Thanks for Driving

“Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”      — Simone Weil

Sam Scoville is my Facebook friend of some years. We share similar upbringing, similar make-up. We've shared some startling conversations about life's real and painful things. Sam is a walking confessional and a skilled trickster. Moreover, he's a practiced truth-teller.

At Warren Wilson College, Sam's job is to jump-start the thinking of first-year students and to introduce them to their brains. It's a job that requires some initial demolition. His class is like a surprise Pamplona. Students come to shop for trinkets— koans of thinking to display in their heirloom cases— and then Sam springs the bulls. There is a lot breakage.

Sam gets to the elemental things and supplies the objectivity to sort through the litter left on the ground. Questioning words, meanings and mythologies help challenge fragile concepts of identity, authority, love and other souvenirs of off-the-shelf culture. It's unsettling for a first-timer. They're confused and complain. But getting run out of the garden shops and into the street is necessary. Does that seem harsh?

Did you ever notice that Adam is banished using the same word Mark's gospel chases Jesus into the wilderness with? The word is driven . And the Spirit of Truth is doing the driving.

Truth's harshness is a judgment we might make before the fact. Its benefits may occur to us in retrospect. But truth is its own justification and exists above our ability to imagine it, much less articulate it. As such it is pure adventure, treacherous and compelling. It is a wild and scenic river we go with as it drives us—to see, think and respond with clarity.

Everything else we'd load our lives with is baggage. Four gospels invoke the great commission of the Christ to “go.” We don't desire it. But the once-spoken logos is gone and still going, so the Spirit of Truth breaks in and drives us to follow. No bag. No purse. No sandals.

Just go.

Genesis and the Fig Tree: The Creative Life

I got lost in it and didn’t hear her at first. “It’s time to go,” my mother called out from the back porch of our neighbor’s house. Mr. Roberts lived alone, the oldest man in the neighborhood, over a 100 years old. I thought the fig tree must be that old—it was massive. It was easy to get lost inside the leafy, twisting branches. The tree, while two or three times taller than my ten-year-old self, also spread over a good quarter of Mr. Roberts’ backyard.

While my mother had a cup of coffee with our neighbor, I circled around in the tree’s low-lying branches, content to be by myself. Leafy doors to “rooms” inside this treehouse opened before me. Other branches bowered over me, the leaves crossing one another to make ceilings, yet there were plenty of skylights, too. When I brushed against the fig leaves, they set off a spicy smell like cinnamon and nutmeg.

My young mind was hooked, enchanted. I sat in one spot a while and made up stories of the fortunate girl living inside this extraordinary home, in charge of her siblings, because she was the only one who knew how to navigate the halls and rooms. I couldn’t live there for long, however. After a short half-hour, it was time to go home.

My mom and I walked home, just up the street. There, I wasn’t in charge. Home was a houseful of brothers, ever-active and more competitive than I was, particularly my oldest brother, who seemed to live and breathe just to taunt me or best me or race me. The only place I could be myself, it seemed, was in my imagination.

So I’d made my closet into a little room to hide myself away, a place where I could read or draw or live in my thoughts. This may be the real genesis of my creative life, but it is always connected to that fig tree, too. My closet wasn’t exactly a lovely place: it held a shelf of my toys, clothes skewed on hangers and hooks, shoes, and dust bunnies. The fig tree, by contrast, was a natural wonder and brightened all my senses.

Its huge leaves and swirling branches have charged my imagination all my life. I’ve got other early memories of fig trees. My grandmother and grandfather in central Texas, near Austin, had a huge backyard garden where they grew pomegranates, figs, tomatoes, squash, and beans. I felt that same state of wonder when I helped harvest the pomegranates or figs, or worked down the garden rows with my grandmother, picking the vegetables.

I’ve found I’m partial to stories that mention the fig tree, too, a tree which has been around since biblical times. There’s Katherine Anne Porter’s story “The Fig Tree” and Barbara Pym’s novel  A Glass of Blessings. Fig trees complicate and enliven the sacred stories as well. They appear in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden. The trees fed the first humans their plump fruits. I can see how the fig tree also made a convenient place to hide. And the amazing leaves—of course they could be used for a quick covering. Adam and Eve sewed the first clothes from fig leaves.

Included in the promise of the Promised Land is the fig. This place, sought by God’s people, was  “a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey” (Deuteronomy 8.8, NIV). The fig tree also makes its appearance in other books of the Bible. George Tsakiridis, in “Vine and Fig Tree,” commented that George Washington often used the phrase “under their vine and fig tree” in his correspondence. He says Washington was referring most likely to Micah 4.4: “But they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”

For Washington, the phrase symbolically indicated “the independence of the peasant farmer who is freed from military oppression,” an apt image that early American settlers aspired to. Washington’s own fondness for life at Mount Vernon can be tied to this image, his own place “under the vine and fig tree.” I think this is the pull of the fig tree for me as well. It represents the place of my independence, where my imagination took hold, and I began to grow aesthetically and intellectually.

Ordinary Round Moments

 

• I cheated again at Centering Prayer.

• Instead of repeating one sacred word, I contemplated the weight of my prayer beads.  Or rather, their lightness, how they rest in my palm like a cloud.

• Each wooden bead is a container for hundreds of prayers.  The cumbersome words are an unfinished painting.

• There is an eye on each bead.

• Really, these are knots.  They are the connective tissue from when the wood was part of a tiny branch—the place where the branch met the body of the tree.

• I roll the beads between thumb and forefinger.  Often, there are no words—only the hope I am pushing toward something.

• I try to ease into uncertainty.

• There is a squirrel storing acorns inside our house.

• My brother-in-law has Stage 4 cancer.

• A woman will likely be executed tonight in Georgia.  Not even the Pope could sway the clemency board.

• Seeing Jesus in the eyes of everyone we pass is an act of resurrection. Rarely do I practice this kind of medicine.

