So many things I haven't been online to share:
[+] Back on Feb. 16, E and I went to New York for a modeling go-see. It was a pretty straightforward, if uneventful trip. We showed up, E read me a chapter of "The Courage of Sarah Noble" and then we went to get her picture taken. The photographer asked me if I would mind if she took my picture too. I figured, what the heck, and filled out the paperwork. Flash, click, we're done. Time to get back on the train and go home, stopping only for overpriced pizza at Penn Station New York. (E ate like a little lady, without even asking me to cut the pizza.)
Well, that Friday I got a call-back for an actual shoot on Tuesday, for Hewlett-Packard. Yes, I got a call-back, not my daughter. Not the cute little 5-year-old, but the hairy man nearing middle age. I joked with my wife and some friends that they figured, "Hey -- this guy looks like the sort of geek who uses our product, let's get him!", but it turns out the actual idea for the shoot was a family get-together, with a sort of "See how bright our printers make your treasured memories turn out" feel.
The actual shoot wasn't too bad, although it did take about six or seven hours. I tried on about five sets of clothes, including some that I was only too thankful not to be seen in by anyone who knew me. (The yellow pants were the worst.) I ended up wearing a light green shirt and a pair of tan Tommy Hilfiger pants. You won't be able to tell from the ad when it runs, but the stylist ripped the back seat out of the pants so they would fit -- an impromptu if expensive way to make alterations. So for most of the shoot, I was walking around with pants that had more rear ventilation than hospital gown. They gave me the shirt when it was over, and offered to let me take the pants home, but I declined. I'll never own a pair of Tommy Hilfiger's, needlessly expensive as they are, but it makes an amusing tale to share how I wore them one afternoon.
Total payment for the shoot is $800, less the 15 percent that goes to agent Lauren Green and the other 10 percent that goes to Elen's Kids. I think we're about breaking even now.
[+] We finally had some decent snow this week. On Tuesday the girls and I spent about an hour outside playing in the snow. We built a giant snowman in the front yard, along with two small snowgirls, and rode around on the sled in the back yard for about 20 minutes. The girls even got back on when they fell off, without complaint. (I guess I ran too fast.) And for the grand finale, before we went back inside, we had a massive snowball fight. Even R was into it, and was picking up clumps of snow to throw at me. One of the funniest moments was when I hit the front door a good two feet above their heads. E laughed at my bad aim, then gave a start when bits of the snowball fell onto her head. She thought it was pretty amusing.
[-] I really hate insomnia. I fell asleep tonight lying in bed with E, woke up just before midnight, did my business and got into bed, where I managed to go back to sleep. About 40 minutes later, my wife came in and unintentionally woke me up. At this point she reminded me I hadn't walked the dog, so I got dressed, went downstairs and trudged around in the cold with Sandy for 15 or 20 minutes so she could do her business. I got back into bed and found myself getting more and more awake. It's now 4:39 a.m., and I'm wide awake. Saturday is going to be hell.
[+/-] Mixed experience on homeschool this week. I had insomnia Tuesday night, and ended up getting about three hours' sleep. We had rented the BBC "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" from Blockbuster since E and her mother have been reading through "The Chronicles of Narnia" the last few weeks, and E wanted to watch it. I put it on, intending to watch only for a little, and fell asleep. (The movie is bad enough I might have done that even had I been less tired.) I woke up at one point, said I was going to turn it off in five minutes, and fell asleep again. And that was pretty much all we accomplished that day.
On the other hand, E has finished reading "The Courage of Sarah Noble," a true Colonial-era chapter book, all by herself. Today I started her on the first book in "The Magic Tree House" series, she still remembers the names and values of coins, and we created our own weather vane to put in the back yard.
To make history more accessible, we must continue to read true stories about America's past. To make science more accessible, we must do more hands-on projects to pique E's curiosity. To make school less onerous to E, we must do arts and crafts on a more regular basis. Today we made two sets of bunny ears -- one for her, and one for R -- after reading "The Tortoise and the Hare." It is the first real craft we have done in a while. I must plan these better.
