Light Makes It Beautiful

I stood on the sidewalk in front of the Empire State Building. It was evening and traffic was light. My friends and I, high school seniors, were heading into the Riverboat Room to hear jazz great, Maynard Ferguson. They opened the doors, and I stopped a minute to feel the presence of the 102-story building. I knew I’d remember this night, but I didn’t know I’d soon walk away from cultural offerings like this.

Nothing weird happened, I turned away from the culture because I took a traditional step - I became a Christian during my first semester of college. I don’t think anyone told me not to listen to Ferguson anymore, I think I assumed that being a Christian meant pursuing only those genres with the Christian label. What happened as I withdrew? I lost the language of people around me. I had no idea what was going on in the world of poetry, fiction, film, and TV. In time, I learned that sanctification does not equal separation, and gladly broadened my scope again.

Sometimes it’s still a stretch to understand the culture’s language. In 1987, when artist Andres Serrano showed his work, “Piss Christ,” it started a firestorm of controversy. (The photograph is of a crucifix in a glass of urine.)  Many immediately labeled it as blasphemous. Serrano, who considers himself a Christian, did not intend the image to be controversial. I didn’t know what to make of it. What was Serrano trying to say? Thirteen years after “Piss Christ” was first shown, poet Andrew Hudgins published a poem by the same title in Slate. Hudgins proved to be an apt translator of culture. He found the photograph to be “gorgeous,” and “theologically correct.” Hudgins’s poem says:

“and he ascended bodily unto heaven, and on the third day he rose into glory, which is what we see here, the Piss Christ in glowing blood: the whole irreducible point of the faith, God thrown in human waste, submerged and shining.”

Translators reopened the doors to culture for me. They helped me see that “dwelling in the land” is largely about the importance of creating art and having conversations with our neighbor about art. If we’re not connecting with them at a point that interests, confuses, angers them, how will we help them see God’s dominion in all things? Another line in Hudgins’s poem is, “and light, as always, light makes it beautiful.”

The Forced Pause, the Gift of Rest

I walked to the grocery store in hopes of finding a power outlet to charge my laptop. Or better: a rogue bit of Wi-Fi that might allow me to e-mail my editor and assure her that, despite the 18 inches of snow being dumped onto our small town, I would be making my deadline. It was not a peaceful walk, the sort you’d expect as snow slowly pillowed on the ground and the entire world went quiet.

No. I went to the store looking for time – looking to work. But all that awaited me was a couple of college kids wearing Adventure Time pajama bottoms and a cashier who kept checking the windows and reminding everybody who came through her line that she – emphatically – “did not need this.”

Rabbi Abraham Heschel said time was the first thing God made holy. A day. The Sabbath. And yet, most of us are extraordinarily bad at accepting the gift of rest. Artists, it seems, have this affliction in spades. There is always one more sentence to be fine-tuned. One more stroke to apply. The reasons to work – to tinker – are countless.  The world applauds busyness. We are encouraged to reject, as Barbara Brown Taylor calls it, the grace of simply “sitting on the porch” because “a field full of weeds will not earn anyone's respect.”

As I walked home, I noticed the light. It was inverted, turning the night into a strange, off-color day. I was alone and frustrated to be going back to a house that had no power, that forced rest upon me like a sickness. But as I walked – as the mounting snow forced my pace slower – I couldn’t help but notice the silence of the empty streets. The sound of my breathing, heavy in the cold.

(Photo by Charles Arbogast)

The Book Thief

A train winds its way through a wintry forest; nine-year-old Liesel watches as her young brother dies in their mother’s arms. After the burial, the book thief’s first acquisition is The Gravedigger’s Handbook, fallen from the pocket of the gravedigger. Just as Great Expectations begins in a graveyard, the film The Book Thief begins with this unavoidable end of all earthly quests.

Liesel is soon separated from her mother, whose political views attract the unwanted attention of the Fuhrer. She is assigned a foster family, an elderly couple living on Himmelstrasse –  Heaven Street.  There she finds a gentle foster father who teaches her to read and to sing through fear, and a stern but sacrificial foster mother who teaches her to love, though haunted by insecurity. And there she also finds a true friend who teaches her to hate evil and cling to good.

Liesel is not the same girl at the end of The Book Thief. She is a young German girl seeing the War from the perspective of Max, a Jew her foster family hides in their basement. And she sees her beloved Papa conscripted into the army in retaliation for defending a Jewish neighbor. She knows suffering. She is acquainted with grief. But Liesel also sees that even in a bomb shelter, hope can flow from an accordion, and comfort sometimes comes with the telling of a story.

It does not require a spoiler alert to reveal that this film, like others set during World War II, ends where it began — with death.  Most well made war movies (think Apocalypse Now) do not view death with the modern, sentimental, but false notion that death is simply a natural (and even beautiful!) part of life – that’s difficult in the midst of so much death and dying. For many, this shadow of death leads to darkness and despair.

Our own quests cannot bypass The Valley, but our Inspired stories, Inspired music, and Inspired poetry promise green pastures and still waters. Knowing that, is there any room for despair?

No spoilers, please!