• Buried beneath my anxiety is a young woman, deeply shaken by the sudden deaths of friends.

• At a recent ordination, love rolled inside the sanctuary like a pinball. Give your clever talents over I heard in a hymn. They spilled out as tears.

• I could not hide my face.

• I want to be like the woman who sings at the oddest times.

• Today, my loved ones are alive.

• I need things to push against in order to give shape to a day.

• The catch phrase, life is short, catches me in all the wrong ways.

• Dang it.

• I may already be living my dream.

• I listen to a favorite song and hear familiar words for the first time, words like cool water, elegant and true. I make them my own, and they move between the beads.

• Roll and push and touch our perfect bodies with your mind.  Touch our perfect bodies with your mind. Hear this broken meditation and touch our perfect bodies with your mind.

The One You Know vs. The One You Need

I had a really good idea a few weeks ago. I was going to dance, teach dance, and sell brightly-colored spandex thereby reinventing and mastering the concept of a triple threat. I was already doing the first two, and was spending the few minutes before a job interview meandering around a store of overpriced workout attire so I could accomplish the third. The hiring manager rounded up two other hopefuls and led us to an empty table in front of a Nordstrom’s Cafe.  

“Did you know this was going to be a group interview?” one of them asked quietly. “I had no idea,” she said. “But maybe we’ll all get hired together.”  

“That would be so cool.” The other girl said. I smiled and nodded wondering just how many positions there were to be filled. 

“So this is a super casual interview,” the manager said smiling. “As you guys probably know we are all about helping all types of women. We really want every woman to feel comfortable from the outside in, and we just want to get to know and figure out where you’d fit within the company. So just go ahead and introduce yourself and just tell us why you want to work here.”  

That is a question I have always hated. "I like to eat food, and my landlord won't let me pay him in experience and bragging rights," though perfectly true, isn’t exactly the answer potential employers want to hear. 

During a mock group interview, in college, the presenter posed a question, “If you could be any type of tree what kind would you be and why?”  

"I'd be a Christmas tree,” I said, “because it's a symbol that represents a time of year that makes a lot of people happy regardless of whether celebrate the actual holiday."   

The boy next to me answered, “I’d be a carrot tree because I’m unlike other you’ve ever seen.”  He was pleased with himself, and the workshop leader thought his answer was memorable and clever. I disagreed. The reason you have never seen a carrot tree is because carrots do not grow on trees, and if they did it would be an entirely different plant. The fact that he didn’t know this mean that he either did not absorb or retain information or didn’t eat vegetables which would result in a host of health problems and neither of those things would be very useful to the company. 

That, however, is the type of thing we do in those situations. We try to be remembered and impressive. We paint a picture of ourselves that adheres to what we think people want to see. I’d argue that one of the most detrimental things you can do in an interview is believe them when they say, “We want to see that real you.”  In most cases, what they really want is to see if you fit into the strangely snapped box they created before they knew that you ever existed. And we want to fit. No one seems to grow out of the elementary school need to fit in with the kids who have what we don’t, and so, like the line of dancers, in the musical, A Chorus Line, we step-kick-kick and smile on cue all while singing “I really need this job. Please, God, I need this job. I’ve got to get this job!”

“Tell us about a time when you received great customer service at. It can be at any store. It doesn’t have to be here," said the manager.

“Starbucks,” I said, automatically. I told them how the baristas knew my name, would notice when I hadn’t been in for a while, and how they knew that something was wrong when I ordered a white mocha. “I know they aren’t my friends,” I said, “but I would go out of my way to go to that Starbucks because it felt like they knew me.”  

The other girls nodded and hummed, and then they proceeded to say that they loved shopping at the very establishment that had gathered us together that afternoon for an interview. As an explanation, they both offered individualized versions of what sounded to me like “Blah blah blah blah blah bloppity bloopity bloop bloop.”  The manager applauded the other applicants for their answers and said how their experiences were really what the company was about, “We just want to help each person find that one item of clothing that makes them feel beautiful on the outside so they can start to make changes on the inside.”  

I felt so betrayed and annoyed, naming the company you are interviewing for as your favorite store is the equivalent of reminding your teacher that he forgot to give you homework. It is sucking up 101. It is deplorable behavior that warrants being ignored at recess, and for the life of me,  I cannot tell you why I didn't do it.

In the introduction of Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warnings: Fictions and Disturbances, he writes, “I find myself, at the start of each flight, meditating and pondering the wisdom offered by the flight attendants as if it were a koan, or a tiny parable, or the high point of all wisdom.” With a mother as a flight attendant and the Philadelphia International Airport on my list favorite places I grew up hearing the pre-flight instructions, but until that moment they had never been about more than oxygen. Secure your own mask before helping others. “I think about the need to help others,” Gaiman writes, "and how we mask ourselves to do it and how unmasking makes us vulnerable.” He goes on to describe people who “trade fictions for a living.” He was talking about authors, but sitting in the group interview answering questions that aimed to prove that I would be of some value to this national corporation, I’m pretty sure everyone does it. 

The manager rolled our applications into a tube and shoved them into the pocket of her jacket. “It was nice to meet you girls.We will call you by Monday if we have a place for you.” Instead of walking back to my car, I rode up the escalator and walked to Starbucks.

“Hey!” the barista said pulling out sharpie and preparing to mark the familiar green and white cup. “What are we doing for you today?”  

“Hi,” I said, “Can I have a grande white mocha, please?”  he nodded, scanned my phone, and told my drink would be ready soon. When the cup came, I took a swig. On the white lid was the shape of my mouth printed in a wine-colored shade of lipgloss called "Desire."  I took another sip and sighed. 

Placemaking and the Garden

The yard that envelops my dentist's building is a shade garden that can only be seen from his treatment rooms. Deep green foliage bobs and sun beams play as breezes tousle the leafy canopies. Dental chairs in each room face tall, broad windows that look out on the garden. Each view is peaceful and verdant though the remaining sensations are clinical: the reclined leather chair, the focused light, the antiseptic smell of the room.

