerry had had an affair while she was an intern on his campaign. Only one problem: It never happened. There was some innuendo, some rumor-mongering and an overactive press corps digging into her life making things miserable for her as they linked her to Kerry in a big rush to get a big news story.
Shoddy reporting happens a lot, and it's not just because of a liberal bias or a conservative bias. It's because sometimes enthusiasm and bloodlust for the next Big Story gets the better of every journalist.
I don't think there's a conscious effort afoot to smear Bush, which is what many conservatives seem to believe. My understanding of reporters stationed overseas -- no personal experience, but I knew missionaries who were interviewed with them in the days leading up to Clinton's invasion of Haiti in 1994 -- is that they're required to file at least one story each day.
Editors then decide which stories to use, and which to hold "for a rainy day." Often, those rainy days never come because the news never stops happening, which very well could mean that some of the stories you want to see are being filed away indefinitely because an editor sees something of local or regional interest as more pressing and more newsworthy than the other stories coming from Iraq.
I'll go a step further: To an extent, I think conservative groups (including evangelicals) have had heard "liberal media bias" repeated so often that they see it even when it doesn't exist. Generally the view I get from conservative Christians is that Clinton basked in the warm glow of love that came from the liberal media, while the liberal media is trying to roast Bush alive.
BUT! I remember quite clearly that several commentators were looking at the media treatment of the Clinton presidency while he was in office, and were struck by how hostile the media were toward him. (Time magazine did a cover story on this one month, in 1994 or 1995, I think.) And during the 2000 primary, the media often were willing to overlook the way Bush treated McCain and presented him fairly positively, while regularly casting Gore as robotlike and as an undesirable presidential candidate. (That's because Bush treated the reporters decently, would talk with them about the Yankees and the Mets, and Gore talked over people's heads.)
I do think Rather's resignation was warranted. Even if his motives were not based on personal political beliefs, the lack of sound judgment is so monumental that, given his prominence, he should beat an exit from the world of reporting and retire.
We all take sides, after all -- even as a reporter, I had feelings on whom the paper should endorse, even if I never voiced them even to the editor -- but chasing stories solely because of how they fit political leanings is despicable.
Much perceived bias, though, can be attributed to laziness, shoddy reporting or a lack of clear vision and guidance from up top, rather than to a calculated effort to advance a specific agenda.
If it's big, we let our excitement get the better of us sometimes, and we don't stop to consider how noncredible it might be, especially if we hear that somebody else is working on the same story. Even working at weeklies, I've fallen guilty to this, to my shame, just because I knew that a reporter from a daily newspaper was there.
So, despite his years of experience, I think Rather made a really stupid mistake because he wanted to get it first and he didn't bother to take the time to make sure his source was reliable and his information was accurate before he went to press with it.
And then, like every other human being on this planet, his pride got in the way and he refused to admit that he had made a mistake. He stuck by his story, even though I'm sure he realized there was reason not to. His supervisors stuck by his story, even though they had to realize there was reason not to. Why? Because of stupid human pride and an unwillingness to admit that even as one of the highest-profile telejournalists in the world, you can make really stupid mistakes, just like a first-year reporter, because you got all excited over an exclusive and forgot to get it right before you got it first.
Remember Alexandra Polier? There was a big sex scandal surrounding her and Kerry back during the primary, claiming that she and Kerry had had an affair while she was an intern on his campaign. Only one problem: It never happened. There was some innuendo, some rumor-mongering and an overactive press corps digging into her life making things miserable for her as they linked her to Kerry in a big rush to get a big news story.
Shoddy reporting happens a lot, and it's not just because of a liberal bias or a conservative bias. It's because sometimes enthusiasm and bloodlust for the next Big Story gets the better of every journalist.
I don't think there's a conscious effort afoot to smear Bush, which is what many conservatives seem to believe. My understanding of reporters stationed overseas -- no personal experience, but I knew missionaries who were interviewed with them in the days leading up to Clinton's invasion of Haiti in 1994 -- is that they're required to file at least one story each day.
Editors then decide which stories to use, and which to hold "for a rainy day." Often, those rainy days never come because the news never stops happening, which very well could mean that some of the stories you want to see are being filed away indefinitely because an editor sees something of local or regional interest as more pressing and more newsworthy than the other stories coming from Iraq.
I'll go a step further: To an extent, I think conservative groups (including evangelicals) have had heard "liberal media bias" repeated so often that they see it even when it doesn't exist. Generally the view I get from conservative Christians is that Clinton basked in the warm glow of love that came from the liberal media, while the liberal media is trying to roast Bush alive.
BUT! I remember quite clearly that several commentators were looking at the media treatment of the Clinton presidency while he was in office, and were struck by how hostile the media were toward him. (Time magazine did a cover story on this one month, in 1994 or 1995, I think.) And during the 2000 primary, the media often were willing to overlook the way Bush treated McCain and presented him fairly positively, while regularly casting Gore as robotlike and as an undesirable presidential candidate. (That's because Bush treated the reporters decently, would talk with them about the Yankees and the Mets, and Gore talked over people's heads.)
I do think Rather's resignation was warranted. Even if his motives were not based on personal political beliefs, the lack of sound judgment is so monumental that, given his prominence, he should beat an exit from the world of reporting and retire.
We all take sides, after all -- even as a reporter, I had feelings on whom the paper should endorse, even if I never voiced them even to the editor -- but chasing stories solely because of how they fit political leanings is despicable.
Much perceived bias, though, can be attributed to laziness, shoddy reporting or a lack of clear vision and guidance from up top, rather than to a calculated effort to advance a specific agenda.
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