My kids hate spoilers more than anything, and it's all my fault.  A few days ago, I heard my son talking with his friend, when out of nowhere, he exploded, "WHAT?! I can't believe you just did that!!".  Naturally, I rushed over to check for blood or bruises, only to find out that this friend had spoiled the ending of 'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug' by implying that Smaug was not killed at the end. "But you've already read the book...you already know how it ends!" I said. Owen replied, "I know, but still. I wanted to see it for myself." 

I knew exactly what he meant, and I couldn't help but feel responsible. I grew up with filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ridley Scott...artists who knew how to keep a secret and surprise an audience on a massive scale. Some of my greatest film experiences would have been ruined by a spoiled ending or plot twist, and I have grown to cherish the truly great surprises in film.

In 1975, Steven Spielberg released 'Jaws' to an unsuspecting public, and the film became one of the most successful of all time. The secret to it's success, however, was not the shark we saw on screen, but the one we didn't see. Spielberg, unknowingly, created both the "summer blockbuster" and, unfortunately, the spoiler at the same time.

The early 1970's production was so ambitious that it was constantly plagued by budget and production issues, most notably a faulty shark prop. No one had filmed under the ocean like this before, and certainly not with an animatronic shark. Spielberg, sensing the pressure to produce a hit, made a decision that changed the film (and his career) forever: lose the shark.

>“I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark,” Spielberg said. “So I just went back to Alfred Hitchcock: ‘What would Hitchcock do in a situation like this?’ ... It’s what we don’t see which is truly frightening.”  -Steven Spielberg [^1]

He focused on the characters, their fear and terror, leaving the shark to lurk in the background, growing more powerful in our imagination. The invisible menace became Hitchcock's "bomb under the table [^2]"; we know it's there the whole time. It hooks us into the story, agitates and delights us, forces us to participate. What began as a straight monster flick, ultimately became the embodiment of the fears of an entire generation, just by taking out the monster.

In 'Orthodoxy' G.K. Chesterton wrote, "Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame." What we don't know is infinitely more vital to our experience than what we do. Even my kids know the power of great surprises, and have learned to protect them at all costs. Spoilers pop the bubble of our imagination, and drain some of the power out of an artists work.

I can't help but wonder...why do I love great surprises in art, but abhor them in real life? I found so much delight in the revelation of Darth Vader's true identity (no spoilers), but if that happened to me, personally, I would be in therapy for years. The real human experience is full of lurking monsters; real pain, conflict and sadness usually bring anxiety and dread, not the beautiful tension of a well made film.

I guess, in the theater, we implicitly know "It's just a movie... it all works out in the end." Even if it doesn't, we know in a couple hours we can just get up and walk out of the theater. The abstraction of the experience frees us from our real, personal fears.

But isn't there some sense in which this is also true (really true) for the Christian? Do we believe that we will someday walk out of this dark theater into the sunlight of a greater reality? Can this certainty about our ultimate ending allow us to delight in the suspense of the unknown, instead of dreading it?

[^1]: http://mentalfloss.com/article/31105/how-steven-spielbergs-malfunctioning-sharks-transformed-movie-business

[^2]: [Alfred Hitchcock on Cinematic Tension](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPFsuc_M_3E)

Clothed in Mystery

After being out of town for a couple weeks, I climbed the stairs to my apartment, dropped my suitcase to the floor, and noticed the light had changed. The sunlight no longer blared with cool blues and purples; it filtered through thin chloroformed leaves leaving fluorescent green slatted across my wood floors.

Even now I write this in the light from my laptop screen. An unchanging, medical light of pure white. My cursor blinks with black insistence to cover the light with words.

When Justinian rebuilt Hagia Sophia, after conquering Istanbul and overthrowing her Islamic rulers, he sought to fill the halls with a holy light. Small windows circle the dome so closely set it appears to be floating. Under the dome, our position is not fixed; we are awash in illusionary light and shadow.

The gospel of John begins its account with light. A light so strange that the darkness cannot comprehend it. Can darkness know something that is not only its opposite but also its destroyer?

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Over the course of two years, Claude Monet painted a series of thirty paintings of the façade of the Rouen Cathedral. He painted at varying times of day and year. His view of the cathedral did not change, that is, he was not trying to paint the cathedral, with all of its complexities and architectural innuendos. He was trying to paint the light, the way it marked time and weather. But in order to paint light, you must also paint shadows.

The Impressionist palate did not include black. Rather Monet slathered the shadows in crimson, umber, burnt orange; light in mauve, rose, naples yellow. In some instances, the shadows and light are nearly indistinguishable. He adjusted value—the relative lightness or darkness of a color—by adding white. The colors found in shadow also appeared in light, and vice versa.

In order to snap a properly exposed photograph, the photographer must first establish the middle point between shadow and light. That is, the shutter time needs to be both long enough to capture the details in shadow, but not so long that the details in light burn out.

The dome would not hover in Hagia Sophia if there were not also edges of darkness.

Annie Dillard writes, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “if we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results.”

Back in my apartment, I watch the light change throughout the day. The northern light in my living room a consistent glow, the light in my southern bedroom crawling up and down the walls, the slow dimming of the close of day when the shadows spread and the distinction between darkness and light is clothed in mystery.

(Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Is it art?

There's an American artist; his name is John Baldessari. In 1973 he mounted two photographs of a pencil on a board. Beneath these photographs is his hand-lettered story of this pencil. So I look at this work and I wonder how it ever made its way into a gallery. It’s certainly no Mona Lisa; it’s definitely no Sistine Ceiling. Is it art? I’m not sure. I suppose if it is art it is because Baldessari causes us to reflect (at least for a moment) on the actual nature of art. Art expresses skill, and art expresses emotion, but art also reflects change. Clay is molded, wood is carved, stone is chiseled, words are arranged, a pencil is sharpened. Something rough is made into something more beautiful, or more useful, or more provocative, or all the above. Art speaks of transformation and sacrifice. Even the dull pencil had to give up something. Did it hurt? Probably.

So I think of our own lives. I wonder what it means when Paul writes, “For we are God’s masterpiece, created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” (Eph 2:10). Though we are guarded and defensive our God remains willing to mess with us. He is even willing to use others to mess with us. Something rough is made into something more beautiful, or more useful, or more provocative, or all the above. At least that’s the plan. Will it hurt? Probably.

Explaining Up vs. Explaining Down

The 17th century theologian and poet François Fénelon is quoted to have said,

There was nothing in me that preceded all [God’s] gifts, nothing able to receive them. The first of His gifts on which all the others rest is what I call “myself.” He gave me that self. I owe Him not only all that I have but also all that I am. Oh incomprehensible gift which our poor language expresses in a moment but which the human mind will never arrive at understanding it and all its depth. This God, who has made me, has given me myself to myself. The self I love so much is simply a present of His goodness. Without Him I would not be myself. Without Him I should have neither the self to love nor the love wherewith I love that self, nor the will that loves it, nor the mind that knows it. All is a gift. He who receives the gifts is himself to first gift he receives.

Sed contra, Francis Crick has stated,

“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: “You're nothing but a pack of neurons.” (Astonishing Hypothesis, 3)

Could there be a more astonishing gulf than between these two metaphysical approaches to human existence?

The Fénelon quote, other than being exquisitely beautiful, might be said to represent a view of reality that explains everything “up,” ultimately into the realm of the infinite, of infinite value, meaning, beauty, joy, and love, “and this we call God,” as Aquinas might say. “That which was from the beginning” (1 Jn 1:1), therefore, is reflected and imbibed throughout all of finite reality, informing the matrix of meaning in which we live and move and have our being.

On the other hand, the Crick quote might be said to display the approach that ultimately explains everything “down,” into ever more divided and basic material, getting into the realm of the inconceivably small, and finally into nothing--if not in a absolute sense, certainly in the sense that meaning, value, beauty, reason or the like simply did not exist “in the beginning.” It appears inevitable that this view could at the end of the day yield only some variety of nihilism, both in an almost “literal” and philosophical sense. If nothing is the beginning of all things, then reality at bottom is ontologically “blank.” By what criteria could anything ever be said to have any meaning, or human life any value, which have their ultimate basis in the nihil of a yawning void? That which is not present in the source cannot be present in what is derived from the source.

Not incidentally, in the “downward” model man can in theory master reality and fully explain it, fit it inside his head (at least once it finally becomes modified through technology). In the “upward” model man rather receives reality; he is the recipient of a gift. G. K. Chesterton, who believed, “The test of all happiness is gratitude” (Orthodoxy, 98), captured the wonder of existence as a gift when he stated that no man has “really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything,” adding,

At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy. (Autobiography, 97)

If indeed we have received our entire reality purely as gift--even the reality of ourselves--can we also be masters of reality (even our own “little realities”)? Might it not be that only when we’re receptive of reality as gift, as revealed both in the wonder of creation and in the gospel--with Jesus Himself being the concentrated form of reality and its gift (Col 2:9)--that we’ll be of such posture as to receive God’s outpouring love revealed there, flowing into ourselves and from thence outward toward others and all creation?

(Painting by Teun Hocks)

Coming Undone

Just the other day I was paralyzed by these words:

“What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of people at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug?. . .If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what?”

The words are from Annie Dillard’s essay, “How to Live,” which first appeared in Image in 2001. I had been thumbing through the Bearing the Mystery anthology in the few minutes I had with my coffee before the kids came home. Now I heard the bus’s diesel engine rounding the corner and didn’t know what to do.

Writing that moves us, we say, makes us laugh or cry. It may even compel us to fight for justice, reach out to a stranger, say a prayer, or otherwise turn our lives around.

But this essay, this essay about my miniscule passions in “the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through,” rendered me helpless. I wasn’t so much overwhelmed with sadness or questions but numb, frozen-fingered in my ability to grasp anything. The fact that such a concept as eternity existed was enough, for the first time in my life, to make the floor tiles spin.

Some art does that—shifts the tectonic plates of our perceptions. It doesn’t inspire us but undoes us, haunts us until we view the image, listen to the piece, or read the essay again. I didn’t want to read it again. It made my stomach hurt, my breath shallow. But I went back to it later that day. Then again the next night. And the next. “Then what?” Dillard asks. Then what, then what, then what?