This separation registers in me as a dissonance, a counter-intuitive gift, that we live in view of an Edenic garden and remember its fruit as we suffer our failing teeth. We have tasted what creation can be in our work, our relations and with God, and we desire it be that way forever. Once it was all joy and now we must count it so. Once we lived where heaven touched the earth and now we gather in worship. Once we ate from the King's garden and now we work for it. Once as near-gods we walked with God, now we lift our common longing in the cool of the day.

Moses considered all this in his words to the Israelite people. The great creation stories that came before held a low view of humanity, save for its royalty. He knew those stories and understood their power to influence a people. So when he told the story of Yahweh's creation, he began in an ordered garden and the animals that had been the inspiration for Egypt's gods were under the dominion of mankind. And more, the One God of the earth and stars would be present in creation and still far above it. It was a polemical declaration of independence from the many impetuous, hungry tyrant-gods they left. And it conveys to us that it was the place where humanity lived in creative harmony with the Creator and where the people that labored in the garden were free to feast in it.

We sense its reality somehow, and likewise, we feel despair with Adam and Eve as they must leave it. We may imagine those days begin as a fast where they spend endless hours in a shadeless plain dirtying their knees digging and planting. We may watch them as they lie prostrate before the fiery swords of the cherubim, mimic the blood sacrifice that covers them still and offer a captured fowl in meager penitence. There they may pine into the night for restored intimacy with their Maker. And when they can no longer endure the pain of hunger, they may eat the burnt bird and suffer again its reminder of their sin. This, day on day, as they wait for the seed of the earth to bear, is not foreign to us.

Moses' great story taps the origin of our own emptiness and desires. Yet, is it true? Was a man made of dust? Does a snake talk? Did Eden exist? What does its mythology do to its truth? Might these details build a wall around the garden that limits its access?

There is a way in which the question of its literal nature does not matter in that we easily find ourselves whether in the garden or outside its gates. This does no harm to its historicity which we cannot know. But, in this way it is more real and present to us than any capability of fact could imbue.

In another way its other-worldly impossibilities help us focus on what's important. Moses' world is our world and what's extraordinary is its ordinariness. We long. We desire. We go on. We hope. And he invites us to enter the garden as our own place of beginning, seed it with our own details and tend it as it flowers and fruits.

The Cantrip of Words

My mother once asked us kids if we’d rather spend our February vacation at Disney World or spend a week at a camp in the middle of Maine. It was unanimous. Vacation would be in sub-zero temperatures. We’d jump off the A-frame cabin roof into fifteen-foot snow drifts. Walk across a frozen Ironbound Pond. Invent card games. Watch bad movies. Eat pancakes. Use an outhouse.

It was a shorter drive to the camp than to Disney World, but it felt like hours. Time is a curse of childhood. At the end of the trip there was a mile or so one-lane dirt road. It wound up and down and through a thick pine forest. Once the tires hit this road, whether it was dirt and gravel or packed slick with snow, the singing began:

We’re going up, up, up, to touch the sky. We’re going down, down, down, to touch the ground!

It wasn’t a lyrical song, but the words had meaning. It meant we were almost to a certain place. And we sang it on repeat until we reached that place. And my dad would take that final curve before the last hill so, so, so quickly.

Words are a legend, a key to understanding place. “Landmarks” is a book by British travel/nature writer Robert Macfarlane. It is obsessed with words. For Macfarlane the terrain, earth, quoting Proust, is “magnificently surcharged” with words that “bind story to place”. He tenaciously records hundreds of words of the British Isles and their meanings, “words act as a compass.” It is a book preserving the literacy of landscape, recognizing the “the power of certain terms to enchant our relation” to place.

Madeleine L’Engle said that “if we settle for a few shopworn words we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator.” Macfarlane’s book has words that confound the dictatorial spellchecker. But a word like rionnach maoim describes an event I have witnessed — shadows cast on the mountain by clouds moving quickly on a windy day — and now, knowing it has a name—that it is Named— affords me “the joy and privilege of incarnation”.

Our family spent a lot of summers, too, going to that place in the woods in the middle of Maine, to the place my grandparents built five decades before, and each time we sang our song. I sang, solo, the final time I made the trek. Then it was with my wife and our son, who was one at the time. It was a few months after Grammie passed away and already it had became too much for Grampie to maintain. It was time to sell it.

Macfarlane says words have a magic spell, a cantrip, and uttering them allows a place to be sung “back into being, to sing one’s being back into it.”

I miss Grammie and Grampie’s Camp.

The Internet: The Least Final Frontier

Late at night in the mid 1990s, I dialed into the World Wide Web for the first time.

With an unmapped continent at my fingertips, I first discovered the familiar: I downloaded the opening credits of my favorite television show, PBS’s Wishbone. (I was 7 years old.)

I didn’t know it then, but that pixelated and drag ridden video revealed one of the Internet’s greatest gifts—immortality. Here, in the backlit glow, we can live forever.

With each round of Webby awards, the constraints of the Internet are challenged and acknowledged. We are in awe of our human endeavors. We circumnavigate the world from our rectangular screens. Just this morning, I saw photographs of Antarctica, I read my favorite New York Times article from 2010 about Eddie Feibusch and his zipper business, I watched Nicole Kidman’s monologue from the 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut.

But amid all of this progress, the website for the movie Space Jam has never been updated or decommissioned. Michael Jordan is still teaming up with the Looney Toons to take prevent an alien invasion. I can still download a limited edition Space Jam cursor. We are trapped in a timeless time. The past continues alongside the present and future. Nothing is a limited edition. Nothing ends.