I also must make more of an effort to include R, who too often is shunted to one side while E and I do school activities. I also need to be more flexible in how I do things, and insist less that E do things the way I had envisioned them. While she does need to follow directions, not everything should be a battle of wills. I never realized what an exacting control freak I could be until I started teaching her -- and I hate it when she asks me, "Daddy, can we please do it my way for a change?" because she's right -- I keep insisting on my way all the time, even on times when there's no big loss in doing it another way.
Got a good suggestion on writing. I will try it this next week. Having some problems with the math drills -- she knows the idea, but doesn't have the addition table memorized. Must content myself with her knowing how to get the answer, and let the memorization come to her in due time. She did it with reading, and she'll do it with numbers too, I have no doubt.
[-] No writing done on big projects. I'm a rotten collaborator on the webcomic and the novel, as my two partners will attest.
Saturday, March 05, 2005
disney princesses
Like many other girls their ages here in the United States, Evangeline and Rachel are just nuts about Disney Princesses. They love to watch the movies, play with the dolls, dress up, and role play -- all of which wouldn't be so bad if the Disney Princesses weren't so vacuous.
Sometime last year, I took advantage of my older daughter's big Cinderella kick, and asked her if she'd like to hear another version of the story, from Germany. When she agreed, I pulled out my beloved copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and introduced her to Ashenputel, the girl whose stepsisters actually cut off parts of their feet to get into shoe.
In the months since then, we've been making a point of hitting up our library for other-cultural versions of the Princesses and various other fairy tale characters. With Cinderella alone, Evangeline has been exposed to fairy tales from Mexico, Ireland, Cambodia, the Phillipines, Germany, Swaziland, England, France, West Virginia, Haiti and Los Angeles. In the process, she's been developing comparative-literature skills-- on her own, she recognized that the bull in an Irish Cinderella story played the same part as the fairy godmother -- and she's been learning world geography. Every time we read a fairy tale, we find the country of origin on our world map, and place a sticker of that country's flag on the map.
So instead of butting heads with the vapidness of Disney, I've managed to turn it into something valuable. Now if I could only find something educational to do with Elmo...
Sometime last year, I took advantage of my older daughter's big Cinderella kick, and asked her if she'd like to hear another version of the story, from Germany. When she agreed, I pulled out my beloved copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and introduced her to Ashenputel, the girl whose stepsisters actually cut off parts of their feet to get into shoe.
In the months since then, we've been making a point of hitting up our library for other-cultural versions of the Princesses and various other fairy tale characters. With Cinderella alone, Evangeline has been exposed to fairy tales from Mexico, Ireland, Cambodia, the Phillipines, Germany, Swaziland, England, France, West Virginia, Haiti and Los Angeles. In the process, she's been developing comparative-literature skills-- on her own, she recognized that the bull in an Irish Cinderella story played the same part as the fairy godmother -- and she's been learning world geography. Every time we read a fairy tale, we find the country of origin on our world map, and place a sticker of that country's flag on the map.
So instead of butting heads with the vapidness of Disney, I've managed to turn it into something valuable. Now if I could only find something educational to do with Elmo...
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
building writing skills
I've been homeschooling my daughter, 5, for about four months now, despite a few bumps and hurdles after leaving my job to be a stay-at-home dad. We're doing very well with reading, with math and science, art and the other subjects, but I'm stuck on one: writing.
Evangeline knows all her letters, as a result of attending a local preschool last year and the year before. When I assumed the homeschooling duties, we worked our way through the letters again just to brush up and make sure everything was going the right way.
Well, here we are, about three months after we finished handwriting exercises, and I'm stumped for what to do to get her writing on a regular basis so that she can develop those skills as well as she's developed her other academic abilities.
Evangeline enjoys writing stories -- but by writing stories, I mean she enjoys having her old man write everything as she dictates, which does nothing to build her handwriting skills or ability to put thoughts to paper herself.
Can anyone make any suggestions? Like her father, Evangeline is opposed to rote work, and also like her father, she can be a challenge to motivate to do something she doesn't want to do.
Evangeline knows all her letters, as a result of attending a local preschool last year and the year before. When I assumed the homeschooling duties, we worked our way through the letters again just to brush up and make sure everything was going the right way.
Well, here we are, about three months after we finished handwriting exercises, and I'm stumped for what to do to get her writing on a regular basis so that she can develop those skills as well as she's developed her other academic abilities.