I still have no idea what to do.

But I know I would like to create something—even just one essay, poem, flowerbed or gingersnap—that leaves someone gaping like a caught fish.

Be still and know that you know nothing, the essay (Spirit? tiles?) seems to be whispering to me. Then work out of that.

Bearing Witness

I was not familiar with David Bazan when two friends, Joe and Marcelo, stopped by for a beer and introduced me to his album Curse Your Branches. Joe told me Bazan’s music showed him, “it was okay to not only have doubts and explore them but also to talk about them publically.” Marcelo said, “I want my ‘entertainment’ to continually wake me up.”

The songs did wake me up. It was like no Christian—or former Christian?—music I had ever heard. I was not sure what to do with it.

Bazan’s former publicist Jessica Hopper talked to some kids after he had played a set at Cornerstone, and they didn’t know what to make of him either. She writes, “many of them [seemed] to be trying to spin the new songs, straining to categorize them as Christian so they [could] justify continuing to listen to them.” One kid told her Bazan was “singing about the perils of sin, ‘particularly sexual sin.’” Another reported that the songs were “a witness of addiction, the testimony of the stumbling man.”

Witness is an apt representation, but not the kind I grew up hearing about in my small Baptist church.

At the 2009 Festival of Faith and Music, Bazan said in an interview that he always felt a tug toward something authentic, the longing to get out of “that [Christian artist] ghetto.” Plenty has been written about the need for Christians to make higher quality art, but it is about much more than quality.

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera discusses the aesthetics of kitsch. Kundera’s short definition of kitsch is that it is an aesthetic ideal "in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist."

Kitsch is an ethical term as much as it is an aesthetic one. In an article in Salon Curtis White calls a book “intellectually shameful.” He explains: “To be intellectually shameful is to be dishonest, to tell less than you know, or ought to know, and to shape what you present in a way that misrepresents the real state of affairs.” Dishonest art is not just aesthetically bad; it is unethical, even shameful.

Curse Your Branches is not a breezy listen—it is emotionally demanding; there is real anguish. It is deeply ethical though. Bazan looks at the world without blinking and honestly relates what he sees there—even when it is ugly.

In his words, “that's what bearing witness is.”

What Do These Four Film Characters Have in Common?

Before you read this post, you may want to ponder what these four film characters have in common (besides “awsome-ness”).

The Classic Teacher Film

Hollywood has been very kind to teachers. Every now and then they release a film such as Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dead Poet’s Society that portrays a teacher. The formula goes something like this: saintly, dedicated, long-suffering teacher accepts a faculty position at a [stuffy prep school / tough, inner-city school]. The teacher endures: tradition-bound, inflexible administrators, pauper’s wages, academic bureaucracy, competitive colleagues, founders/donors with agendas, hateful parents, false accusations, intolerance to his teaching methods (no matter how enlightened) and ungrateful, unteachable students (especially one, particularly unpleasant and resistant student).

In most cases the teacher is marginalized, passed over for advancement or eventually loses his faculty position to leave in disgrace. By the end of the film he is vindicated and recognized for his positive influence in the lives of the students. This usually takes the form of a teary-eyed standing ovation or some other tribute, but we all know that his true reward is primarily in heaven.

Along the way the teacher wins the students over (especially that “one” student). They learn that behind his gruff exterior there stands a teacher who really cares for them. They come to realize that he has taught them to love knowledge and see the world in a better way.

The New Teacher Film

Currently we see a new type of teacher film. It appears in the unlikely genres of science fiction, fantasy and action-adventure. Madam Professor Minerva McGonagall teaches at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. James “Logan” Howlett, aka “Wolverine” teaches at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Dr. Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones holds faculty positions at Barnett and Marshall Colleges. Obi Wan Kenobi is a Jedi Master who teaches padawan learners at the Jedi Academy on planet Coruscant and later as a private tutor on planet Tatooine.

The four pictured characters are all teachers, but they are not mere teachers. What they have in common is that they all do what they teach.

How many times have you heard a student complain, “Teacher, when am I ever going to use this in real life?” They are right to ask this. Students are hungry for applicability. All too often the academic environment dichotomizes theory and practice. Students need to see their teachers actively engaged in the battles of the day.

These four film franchises have been incredibly successful. Perhaps part of their success has been due to the fact that audiences long to see their teachers “in the fray.” The benefits of this approach to teaching are multifold. Students get to see that what their teachers teach really matters. Teachers avoid burn-out by regularly “testing their knowledge in the field of deeds.” Most importantly, the world benefits from the most knowledgeable people bringing their gifts to engage the culture.

Since most teachers are not fighting Nazis, evil geniuses, diabolical wizards or intergalactic empires, what does it look like to engage in spiritual warfare as a teacher? What are some ways that teachers can model this kind of involvement in their field before their students?

Announcing Relief Issue 7.2 pre-sales!

Relief Issue 7.2 is now available at the pre-sale price of just $11.47, a savings of 23%. This issue will hold the mirror of reality up to you and slap you in the face.