In my newest obsession, Gimlet’s podcast, Reply All, Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt dig deep into a story about the Internet. Their episodes run the gambit of subject matter, which more than anything else is a testament to the diversity and evolution of the net. With each episode, something that is so familiar, something I use everyday and am using right now (and so are you), is made mysterious. It is like that first time again, waiting for the dial-up tone to open like a door.

Isn’t this the same mystery I experience when the sunlight falls on my floor in an unusual pattern, when an iridescent beetle crosses my path, when the clouds clear and the moon hangs heavy and low and orange? It’s a joy of discovery. Of feeling, for a moment, like the only person alive. Of pushing to the next best thing and knowing your footsteps will trail behind you.

Our cyber fingerprints are on everything, but it is the sense of wonder and discovery that is the gift. It is fleeting. It is mysterious.

When I Talk About Mud Runs

So maybe I have a hyper-competitive side; it’s been present since my youth. In Little League baseball, I was the first kid in my city ever ejected from a game. I’m also still bitter about the time I lost a foot race against Howard Schaap.

So at 35 with diminishing athletic skills, I find it harder than ever to satiate that nature. But I have to try, right?

This past month I ran another obstacle course race (OCR). Six miles through mud, ice baths, barbed wire crawls, log hurdles, creek sprints, and fire jumps. The terrain: a ski slope. This was my fifth OCR; it was the hardest. My wife, now a veteran of these races herself, asked me why I run in them—we were at the starting gate. It is the kind of question that goes unanswered when you’re staring up a thousand foot incline, as we were. The motionless chair lift above mocked like gargoyles.

The answer—if there is one, I think it changes—is also the answer to why I write and have faith. But to say “I just do,” empties the habit. There’s a grueling beauty present in endurance, though it abides like pebbles in your shoe. I might be justified in abandoning any task the second it sees the slope upward. But I don’t. Not even after weeks of writing draft after draft of a story that still exposes itself as shitty as that first draft. I don’t abandon my faith because I live in a world that doesn’t have the sense to get itself “undamned.”

So when I talk about mud runs and writing and faith, I know I’m talking about why I need community. I desire to be surrounded by people of all abilities pursuing the same end. Some who know that feeling of finishing a story. Or can scale a muddy twelve foot wall in three bounding leaps (let’s see you do that, Howard!). Or know, what Christian Wiman describes, as the “moments when we reflect a mercy and mystery that are greater than we are.”

I believe and write and race because others reach a hand down over the ledge and pull me from the muck. They say a part of the creed for me that I cannot say, uncover a character’s motivations I could not identify.

When I talk about mud runs and writing and faith though, I’m also talking about how sometimes it’s only me against me. And how I just have to sink the balls of my feet into the mud and ascend.

The Power of Humor

Twice a year or so, my boyfriend Dave starts showing me YouTube videos and makes me question our relationship.

I mean, not really. I wouldn’t actually end our relationship over the YouTube videos he shows me. But I do look at some of them and wonder what on Earth he finds funny about the things he finds on the Internet.

Dave has a particular appreciation for surreal humor which, I will freely admit, I do not share. Shows like Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job!; Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule; Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared; and others are so awkward and weird that they make me almost physically uncomfortable. He’s always maintained that they were “actually really smart entertainment” and would joke that someday my sense of humor would evolve to be on his level.

He actually had a point. The more I started paying attention to the shows he watched (although I often watched them under protest), the more I realized that they weren’t just awkward, uncomfortable shows. They were satirical shows that took common television tropes—cringe-worthy late-night television shows, family-friendly prime time sitcoms, children’s shows, etc.—and exaggerated them to the point that they became surrealist commentaries on life as we know it.

These shows aren’t the first of their kind, either. Surreal humor has long been used by authors and playwrights to comment on society. It really became popular with the dawn of postmodernism, which, in the aftermath of World War II, became the dominant zeitgeist of a society dealing with a destabilized world and a deep distrust of authority. Surrealist humor was a way for people to deal with political and social uncertainty, the tension of the Cold War, the rapidly-accelerating development of technology, and morphing religious and moral norms.

No wonder surrealist humor is alive and well! Today, world politics are tense. War is everywhere. Technology is increasingly advanced and intrusive. Constant scandals have further weakened trust in established governments, religions, and social figures. Our generation’s surrealist humor has moved off of the stage and onto the Internet, but it’s still wrestling with the issues addressed by Samuel Beckett and others. They deal with topics like the ever-pervasive Internet, the idea of teaching children with television, concepts of identity in a digital world, and fame.

I’m still not a fan of Dave’s shows. Watching a bunch of puppets devolve into shrieking, hysterical versions of themselves as they delve into the Internet is not fun for me. Steve Brule makes me cringe. But I understand how they’re “smart humor” (even though I still roll my eyes at the “your-humor-will-evolve” joke), and I understand why they’re important.

Who knows? Maybe, someday, people will watch Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared like we read Samuel Beckett. We might not love them, but we’ll see more clearly how significant they are.

Lenny Bruce

I get a lot of reading done sitting on the can. Evidently there’s something about filling my nostrils with my own stench that also makes me want to fill my mind. If I were smarter I’d conduct some Pavlovian-type research to see if the smell of crap actually increases my brain’s neuroplasticity. (DAMN. There’s a word that’ll make you slap your mama upside the prefrontal cortex. But let me tell on myself: Wikipedia.) Right next to my commode is a basket of books and magazines. The current selections include Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water, a Runner’s World that’s a couple of months old, some magazines about parenting and, from 1967, The Essential Lenny Bruce. It’s an original edition. Musty, with brittle pages and those tiny bugs that crawl up from the binding once in awhile (which straight up give me the creeps. After all I routinely open the book inches above my exposed junk.) Anyway, The Essential Lenny Bruce is nothing more than his act transcribed onto the page.

Lenny Bruce, the original filthy comic. He nailed topics like drugs, politics, pornography, religion(s), and made gorgeous art out of the word “motherfucker” while his contemporaries were riffing on their wives’ terrible cooking. Bruce got arrested all the time for the stuff he said. Sometimes the cops would climb up on stage and collar him right in front of the audience. How’s that for a show?