Evangeline enjoys writing stories -- but by writing stories, I mean she enjoys having her old man write everything as she dictates, which does nothing to build her handwriting skills or ability to put thoughts to paper herself.
Can anyone make any suggestions? Like her father, Evangeline is opposed to rote work, and also like her father, she can be a challenge to motivate to do something she doesn't want to do.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
social security
Here's an idea I came across for Social Security reform. Instead of Social Security, how about a $2,000 government investment for each child from birth to 18? A former secretary of the treasury believes such a practice would leave each person in possession of $1,013,326 at retirement age.
No idea on the specifics, obviously, since the article didn't enumerate them. My thought would be that the money would not be vested until beneficiary turned 18, and would not be accessible until retirement. I would expect that in the event of death, the money and interest would return to the government, or however Social Security benefits are handled now.
I thought it an intriguing idea -- as the article claims a number of policymakers do -- but I doubt anything will happen with it. Opposition to this is likely to be high among the Republicans on Capitol Hill, and as one commentator noted in the article, it leaves little incentive for the individual to prepare a 401(k) or retirement IRA. There's also the problem of this program not being able to kick in until 30 or 40 years after Social Security goes insolvent.
Still, it was thought provoking enough that I remarked to my wife how wonderful it would be if we had the disposable income to start putting away money for the girls' retirements each year; alas, we have trouble enough getting the money to put away toward our own retirements and the girls' college educations.
No idea on the specifics, obviously, since the article didn't enumerate them. My thought would be that the money would not be vested until beneficiary turned 18, and would not be accessible until retirement. I would expect that in the event of death, the money and interest would return to the government, or however Social Security benefits are handled now.
I thought it an intriguing idea -- as the article claims a number of policymakers do -- but I doubt anything will happen with it. Opposition to this is likely to be high among the Republicans on Capitol Hill, and as one commentator noted in the article, it leaves little incentive for the individual to prepare a 401(k) or retirement IRA. There's also the problem of this program not being able to kick in until 30 or 40 years after Social Security goes insolvent.
Still, it was thought provoking enough that I remarked to my wife how wonderful it would be if we had the disposable income to start putting away money for the girls' retirements each year; alas, we have trouble enough getting the money to put away toward our own retirements and the girls' college educations.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
my kid hates homeschool
My daughter Evangeline hates being homeschooled. She spent a year-and-a-half in a preschool, where she got to make a number of friends her own age, and now she is here at home with her father and younger sister, Rachel.
I try my hardest to make homeschooling enjoyable and educational for her. We have her involved in activities where she can be with other children her age, we go on homeschooling field trips regularly with the co-op we belong to, and we try to arrange playdates with her friendsfrom preschool, but she still wishes she were in regular school.
As someone who worked for nearly 10 years in the news media, I can attest that most of the colleagues I discussed it with thought homeschooling parents should be commended for their commitment to their children, and they also were impressed with the success stories of the homeschooled children that we diligently reported.
But homeschooling remains not for every parent, and not for every child. We've been homeschooling Evangeline for kindergarten because she was reading-ready at 5 years old, but missed the cut-off date for our school district by two weeks. My experience is that the socialization that occurs in a school setting is usually destructive, rather than productive. Schools function on the law of club and fang, where people who are different are ostracized and put down, and we're made to feel ashamed of our differences, no matter how beneficial those differences are.
A charter school is different in that it's multi-grade level, so that Evangeline will interact with children who are older than her and are not dealing with the same issues she is, and therefore might actually be positive rather than destructive role models for her. It's also different in that there is a lot of parental involvement, which is usually somewhat difficult in a public school setting.
Well, we'll see what happens. She's said several times that she doesn't want to be homeschooled after kindergarten, so we're almost definitely going to enroll her at the charter school, I think. And I'll be there every step of the way with her.
I try my hardest to make homeschooling enjoyable and educational for her. We have her involved in activities where she can be with other children her age, we go on homeschooling field trips regularly with the co-op we belong to, and we try to arrange playdates with her friendsfrom preschool, but she still wishes she were in regular school.
As someone who worked for nearly 10 years in the news media, I can attest that most of the colleagues I discussed it with thought homeschooling parents should be commended for their commitment to their children, and they also were impressed with the success stories of the homeschooled children that we diligently reported.