• You'll find a story of a farmer's daughter abandoned, pregnant, by her missionary husband, who takes solace in a Thomas Kinkade gallery of all places.
• You'll see the world through Bob Denst's wry yet sacramental imagination that turns a discarded KJV into a flapping bird and a Red Cross blood donation center into an opportunity to encounter something other, and you'll follow Kyle Laws through a series of spiritual emotions you may have forgotten were in the Bible.
• You will also find work from Relief favorites like Jean Hoefling and David Holper, both of whom always manage to take something we may have thought we knew and tweak it into their own idiom.
• You will also find something original under the sun (sort of): a Relief-produced work of graphic fiction called "Earl and LeAnn."

The Real Race

I started running seriously about a year and a half ago, as I was beginning my MFA thesis, which means I was digging deeply into old drafts and seeing my old writing faults everywhere I looked. On a whim one night, I signed up for a half-marathon that was four months away, Googled a training schedule, and started getting out on the road to pound out miles.

My life—which at the time was in various states of emotional and professional turmoil, and some of those linked to one another—fell into a rhythm of work, writing, and running. Whenever I wasn't at work, I was either at my computer or out on the pavement.

Five half-marathons and thousands and thousands of words and only a few mini-breakdowns later, I'm still surprised to realize that, for me at least, consistently running is far easier than consistently writing. In fact, running is almost comically easy: it’s just one foot in front of the other, and a lot of ignoring the voices in your head. There’s no grammar or style or word choice or any of those things to attend to. All runners engage in the same general muscle movements: the legs lifted and placed down, the feet striking pavement, the arms pumping back and forth. Sometimes I run past a person whose stride has been altered by injury or some kind of muscular defect, and his gait is noticeable only because it is different.

That means that the main difference between me and Haruki Murakami, who runs marathons and ultramarathons and wrote a book about running and writing called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, is just that he’s repeated the same muscular motions, the breathing and pumping of limbs, a lot more than I have.

Murakami also has a great deal more practice than I do with writing. He has been writing for three or four hours per day for decades. I suppose that means he also has developed the muscle for discipline. Reading his book on this point, I found this passage:

To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole. But as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein. So as soon as I notice one water source drying up, I can move on right away to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their only source, they’re in trouble.

When I started writing, I “relied on a natural spring of talent,” especially since I was mostly writing short informational pieces. But when I decided to dig deeper and dredge another hole called “creative writing,” one in which I had to work with my own stories and my own material, I discovered that I’d exhausted my source—my natural spring—and now was going to be forced to do the hard work of sitting down and writing every day.

That is a real drag on the ego. Someone who sprints and then decides to train for a marathon will hit a wall around mile four, and might get discouraged. And someone like me has her identity rocked when she can’t do something well on the second or third or even tenth try.

I can tell you this: her tendency is to try to find a shortcut, or just quit. Usually the latter.

She has to take a hard look at herself and get ready to fail and then keep going. She has to be ready for sore muscles, and a bruised ego, and maybe even injuries, and the possibility that she might never be as good as the other guy, the hard truth that it’s possible she’ll never be a standout. Or she may write for years before she has anything to say. She might have to write from fear, and through fear, before she is ready for the real race.

Socratic method? What's that?

Classical education emphasizes "Socratic dialogue," a mode of teaching named after the famous Greek philosopher Socrates. But what is Socratic teaching? You may have heard that it is "question driven instruction". This isn't wrong, but it's not entirely right. Anyone can ask questions. 

For Socrates it was about Truth. He was so confident that the truth could be known, he developed strategies to discover it. Socrates knew it is hard to see the truth, so he followed a path to rise from error and to raise others from error as well. It has been called the Socratic Method, though Socrates would probably not agree that there is a "method" being followed. Instead, there is a goal: to perceive truth; and there is a means: dialectical thought.

In the simplest sense, Socratic, or dialectical thinking, means examining each thought in order to remove every contradiction and inconsistency. When the inconsistencies are cleaned up, we can move forward to new insights, often using analogies and comparisons from what we already know.

Socrates' approach, when fully realized, passes through two stages.

The first stage is perhaps best called the Ironic stage. Socrates asks questions that help his student see the contradictions and inconsistencies in the student's opinion. If the student is willing to see what Socrates shows him, then he will say those magic words: I don't know. He has reached what Socrates' prodigy, Plato, calls "metanoia," the Greek word for repentance. It means "a change of mind." According to Socrates, the person who accepts his own ignorance is prepared to see the truth.

Socrates then begins the second stage. Here he helps the student remedy his ignorance. Whereas the goal in the first stage was to demonstrate the disharmony of the student's thought, the goal of the second stage is to restore harmony on a more solid foundation.

Underlying this "method" were at least four Socratic convictions:

1.  Truth is. 2.  Truth is knowable. 3.  Truth can be discovered. 4.  Truth is ultimately one [in the sense that all things fit together into a harmonious symphony of being].

The Sophists, Socrates' intellectual adversaries, denied each of these convictions. They believed there is no truth; and even if there was, you couldn't know it; and even if you could, you couldn't communicate it to someone else. Consequently, according to the Sophists, there is no principle of harmony, no logos to guide inquiry. You have your truth and I have mine. We live in two different mental universes.