Lenny Bruce, the original comic’s comic. Bruce was light years ahead of his time. Without Lenny Bruce, you can forget about George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, Roseanne Barr, Dennis Leary, David Letterman, Louis CK. The list goes on. Though I have a feeling we’d still be cursed with Andrew Dice Clay, Yakov Smirnoff, Dane Cook…it is a fallen world after all.

Lenny Bruce, an original modern prophet. Howzat? Yeah. Now, I think God is pretty funny. I mean, the Divine has a sense of humor and it’s kind of sick if you think about it. Dig. We Christian types like to say stuff about the Judeo-Christian prophets like, “Well, that was a different time and after Jesus, you know, we didn’t need prophets anymore so God doesn’t, you know, work like that. Anymore.” I’ll bet He does. Probably all the time. It’s just that we Christian types don’t hang around where His prophets do. That’s funny, man.

Of course it goes without saying that the Christian types chased Lenny Bruce around in his day. “Motherfucker” was just their cover. Bruce was more than dirty words. He stuck it to them right in the heart and it made them twitch. So they called him immoral and they all wrote him off. For bits like this: Imagining Jesus and Moses walking into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, Bruce said:

Christ and Moses standing in the back of St. Pat's, looking around. Confused, Christ is, at the grandeur of the interior, the baroque interior, the rocoque baroque interior. Because his route took him through Spanish Harlem, and he was wondering what the hell fifty Puerto Ricans were doing living in one room when that stained glass window is worth ten G's a square foot? And this guy had a ring worth eight grand. Why weren't the Puerto Ricans living here? That was the purpose of church—for the people.

Some comic material goes with the times in which it was created and only with those times. It lacks the universality to propel it through the generations. I’m thinking of Mike Myers thrusting his crotch at the camera. “Shwing!” It’s irrelevant now and can only be appreciated in an ironic sense even if it does elicit laughter. But imagine Bruce’s bit above as it pertains to now. Replace the words “St. Pat’s” with “Willow Creek Community Church,” “Spanish Harlem” with “East Garfield Park” and “stained glass window” with “sound system.” Fifty years later and it still hangs true. I call that a motherfucking prophecy.

From the Mouths of Grandmothers

My fathers’ siblings, the story goes, had no idea their mother was pregnant with him until they were mysteriously sent to stay with relatives and then brought home a few days later to find a baby in the house. My grandparents were not alone in this failure to communicate. From other stories I’ve heard, one might say this was a cultural non-practice of the time.

Sure, there was a flipside: I had a funny great uncle who, my sisters tell me, doubled as a dirty old man. Still, in a culture impossibly opposite to the extreme sexual reticence of my grandparents, it’s tempting to think of these days-gone-by as somehow modest.

That’s the way it goes in a culture of opposition, it seems to me: we become able to conceive—no pun intended—of only two extremes.

Perhaps this is why I found the character of Grandma Thunder in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House so refreshing. Erdrich introduces Grandma Ignatia Thunder as one of those “Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young.” The young man whom she primarily shocks is Joe Coutts, the adolescent narrator, who, upon visiting her house to get fresh fry bread and goulash, warns his friends to steer clear of any word she might twist into a double entendre—even words such as “hot,” “head,” and “come.”

The boys think they’ve successfully navigated the visit when another elderly woman drops by and uses the word “bony,” setting Grandma Thunder off on a bawdy tale that has the young men both blushing and transfixed. It’s a tale, as I understand it, very much within the oral tradition, full of both comedy and passion that—coming as they do from Grandma Thunder’s mouth—add up to real sex. And within the context of a novel whose central crime and metaphor is rape, Grandma Thunder’s sexual storytelling is both a hilarious and profoundly healing moment.

In fact, I’m advocating for more of it: more hilarious and healing sexual storytelling from the mouths of grandmothers.

Here’s my own experience: once, leaving for a date with a girlfriend from her apartment, her grandmother hollered something after us. The girlfriend, who would become my wife, scoffed, shook her head, blushed. “What’d she say?” I asked. Grandma Mouth (“Moot”), a Lao matriarch who spoke almost no English and occasionally chewed betel nuts, spitting an impossibly red-maroon spit into empty Folger’s cans, was utterly unpredictable to me.

“She said, ‘Don’t let him put his . . . in your . . .’”

As a young man, tempted to think I was discovering something that was anything but new in the world, it was a moment of humor and humility that I didn’t forget all through that night.

Or ever after.

Cameras and Community

In the spring of 2006, a crew of 400 volunteers converted the inside of a rented F-18 aircraft hanger into a working camera. The shutter was the size of a pinhole. The film was a 3,375-square-foot-emulsion-coated canvas that covered the entire back wall. The photo consisted of everything that could be seen outside the front door of the hanger. Everything. Once exposed, the film was developed in an Olympic-sized-swimming-pool liner. The net result was a landscape photograph that was three stories high and eleven stories wide. The unprecedented achievement was celebrated by holding a reception for the entire volunteer crew in the camera!

I sometimes think about that camera when I'm worshiping in church. To begin to understand the depths and riches and wonders of our God, to capture a sense of Him, to reflect and represent Him, takes something larger than me or you. It takes community. It takes people with different experiences. It takes people with different tastes. It even takes people I might not normally hang out with. People who are more staid and traditional than I am. People who are more audacious and expressive. Presbyterians and Pentecostals. Methodists and Mennonites. Congregationalists and Catholics. To begin to reflect and represent the depths and riches and wonders of God takes a worshiping community. It even takes sermons I would rather not hear, and music that rubs me the wrong way, and liturgies that do not line up with my immediate preferences.

Or maybe I'll just stay home and fiddle with my iPhone camera.