But homeschooling remains not for every parent, and not for every child. We've been homeschooling Evangeline for kindergarten because she was reading-ready at 5 years old, but missed the cut-off date for our school district by two weeks. My experience is that the socialization that occurs in a school setting is usually destructive, rather than productive. Schools function on the law of club and fang, where people who are different are ostracized and put down, and we're made to feel ashamed of our differences, no matter how beneficial those differences are.
A charter school is different in that it's multi-grade level, so that Evangeline will interact with children who are older than her and are not dealing with the same issues she is, and therefore might actually be positive rather than destructive role models for her. It's also different in that there is a lot of parental involvement, which is usually somewhat difficult in a public school setting.
Well, we'll see what happens. She's said several times that she doesn't want to be homeschooled after kindergarten, so we're almost definitely going to enroll her at the charter school, I think. And I'll be there every step of the way with her.
Friday, February 25, 2005
a pleasant surprise
My conversation with the pastor at Zarephath Community Chapel surpassed my expectations by light years. It was positive, productive and deeply encouraging. Rob Cruver, the pastor, leapt several points upward in my estimation from this meeting.
One of the biggest things I carried away from this was Rob's genuine humility. I started off the meeting by saying essentially (but politely) that I was genuinely unsure of whether Zarephath is even the right place for me to attend. He didn't try to convince me that it was, not even once. That's virtually unprecedented in my experience.
He also didn't get defensive when I critiqued his sermons as shallow. He was a little taken aback, but he also admitted that I'm not the first person to tell him that he's not providing much for people to think about, and that he's going to have to put more effort into giving his sermons more oomph in the analysis and application departments.
I also mentioned that I got a little soured on the church by some of the political attitudes I encountered before the election. I've mentioned the one, where Eowyn's Sunday School teacher told me I shouldn't bother going to church if I was planning to vote for Kerry, but there were others. The political action bulletin board also has a ton of GOP campaign literature for the taking, and the Sunday before the election there was a reminder (not from the pulpit) that it was our Christian duty to elect professing Christians to office, because God's blessing is on such people, and they actively seek God's guidance, blah blah blah blah blah.
Well, Rob was disappointed that someone actually would be crass enough to link faith and the GOP to that extent, and apologized for it. He also explained that they had asked both political parties to provide their literature but the Democrats never came through, and what's more, he agreed with me that Christians often get one-sided in their allegiances when they try to infuse their faith into the political process. And it wasn't just a polite thing either; apparently the head of the Pillar of Fire Bible college on the church campus, when he came to the area a few years ago, was of the opinion that you couldn't be a Christian and vote Republican.
Rob said he would have to introduce the two of us, since he's sure we would hit it off fine.
Also nicely, we talked about our visions -- in Rob's case, for the church; in mine, for the sort of ministry I'd like to be involved with.
I used to head a drama ministry at my old church. There's been talk of starting a drama ministry at Zarephath as well, but nothing else public but talk. Well, apparently they've hired someone to head the drama ministry this August, and the guy they've hired has pretty much the same vision I'd had for our drama ministry back at Community Gospel Church. He wants to have dramas during the church service each week to lay the groundwork for or build upon the sermon, and he wants to do other things in the community. First is some sort of open-air evangelical outreach via drama -- the mere thought is enough to make me cringe, given the caliber of most evangelism through drama -- but he also wants to bring something to the community in terms of theater, by performing honest-to-gosh plays like "The Crucible" or "Death of a Salesman" that deal with eternal issues honestly without being distinctly Christian.
Wow. That's *exactly* what I would have loved to do at my old church, if we had been granted the breakthrough in numbers that we would have needed. (And in an area like this part of New Jersey, a theater presence would be a tremendous asset. We're an hour away from Broadway, and the two Tony-winning theaters outside New York are here in the area as well.)
So since it's evident that the two of us have similar visions for what it means to be serving God, I shared with Rob my vision for a community where the believers share all their possessions in common and use their freed-up wealth to reach out to the needy around them. He was visibly impressed with the vision, and said he'd love to see that happen, although he's uncertain how that would play out in New Jersey, where people drive 30 or 40 minutes to get to church, making community fairly difficult to cultivate. (My response was that even with that distance, there would still be pockets of church members who live fairly close together, and one goal should be to encourage a sense of community within those pockets, and to get people to view the church as a place we gather for worship on Sundays, and not as the place where all ministry and spiritual activity is centered.)