The late 19th century saw the wide-spread triumph of the Sophist in the American school. Whereas Socrates tried to deconstruct a student's thoughts in order to bring healing, the Sophist (and the conventional educator) goes in a very different direction. Like Socrates, the Sophist has two stages, but not those of the classical educator. Socrates sought to expose contradictions. The Sophist seeks to debunk. Socrates sought to bring healing by remediating his disciples' ignorance. The Sophist seeks to condition. After all, when there is no truth to seek, all the teacher can do is influence students.

That's why, for educators who seek to cultivate wisdom and virtue in students, Socratic teaching is a meaningful, useful, and even necessary approach. For only a student who learns to seek Truth relentlessly can be truly wise and virtuous. And only a teacher who seeks Truth can be anything other than a tyrant, petty or otherwise.

Arise, sad heart . . .

Arise, sad heart; if thou do not withstand,

Christ’s resurrection thine may be:

Do not by hanging down break from the hand,

Which as it riseth, raiseth thee.

    ~ George Herbert, “The Dawning”

My husband and I are arguing over the saying for March: is it in like a lion, out like a lamb, or the other way around? Ice on the windshield this morning, and by noon, sunshine on the back porch.

For us, it was February that came in like a lion, bringing pain and fear. We lost a baby we very much wanted, and less than a week later, there was a heart-wrenching crisis in the life of a loved one. I had been praying for trust, for the Lord to teach me how to lean on Him, and in the weeks that followed, I learned.

Faith challenges us to give thanks even for the difficult times, to see and to seek God through any kind of weather, to feel pain and anger and reach both hands out for Him. Faith challenges us to offer up questions, yet it doesn’t promise answers. Faith is its own answer.

As it turns out, my husband is right: In like a lion, out like a lamb. He is quietly triumphant in his small victory over the writer in the house, and I’m stubborn enough to keep riffling through internet pages for confirmation of my version.

Like the fickle month it describes, the saying itself has a history of change. It started out as a generalization, then morphed into a predictor that could be applied either way: If March comes in like a lamb, it will go out like a lion. It’s a nice theory of balance, but it breaks down in practice, especially in these days of climate destabilization and super storms.

Because the reality of spring—the reality of resurrection—is both. Christ is both lamb and lion. So is spring. So is trust.

I know God didn’t cause this pain, but I know He is working in it. It is uncomfortable to give thanks in the midst of grief. It goes against a lifetime of habit. I can’t do it, so I pray weakly and ask God to do the rest. He does. Love keeps breaking me open, and the bulbs we planted in fall keep pushing their way through the ice.

Reading Milton. Out Loud. In the Car.

The journey began as many tandem road trips in the modern world do, with two husbands behind the wheel of their respective vehicles and each wife beside him texting back and forth and pinning images to Pinterest. At a roadside Starbucks near Austin, the configuration changed. My wife Laurie and Mike’s wife Lisa hopped in my station wagon, freeing me to sit in the passenger seat of Mike’s rental car with a paperback edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I started reading aloud. Bumper stickers in the Texas capitol encourage passersby to “Keep Austin Weird.” That January afternoon, we did our part.

Mike would be teaching Books 1 and 2 to a group of thirty-odd students the next morning, and while he’d taught the poem before, a refresher never hurts. For me this was the first reading since a hasty grad school skim. Paradise Lost is much better than I remember. For one thing, I actually follow most of his references. (Half of them, anyway.) All my reading life was preparation, it seems. I’ve been training for Milton the way runners train for a marathon.

Milton is bold. Virgil appropriated Greek culture for The Aeneid, and Milton does likewise, claiming the whole of the classical world for his epic––only in place of Odysseus or Aeneas he casts none other than Satan, that bad eminence, and treats him very much like a hero. Book 2’s council in Pandaemonium, the city of devils, is straight out of Homer––or perhaps Tolkein, ending as it does with Satan embarking on a quest none of his peers have the courage to undertake. (When we reach that part of the story, I actually substitute Frodo’s words for Milton’s: “I will take the ring, though I do not know the way.” It works.) This sleight-of-hero calls into question so many ideas that resonate: The desire to be free, to be captain of our souls, to rule rather than serve, and to make a name for ourselves. These are noble virtues, but coming from Lucifer, you have to wonder.

The next morning in class the story of our drive-time reading comes out. The students are embarrassed for us. They worry, too, that this pair of middle aged men is a warning: continue down the path of literature, and this is what you will become, a declaimer of verse, out loud and unashamed.

Somewhere toward the end of the class discussion, Mike puts me on the spot. Do I have any thoughts to share? “Maybe Milton is giving us a reason to ask whether the things we admire most,” I say, “are a testament to the fact that something’s gone wrong with us.” The story of the fall, in other words, is written in the tales not just of our sinners, but of our heroes.

And then I tell them to read next week’s assignment out loud the way blind Milton intended. They look back at me, doubtful. Twenty years from now they’ll understand.