The Grip of Entertainment

I went to a casino for the first time several weeks ago. I am as numb to stimuli as the next person, but in that place, I felt an extreme sensory overload. Bright, flashing, loud, smoky, and crowded, every sense assaulted. Curiosity and excitement melted into confusion—I had no idea how to do nearly anything in that place—and then into a sadness that reminded me very much of how I eventually came to feel about strip clubs, about 15 years ago. I lost what little money I committed beforehand to losing in about half an hour, mostly over a half-dozen hands or so of blackjack. I wandered outside into the cold, clearer air and began earnestly trying to justify to myself the urge to get a little more cash out of a little machine that sponges dollars from far away bank accounts so I could play a little more. That’s all I’m doing here, I told myself: just playing. The signs everywhere confirmed this: we are all here just for entertainment’s sake, just for fun, you see. Later that night, riding home with my old friends I spoke up out of a prolonged silence: “That was a great place to make some terrible decisions,” I said.

I didn’t really get angry until the next day, in the morning as I had my coffee and journaled and tried to sort out the previous night’s expedition. All the signage about entertainment is what got me, gets me still. I saw faces of people likely having a great time. I saw others that I’m sure were hiding ruin and addiction and wreckage I can’t even bear to imagine much about. “Entertainment” comes to us by way of the late Middle English, before that, the French, and on back to some glued up Latin. “Among” and “to hold.” I don’t know how to put those things together, but the last bit arrests, holds me: we are entertained when we are held by something. When our eyes, mostly, are held by something, and they, in their turn, hold onto something else: let’s say our attention, let’s say our hearts. Let’s say awe diluted to silent gorging; let’s say wonder diminished to wandering curiosity; let’s say praise transmuted into bastardized worship: we cheer and call for more and more, already on our knees and we know not who our Daddy is, as we are entertained, just here for some fun, held, among others, in whatever audience.

I think “entertainment” and I think first of a king slouched on his throne, bored in his court, who calls for his jester. I don’t care about the jester or his act right now, it’s the king I see: him who does not see, who will not look out on what he has been given to rule. He would see only problems to be dealt with, if he did, or faceless subjects with nothing to offer him but troubles and a dirty throne room floor. He cannot delight in what is his, so bring me someone, bring me something that will at least amuse me, if delight is so out of the question, he roars, and enter the jester in his suit and bells. He is a foolish king, I see, and false to his calling, his kingdom, even to his bored and all too human self.

And then I imagine what I cannot see: how unlike him the King is. The one who sees and is not bored. The one who cares most deeply for what he has made, and what he rules, and what he was given. The King that will not be held by any one or thing against his will and yet sits enthroned and arrested by his children he delights in, calling them before his throne, name by name.

Imogen's Disney Books

I love to read to my kids. Imogen, my eldest daughter, has a particular set of Disney books. They’re uber-condensed versions of Disney’s biggest animated movies—Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and several others. The set, though, came with a reader. It’s this little push-pad device that lets you choose which of the books you want to read and then there’s this syrupy voice that reads whatever book you chose. You have to push certain buttons on the device to cue the voice that you’re done with one page and that it can start reading the next one. Concurrently, you physically turn the book’s pages. But even though the voice does my job for me, Imogen always wants me to sit with her while it reads to her. Or to us. (That she wants me to sit with her warms the cockles of my father-heart, by the way. This I will cherish when she is sixteen and curses me because I won’t let her date “Octopus the Maladjusted Senior*.”) Because I’m not doing the reading, I find myself paying attention to the books in a way that I don’t when I am reading them.

I’ll be the first to admit that I know jack about feminism. I think men and women should be treated equally, and that’s about all I know. I wish I could give you a smart-sounding dissertation on gender roles. I can’t. But I noticed something in Imogen's books. In some of the books, the female protagonist, the princess, is functionally a mannequin. Like, Cinderella? Nothing that happens in the story is her fault, whether for good or bad. She doesn’t cause anything. She doesn’t choose to go to the ball, for example. The prince invites all the ladies in the kingdom to the ball to, essentially, celebrate him. Cinderella doesn’t choose a fairy godmother. Rather, one just shows up and, without really asking Cinderella’s opinion of any of it, bibbity bobbity boo’s all that glass slipper business right down on top of her. After the clock strikes midnight and Cinderella runs away, the prince finds her; she doesn’t go out looking for him. What I’m saying is that Cinderella is about 98% purely passive.

It’s different in, specifically, Beauty and the Beast. Really, Belle is the hero in that one. There’s Gaston, whose advances she keeps at bay. She’s not falling for his expectorating hunter bullshit. She reads books like a house on fire, so she’s smart and has real opinions on stuff. Then there’s her father, a bumbling old guy who means well, but is…way too bumbling. Belle is the brave one who takes her father’s place as the Beast’s captive, and it’s out of sheer love that she does it. Even the Beast, as big and strong as he is, ends up dead. It's Belle who chooses to love him. Her active choice of love a.) saves him and b.) turns him back into a man. (Which, personally, would have pissed me off. “My horns! My sweet fangs! NOOO!”)

I want my daughters—I have Ingrid as well as Imogen—to be opinionated and active and brave. That doesn’t mean I want them to be manly, whatever that means. (Maybe Gaston is manly, spitting and hunting and all of that.) Above all, I want them to be loving. Loving in the real sense. How could Cinderella, poor girl, be loving? I predict divorce for her and the prince within six months after the prince finds out she doesn’t. Do. Anything. He probably has to feed her. “I’m outta here, Cinderella. I’m tired of shoving figs in your mouth and then working your jaw for you.” Loving as in sacrificial. Loving as in making hard choices. Loving as in putting other people’s well-being ahead of their own. You get what I’m saying. Loving as in Belle-ish-ness.

*Don’t even think about stealing “Octopus the Maladjusted Senior.” I’m going to write a rock opera about him. Don’t touch.