Anyway, it went well. So well in fact that he told me his chief goal right now is to get more people actively involved in discipleship relationships, where one person is committed to discipling three or four other men.
He asked me to consider being one of those leaders. I'm considering.
So. I'm impressed, and I was really pleased at how well this went today. I was bracing myself for a huge disappointment and a need to plunge back into the waters to find a church, but as I told my wife today, "If you want to keep attending this church, I'm a lot more open to it now than I was last week."
One of the biggest things I carried away from this was Rob's genuine humility. I started off the meeting by saying essentially (but politely) that I was genuinely unsure of whether Zarephath is even the right place for me to attend. He didn't try to convince me that it was, not even once. That's virtually unprecedented in my experience.
He also didn't get defensive when I critiqued his sermons as shallow. He was a little taken aback, but he also admitted that I'm not the first person to tell him that he's not providing much for people to think about, and that he's going to have to put more effort into giving his sermons more oomph in the analysis and application departments.
I also mentioned that I got a little soured on the church by some of the political attitudes I encountered before the election. I've mentioned the one, where Eowyn's Sunday School teacher told me I shouldn't bother going to church if I was planning to vote for Kerry, but there were others. The political action bulletin board also has a ton of GOP campaign literature for the taking, and the Sunday before the election there was a reminder (not from the pulpit) that it was our Christian duty to elect professing Christians to office, because God's blessing is on such people, and they actively seek God's guidance, blah blah blah blah blah.
Well, Rob was disappointed that someone actually would be crass enough to link faith and the GOP to that extent, and apologized for it. He also explained that they had asked both political parties to provide their literature but the Democrats never came through, and what's more, he agreed with me that Christians often get one-sided in their allegiances when they try to infuse their faith into the political process. And it wasn't just a polite thing either; apparently the head of the Pillar of Fire Bible college on the church campus, when he came to the area a few years ago, was of the opinion that you couldn't be a Christian and vote Republican.
Rob said he would have to introduce the two of us, since he's sure we would hit it off fine.
Also nicely, we talked about our visions -- in Rob's case, for the church; in mine, for the sort of ministry I'd like to be involved with.
I used to head a drama ministry at my old church. There's been talk of starting a drama ministry at Zarephath as well, but nothing else public but talk. Well, apparently they've hired someone to head the drama ministry this August, and the guy they've hired has pretty much the same vision I'd had for our drama ministry back at Community Gospel Church. He wants to have dramas during the church service each week to lay the groundwork for or build upon the sermon, and he wants to do other things in the community. First is some sort of open-air evangelical outreach via drama -- the mere thought is enough to make me cringe, given the caliber of most evangelism through drama -- but he also wants to bring something to the community in terms of theater, by performing honest-to-gosh plays like "The Crucible" or "Death of a Salesman" that deal with eternal issues honestly without being distinctly Christian.
Wow. That's *exactly* what I would have loved to do at my old church, if we had been granted the breakthrough in numbers that we would have needed. (And in an area like this part of New Jersey, a theater presence would be a tremendous asset. We're an hour away from Broadway, and the two Tony-winning theaters outside New York are here in the area as well.)
So since it's evident that the two of us have similar visions for what it means to be serving God, I shared with Rob my vision for a community where the believers share all their possessions in common and use their freed-up wealth to reach out to the needy around them. He was visibly impressed with the vision, and said he'd love to see that happen, although he's uncertain how that would play out in New Jersey, where people drive 30 or 40 minutes to get to church, making community fairly difficult to cultivate. (My response was that even with that distance, there would still be pockets of church members who live fairly close together, and one goal should be to encourage a sense of community within those pockets, and to get people to view the church as a place we gather for worship on Sundays, and not as the place where all ministry and spiritual activity is centered.)
Anyway, it went well. So well in fact that he told me his chief goal right now is to get more people actively involved in discipleship relationships, where one person is committed to discipling three or four other men.
He asked me to consider being one of those leaders. I'm considering.