(Art by William Blake, Satan Addressing His Potentates)

Isolation in a Virtual Waste Land

When I teach T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, I often start out playing this video that dismantles a track from Girl Talk, highlighting all of the secondary texts that the artist combines to create something “new.” My point is that Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece, just as postmodern as it is modern, is a mashup itself. Both Eliot and Gregg Michael Gillis (Girl Talk) are, as Roland Barthes would tell us, forming something supposedly “original” from “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” In The Waste Land, an anti-epic poem if there ever was one, the heaps of fragments indicate that in a world where “God is dead”, a world devastated by the nonsensical cruelty of war, there is no meaning or even ability to communicate. Eliot continually emphasizes human isolation, that the inhabitants of The Waste Land are “each in his own prison.”

A large part of the disorientation one experiences when reading The Waste Land comes from Eliot’s intentional failure to translate foreign languages or cite his sources. The definitive sacred and secular texts of powerful Western and Eastern civilizations are decontextualized and remixed, pointing to the meaninglessness of life without any defining narrative, a life in which the Author God is dead.

But anyone who takes the tedious trouble to really spend thoughtful time in The Waste Land will track down Eliot’s sources, read them in context, and finally see that Eliot’s poem has complex meaning via the connectedness of the themes in these carefully selected fragments; in a sense, the poem betrays itself. In tracking down sources, we begin to get a sense of the whole, we long more and more for connectivity.

But in the age of google, my students and I have all of these secondary sources at our fingertips; there is not much hard work required as we can even find hyperlink versions of the poem that instantly translate the texts for us and briefly summarize the entire plot of the multiple narratives alluded to in the poem. The internet allows us to move from the poem’s decontextualized fragments to disembodied, virtual explanations of fragments. Rather than going to the library (a communal experience), we can sit in our pajamas and google it all. What would Eliot think of this isolating, perhaps “unreal” (in his eyes) research? He has removed “original” ideas from their contexts, yet we depend on an invisible network of replicated images to give us knowledge, almost always out of context.

At the beginning of the poem, Eliot envisions one of Dante’s circles of hell as a picture of living but dead (“unreal”) Londoners walking home from work over London bridge: “Each man fixed his eyes before his feet…”. I often ask my students what they think Eliot would say today if he went to London bridge, rode on the tube, or sat in a restaurant and saw our eyes not “on our own feet” but on our iPhones. Would he say we have we created a rich new access to knowledge and community, or would he conclude we have simply mastered the art of distraction and isolation? Or would he say we have somehow accomplished both?

Relief Issue 7.2 Thinks You're Pretty Smart

As we get ready to print 7.2 (debuting at the Festival of Faith and Writing next week), I've been noticing how many of the pieces ask so much from the reader. If art is, or can be, a difficult pleasure, then I think you'll enjoy issue 7.2, but in that Relief-y way that isn't satisfied with pat answers or disingenuous questions.

Of course, this means that the issue as a whole, which is to say our authors, think that you as readers are pretty smart and can handle some uncertainty, some openness, and some unrestrained wonder—if you're into that kind of thing. The teacher in me wants to make sure you're not among those who sell themselves short. Most people are better readers than they think; as often as my students say they're "not smart enough" for the poems or short stories we read, but when I ask them for their responses, their questions and gut reactions are often right in line with what the piece invites and evokes.

I'll highlight just our Editors' Choice recipients to give you an idea of what to look forward to. In fiction, Amy Krohn's "Master of Light" reads like memoir, it's so full of those inarguable facts that are so indifferent to its heroine's fantasy. Not only that, but Krohn manages to pull off an entire story in second-person narration without it feeling in the least like a cute gimmick. Her story asks "you" to think about what it would mean if your farmer husband suddenly turned missionary and left you behind. The answer "you" come to is both easier and harder than you might expect.

In CNF, Angi Kortenhoven shares an encounter with one of her own students, years later, seeing all his potential being rubbed away by the banalities of daily life. Kortenhoven ends on a bitter note, clinging to hope almost in a plea to the reader to nod in affirmation. She's not offering hope, but asking you whether you can find it in yourself.

Finally, in poetry, Bob Denst adds a subtle twist of playfulness to scenes that are ultimately about great beauty and sometimes sublimity. His "Wildland," in particular, powerfully reverses the normal questions we ask about God's actions or will when natural disaster strikes.

These authors represent some of what I love most about what we do at Relief, finding the stories and memories and metaphors that represent the mysterious or ineffable without trying to tame it.

(Painting by Henry Lamb)

A Dieter's Prayer at a King's Table

A DIETER'S PRAYER

Lord, grant me the strength that I may not fall Into the clutches of cholesterol. At polyunsaturates, I'll never mutter, For the road to hell is paved with butter. And cake is cursed and cream is awful And Satan is hiding in every waffle. Beelzebub is a chocolate drop And Lucifer is a lollipop. Teach me the evils of hollandaise, Of pasta and globs of mayonnaise. And crisp fried chicken from the south— Lord, if you love me, shut my mouth.

The more I live, the more I realize that we all need to be discerning about all things. That includes the ambiguous food of this ambiguous world. We have to be as percipient as the prophet Daniel when he arrived at king Nebuchadnezzar’s table.