Aaron’s Forearm

A year ago at this time, I was fresh from completing graduate school. Ink wasn’t drying on a diploma—that would come the following month—but was scored into the skin of my forearm. It was my first tattoo and it will not be my last and I will not tell you what it means.

O.E. Parker, in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Parker’s Back,” could not tell you exactly what the Christ-figure on his back meant to him. He couldn’t even see it, which was the reason his back had remained the only part of his skin without a tattoo. But like Parker, I felt that same sensation for desiring a tattoo. The one that finds you “turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.”

So, why a tattoo? Why, like Parker, experience the pain associated with it, even if it was “just enough to make it appear… to be worth doing”? As a kid, I thought tattoos to be the indulgences of people with other vices. They were on the arms of the addicts and alcoholics to whom our church ministered. People who would stand and curse at my father during the Sunday service with outstretched green arms. I saw them with the same coiled eyes of Parker’s wife Sarah Ruth, as the “vanity of vanities”, or the sin of sinners.

Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber, herself tattooed, flipped my perception of tattoos—“[h]uman bodies carry stories, and some people choose to carry those stories on the outside.” Grad school was ending and life was irrevocably headed in a new direction. Third child in tow now and a possible continental-sized move a-comin’. A longer road lay ahead, but I had been pivoted. So, I carry a story, now, on the outside of my body.

But why get a tattoo with a meaning I won’t share with those who ask? It’s not for not wanting too. You can use my son’s spy book to understand the symbols. But I can’t explain to anyone why the bread and wine doesn’t just taste like bread and wine.

Parker’s attempt to win the love of his wife, by getting a tattoo he believed she would find meaning in, ended with him being beaten to tears by Sarah Ruth and called an idolater. In a gesture of sacrament, I stretch out this wordless story as I write. Because, as O’Connor has said, “If it’s a symbol, then to hell with it.”

God, Guideposts, and the Modern Miracle

Sometime in the early 1990s, I sat in a barbershop while my brother’s hair was trimmed and read a Guideposts. As with all barbershop and waiting room magazine selections, the Guideposts were outdated and incomplete, a scattershot of the 1980s.

Earlier that year, from my sleeping bag pitched on a friend’s living room floor, I watched “The Towering Inferno.” I saw the skyscraper catch fire. Wonderment turned to fear as a family trapped in their room soaked towels in water from the sink in an attempt to escape the blaze. Several floors below, a posh party was in full swing. It was the partygoers' ignorant bliss that frightened me.

Unbeknownst to me, the roof over my head could be consumed. What we believe to be true—i.e., that the struts and beams supporting the weight above us are in fact solid and weight bearing—could come down at any minute.

To sate my fear, my parents bought a fire ladder that could be unrolled and hooked to a windowsill. On the front of the box a photograph showed a girl, her brother, and mother calmly descending the metal rungs as bright orange flames snapped from the window they had just escaped. When I woke up in the middle of the night, sure that I smelled smoke or heard the distant crackle of a fire, I would look at the picture on the box—the calm face of the girl in the footed pajamas, the fire stilled by the camera’s shutter.

I read about Bud Ward’s miracle photograph in the barbershop that year, the year my fear of fire was beginning to take shape.

Bud Ward, a retired New Jersey fireman, took several photographs of a burning shed. When he developed the film, he was amazed to discover Jesus in the flames. People flocked to the shed, praying and taking home shards of burnt wood.

Guideposts included the photograph.

I was too young to know much of modern-day miracles, but I could recount most of the biblical miracles. Water from stone, loaves and fishes, parting seas, plagues and manna. The veil between the world I knew and the miraculous was thin.

But I couldn’t see Jesus in the flames; I could only see the fire. In the black and white photograph, the fire is a pure white light. Bare tree branches jag through the image as if they could escape. The miracle to me was not the figure, but the fire’s slow destruction—flames billow out of the doorway and surround the roof in a halo of light. In the photograph, the shack, despite the fire and heat and smoke, is still standing.

Perhaps, if the photo was taken with a better exposure, the miraculous Jesus would return to the flames. If the distinction between black and white was more decisive, the photograph would be evidence of nothing but a fire and a roof withstanding, if only for a little while longer, the inferno.

Now, when I am alone in the darkroom agitating the developer and waiting for the photographic image to burn into the paper, I always think of Bud’s photograph. As the blacks darken and the lights pull forward, I look for a figure to appear. A Jesus in the threshold, a figure present for the burn before the collapse.

Reading at Fall Out Arts Initiative

The Fall Out Arts Initiative is hosting a reading Friday, April 10th. The reading will start at 7 p.m. and doors will open at 6:30 p.m. The even is hosted at the Urban Art Center, located at 2609 Stevens Ave. S, Minneapolis, MN. For further information, see their website.

The Age of Heroes

Tacked to the corkboard that hung on my bedroom wall throughout most of my childhood was a giant poster of Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. The caption on the poster read, “The Bash Brothers” and McGwire and Canseco were dressed in fedoras and black Ray-Bans, a la the Blues Brothers. At the time, McGwire and Canseco were the two hottest ballplayers in the Major Leagues. They were both with the Oakland A’s. I wasn’t an A’s fan per se, but I loved baseball in general and I loved that McGwire and Canseco were so much larger than life. That turned out to be true in more ways than one as almost two decades later Canseco himself, of all people, revealed that both of them (along with a bunch of other big-time major leaguers) were filled with more juice than a dump truck full of grapefruits.

I posit that human history has necessarily entered an age beyond heroes. Perhaps we, as a species, have outlived our use for them. Perhaps that’s for the better. Heroes in the American sense of the word, at least: seemingly infallible Earth-bound Ubermenschen who possess no discernable faults. They’re the people we want to be like, but they’re also the people we realize, with simple glances in our bathroom mirrors, we’re actually nothing like. And since we can’t be like them, since we can’t join their ranks, we do the next best thing. Worship them. But there’s the inevitable (and why, oh why, don’t we understand just how truly inevitable this is?) cataclysm—the crime, the fall, the bust, the sin. Who needs a god who needs steroids to slam homeruns, the boyhood equivalent of watching the Red Sea part? With even one speck of failure on their burnished faces, pilgrimages to their shrines—ballparks in the case of McGwire and Canseco—become an exercise in self-delusion. So it may be that quitting them altogether is the most righteous response.