So. I'm impressed, and I was really pleased at how well this went today. I was bracing myself for a huge disappointment and a need to plunge back into the waters to find a church, but as I told my wife today, "If you want to keep attending this church, I'm a lot more open to it now than I was last week."
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
return to new york
We return to New York on Wednesday afternoon, for another child model tryout.
Evangeline was chosen specifically by Hewlett Packard to come up for a go-see, so we have to be at the studio a little after 5 p.m. In the past, she's always been selected as part of a range -- i.e., every girl between 4 and 5 years old with brown eyes, or something similar -- but this time, they actually requested her specifically, so presumably her chances of being selected to earn $1,000 for college are a little better this time than in the past.
It would be nice. It's kind of a pain to go to New York -- it takes about an hour to get there by train, plus the time spent waiting for the train and subway, and then actually hiking around the city -- and it's not exactly cheap. Evangeline's now 5, so I have to pay for train tickets for both of us, which drives up the price. So two hours to the shoot, two hours back, and the actual appointment usually takes all of five or ten minutes. It's enough to take up your whole day.
On the bright side, it's time spent alone with her, so I value it all the more. We take a few books and read them if she's settled enough. The first couple trips she was too excited to do much, but the novelty has worn off somewhat. We'll also have to find a place to grab a bite to eat, since we'll be there around dinner time. (Here's hoping we find something nicer than McDonald's, but not too pricey either.)
Before we go, I have to call the gymnastics academy and see about scheduling a make-up class, since attending it won't leave us enough time to get to the studio with a comfortable safety cushion.
And naturally this is the night my insomnia decides to kick in and keep me up.
Evangeline was chosen specifically by Hewlett Packard to come up for a go-see, so we have to be at the studio a little after 5 p.m. In the past, she's always been selected as part of a range -- i.e., every girl between 4 and 5 years old with brown eyes, or something similar -- but this time, they actually requested her specifically, so presumably her chances of being selected to earn $1,000 for college are a little better this time than in the past.
It would be nice. It's kind of a pain to go to New York -- it takes about an hour to get there by train, plus the time spent waiting for the train and subway, and then actually hiking around the city -- and it's not exactly cheap. Evangeline's now 5, so I have to pay for train tickets for both of us, which drives up the price. So two hours to the shoot, two hours back, and the actual appointment usually takes all of five or ten minutes. It's enough to take up your whole day.
On the bright side, it's time spent alone with her, so I value it all the more. We take a few books and read them if she's settled enough. The first couple trips she was too excited to do much, but the novelty has worn off somewhat. We'll also have to find a place to grab a bite to eat, since we'll be there around dinner time. (Here's hoping we find something nicer than McDonald's, but not too pricey either.)
Before we go, I have to call the gymnastics academy and see about scheduling a make-up class, since attending it won't leave us enough time to get to the studio with a comfortable safety cushion.
And naturally this is the night my insomnia decides to kick in and keep me up.
Remembering Easton Assembly of God
Some of the best worship services I've ever been a part of were at Easton Assembly of God while I was a member there.
The preaching was excellent under the first pastor there too. Nothing lasts forever. I stuck around for about four more years after we hired a new pastor, but eventually left. It was the lackluster preaching, particularly the wrongheaded messages like "Christians should smile all the time if they have the joy of the Lord!", combined with increased dissatisfaction with the church's lack of interest in the community around it, that did it. The differences between me and the church's take on the gospel eventually started to really get at me.
Another reason I left was an overemphasis on glossolalia. The Baptism in the Holy Spirit is a trademark of the Assemblies of God. To their credit, I never heard anyone in authority claim that people who didn't speak in tongues weren't really Christians. But someone did tell me how mortified she was that I would presume to teach children's church without that gift.
The truth is, I'm a skeptical believer in the gift of tongues. I've yet to hear a reasonable biblical argument against the continued existence of glossolalia as a gift of the Holy Spirit.
I believe the Holy Spirit can inspire people to speak either in a human language they don't know or in a heavenly language, but I can only think of one instance where I believe I might have witnessed it. In that particular case, the utterance had a lot of repetition, enough so that there was a recognizable structure to the language. The interpretation came out with the same manner of repetition.
Other times I've heard alleged messages in tongues, the interpretations were incomprehensible mishmashes of contemporary and King James English; they were so vague that they were meaningless; and so on. Usually, when I've heard people praying in tongues in church, it goes against what Paul sets down for guidelines about speaking in tongues in 1 Corinthians.