We live in a consumer-based economy, if we don’t consume, the economy collapses. It’s as simple as that.  We are constantly being pitched a zillion things that look good, sound good, smell good, but are terrible for us.

Having recently read Salt Sugar Fat from Pulitzer-prize winning author, Michael Moss most major food empires heavily engineer food intake for a “Bliss Effect”, which is the perfect combination of fat, salt and sugar. It makes us want more, but isn’t good for our long-term health. Indeed, it messes with our cardiovascular system, including our blood chemistry.

The real truth is that American processed food appears to be putting the average American in a constant state of inflammation – not for hours, or days, or years, but for decades. What this essentially means is our poor God-given bodies are constantly in a state of rejecting that blissful food we are all injesting.

Sadly, even our daily bread, made from genetically engineered dwarf wheat, not the Einkorn wheat of the past, is making us tired and bloated.  What’s the solution?  Get away from as much processed and fast food as possible, eat as fresh as you can – vegetables, fruits, some grains, some protein.  Stay clear of sugar, salt, and limit your dairy intake. Push clear of the king’s table. That royal food is not only giving our teenagers pimples. Long term, it’s killing the rest of us.

(Painting by Jan Davidszoon de Heem. Source of the poem is unknown but it can be found is The Jesus Habits by Pastor Jay Dennis where it appeared in a blog by Stephen A Pickert, M.D.)

Questions or Booking Travel?

Now through June 8 MoMA is exhibiting about 150 works of Paul Gauguin. On MoMA's event website is a handy map and chronology of his life and work. The time line leads to a moment when in 1895, forty-five year-old Paul Gauguin traveled to Tahiti, leaving his wife and five children behind forever. Native of France, he grew up in Peru, sailed the world with the merchant marine, and worked for years in the French stock exchange. In 1879 he began to paint and exhibit with the Impressionists. When France's economy collapsed his business failed and after that painted full time. He became intrigued with Rousseau’s theories of the Natural Human and experimented widely with artistic materials and forms. In Tahiti he painted his masterpiece, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” The title, as you can just see in the link, is written in the upper left hand corner of the painting.

Suppose Gauguin painted today. The context is fairly similar: poor economy, debts and responsibilities, and a nagging sense we were made for more than this. Of course Tahiti today would feature fewer natives and better hotels. And I think his three questions would probably morph into our texting shorthand, WTF? Interestingly, Gauguin didn't use question marks in the painting title. His “questions” are rendered as statements– statements of the existential angst that he reported feeling to the point of attempting suicide after finishing the work. Likewise, our WTF is usually rendered, not as a question, but a malediction. It is intended as a judgment, a confession of helplessness and tacit defeat. It separates us from the world, and more insidiously, it becomes a ticket to pursue life as we please – a self indulgence that books travel to our imaginary lives that lie outside the reality of suffering.

While I write this my neighborhood is a cacophony of leaf blowers and my cat keeps pawing my arm. I have a boatload of work to do, bills to pay and time bears down. Forget war and poverty. What good are these few words? Am I mocked? Maybe so, but I have a choice in how I will respond. I can manifest an impossible version of life and escape to a convenient “Tahiti”, or I can speak into the chaos, join with others and help make a new world of this one.

One day soon we'll hear the shorthand curse again. Suppose instead of giving it form we affirm that life is hard, that suffering is a common bond, and then re-imagine our goals? What if we begin to answer the big questions a little at a time? What if instead of checking out we keep watch for those on the rocks and come alongside? In doing so, might we be transformed from cursing sailors to traveling agents of peace?

Self-Made Monsters

Rolling Stone recently published an interview with Dong Nguyen, creator of the viral hit game "Flappy Bird". The interviewer, David Kushner, writes about Nguyen’s experience as his app surged in popularity:

He hands me his iPhone so that I can scroll through some messages he’s saved. One is from a woman chastising him for "distracting the children of the world." Another laments that "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it's addicting like crack." Nguyen tells me of e-mails from workers who had lost their jobs, a mother who had stopped talking to her kids. "At first I thought they were just joking," he says, "but I realize they really hurt themselves." Nguyen – who says he botched tests in high school because he was playing too much Counter-Strike – genuinely took them to heart.

Nguyen’s intention had been straightforward: build a fun game for mobile platforms, easy to play and hard to master. But as his app went viral, it garnered a darker reception. People attacked Nguyen. They designated him an author of evil. Their vindictive reaction peeled back the app’s popularity to reveal an addicted and infuriated world where guilt was eschewed by appeals to ‘distraction’ and ‘addiction’.

Wrapped up in low-fi, Nintendo-esque graphics, Flappy Bird is a feathered fiend for the modern disposition. Its simplicity is infuriatingly addictive, and its difficulty chafes against impatience and demand for easy victory. It’s easy to love, but even easier to hate. And the app’s fallout, directed toward Nguyen, shines a spotlight on a basic human proclivity: our readiness to shift the responsibility for our destructive impulses onto anyone or anything other than ourselves.

Mike Carey and Peter Gross write in the fantasy series The Unwritten (Vol. 1), “We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.” For many, Flappy Bird provided that insight.

What’s your monster?