I also had a collection of, watch this, Bill Cosby records. I’d hunt for them in thrift stores and independent record shops and buy them up as quickly as I came across them. And not only did I buy them, I listened to them. A lot. Sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours in front of my parents’ big record player. Recently, I mentioned to a friend my squeamishness at even admitting to owning such a collection given the rapist label that’s (let’s face it, probably appropriately) attached to Cosby these days. I understand he’s innocent until proven guilty, but as more and more allegations come out…well, let’s just say the math is working against him. My friend said, “He’s still funny.” So what if he is? I’ve been forced to become a Cosby-atheist. Those records will sit where they are: in some dark place collecting dust. Let that vinyl return to the earth from which it came.

Space-making

Amidst the poorly-veiled disgruntled mumblings and vigorously squirming behinds, the evening’s speaker announced the lecture was now concluded and it was time for questions: “This is a Q and R, not a Q and A. I will do my best to respond to all questions directed at me, but answers I will not promise,” she said. While this statement may have sounded quaint, perhaps even smug coming from a less candid presenter, her unpretentious approach dissembled my cynicism. Starkly shadowed by bright stage lights, the speaker traversed the stage’s width back and forth, back and forth. Her purpose for the evening was to invite our denominational tribes to a mediation concerning a hotly controversial topic.

True to the spirit of mediation, she had no harsh rebukes for people with alliances on either side, only an invitation to put our scholarly and scriptural ammunition aside and engage in genuine dialogue. Instead of more conventional approaches to differences which often include themes like how to defend alliances with scripture, maintain doctrinally correct borders and pursue “moral rightness,” she spoke to us on the value of generosity. The problem, she openly admitted, is that humans are not prone to honoring questions very well. We’ve always preferred the safety and comfort of believing our side of the battle line is the “correct” one and then devising strategies to defend it. Our default position is to lob counterarguments. Genuinely listening to voices on both sides of the issue can seems to threaten our desire to uphold Truth.

I’ve been reading Henri J. M. Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life recently. His section on hospitality reminds me a great deal of the speaker’s invitation to wade into the turbulent waters of open conversation. Unfortunately, in Western culture the term hospitable has often come to be associated with Martha Stewart or the kindly matronly woman at church who hosts ladies luncheons. This is unfortunate.

In hospitality, Nouwen says, we treat people as guests rather than potential converts. By imagining ourselves as hosts, we create spaces where we can be witnesses to the unveiling of a stranger’s inward treasure. And what’s more, our own gifts might be revealed to us when we open our hearts: for surely we all have treasures to share when we’ve found someone who will create a safe space for us to reveal them. Perhaps more risky still, Nouwen suggests that true hospitality “is not a subtle invitation to adopt the lifestyle of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own way.”

Neither Nouwen nor the speaker suggested that the craft of space-making is by any means an easy undertaking. To be sure, tending to demands, talking, doing, acting, moving, and producing are all much easier alternatives to the patience-draining, vulnerability-requiring, generosity-demanding task of moulding ourselves into hosts and hostesses: individuals who willingly open ourselves up to the criticism of others for not toeing the theological party line we’ve been groomed to vociferously espouse. For some, the depth of our conviction will be called into question. But when we are grounded in the person who is Love, we can offer hospitality without fear. We can, as the speaker admonished, foster unity, not through the abandonment of our personal convictions, but through the enlivening cultivation of compassionate space-making where dialogue is no longer threatening. We can, as Nouwen says, “offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.”

What the Rich Need from the Poor

I was talking to a guy at church a while ago and he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I worked with homeless men and women and his immediate response was, “They’re all drunk, right? On drugs?” I came to find out he owned his own construction business and had, in the past, employed a few homeless people to do general labor on his construction sites. He’d been burned. “They’re never on time. They don’t work hard.” That kind of stuff. This guy was wealthy. He’d built the construction business from the ground up and put a lot of hard work into it over many years. He’d seen hard times, no doubt, but now lived in a palace off Lake Shore Drive.

At the very least, he had a logic problem—extrapolating an ironclad belief about an entire demographic from the behaviors of a small percentage of that demographic. On a grander scale, what he didn’t realize is just how closely linked the rich and the poor are meant to be. The poor see this need for connection more clearly than the rich see it. At the very least, the poor are typically much more aware of what they need from the rich. But Dorothy Day went so far as to say, “I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.” If this is true, then a positive outcome in terms of heaven or hell necessitates an intimacy between the rich and the poor. It has to go both ways. But there’s a tragic affection common only to the rich that prevents this intimacy from forming. An affection not for stuff, like the big TVs, summerhouses and all the rest, but for privilege. Privilege allows for the unfair expectation that the poor should act like the rich if they are ever to become un-poor. It also allows for the notion that help without strings from the rich to the poor will only produce a sense of entitlement in the poor. What’s swept under the rug, in that case, is the enormous sense of entitlement possessed by the rich. The rich perceive irreversible failure in the lives of the poor but if they, the rich, are to lend their help, privilege expects conformity from the poor to an impossible standard.

By the way, I only know the guy lived in a palace off Lake Shore Drive because I ended up in a Bible study with him. Sometimes we met there. How ironic and personally irksome. Over the Word of God, I had to figure out if I could love this guy like he was my brother, if I could stand being linked to him for the sake of my own soul. I’m not rich. I’m not poor either, but my sentiments obviously favor the poor. I often wondered what he thought about my job. He and I never talked about homeless people again.