Most ecstatic utterances in tongues appear to be just that -- ecstatic utterances born entirely of the human spirit, with nothing divine about them. Spoken tongues like that are found in other religions, notably at least one sect of Islam, and have been practiced by heretics throughout church history.
As to an utterance in a language unknown to the speaker but known to a listener, I've heard stories about that happening, but I have no way of knowing if there's any truth to them, so I don't bother to enter them as evidence one way or the other.
I don't particularly disbelieve in glossolalia, but I don't believe I've seen more than one legitimate instance of it in my life. I do believe I've seen enough error, confused doctrine, abuse and misuse of the gift, and just muddled thinking to convince someone who's already skeptical that the whole thing is a fraud.
I will say that I've been tempted to use my knowledge of Haitian Creole during a worship service to order a large pepperoni pizza with an order of breadsticks and a bottle of Coke, and wait for the interpretation, but that's something that's amusing only in concept. It would be incredibly disrespectful to actually do it.
I left Easton Assembly of God years ago. I went to visit the church about 2½ years ago, when my foster son was with us, because I needed to get away for a little.
The worship is almost all done on an organ now and has none of the brilliance that made it work before, and the pastor's preaching is just as awful as ever. A lot of the church leaders from when I was a member have gone (not all), and it seemed a duller place than ever.
The preaching was excellent under the first pastor there too. Nothing lasts forever. I stuck around for about four more years after we hired a new pastor, but eventually left. It was the lackluster preaching, particularly the wrongheaded messages like "Christians should smile all the time if they have the joy of the Lord!", combined with increased dissatisfaction with the church's lack of interest in the community around it, that did it. The differences between me and the church's take on the gospel eventually started to really get at me.
Another reason I left was an overemphasis on glossolalia. The Baptism in the Holy Spirit is a trademark of the Assemblies of God. To their credit, I never heard anyone in authority claim that people who didn't speak in tongues weren't really Christians. But someone did tell me how mortified she was that I would presume to teach children's church without that gift.
The truth is, I'm a skeptical believer in the gift of tongues. I've yet to hear a reasonable biblical argument against the continued existence of glossolalia as a gift of the Holy Spirit.
I believe the Holy Spirit can inspire people to speak either in a human language they don't know or in a heavenly language, but I can only think of one instance where I believe I might have witnessed it. In that particular case, the utterance had a lot of repetition, enough so that there was a recognizable structure to the language. The interpretation came out with the same manner of repetition.
Other times I've heard alleged messages in tongues, the interpretations were incomprehensible mishmashes of contemporary and King James English; they were so vague that they were meaningless; and so on. Usually, when I've heard people praying in tongues in church, it goes against what Paul sets down for guidelines about speaking in tongues in 1 Corinthians.
Most ecstatic utterances in tongues appear to be just that -- ecstatic utterances born entirely of the human spirit, with nothing divine about them. Spoken tongues like that are found in other religions, notably at least one sect of Islam, and have been practiced by heretics throughout church history.
As to an utterance in a language unknown to the speaker but known to a listener, I've heard stories about that happening, but I have no way of knowing if there's any truth to them, so I don't bother to enter them as evidence one way or the other.
I don't particularly disbelieve in glossolalia, but I don't believe I've seen more than one legitimate instance of it in my life. I do believe I've seen enough error, confused doctrine, abuse and misuse of the gift, and just muddled thinking to convince someone who's already skeptical that the whole thing is a fraud.
I will say that I've been tempted to use my knowledge of Haitian Creole during a worship service to order a large pepperoni pizza with an order of breadsticks and a bottle of Coke, and wait for the interpretation, but that's something that's amusing only in concept. It would be incredibly disrespectful to actually do it.
I left Easton Assembly of God years ago. I went to visit the church about 2½ years ago, when my foster son was with us, because I needed to get away for a little.
The worship is almost all done on an organ now and has none of the brilliance that made it work before, and the pastor's preaching is just as awful as ever. A lot of the church leaders from when I was a member have gone (not all), and it seemed a duller place than ever.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
left feeling cold
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.
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.
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.
Tweet
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.
Tweet
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
