Under the Overpass

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor.” (2 Cor 8:9)

Mike Yankoski’s Under the Overpass recounts the story of how he radically took these words to heart, taking the reader on quite a journey. It is the tale of the experience of an upper-middle-class young man who has an existential crisis of sorts. After hearing a sermon on the necessity that Christian action match confession, manifesting itself in truly caring for a needy world, he was powerfully struck with a crisis of whether his faith in Christ was weighty enough to genuinely identify with the poor in their suffering. An idea began to form in his mind that compelled him on a journey deep into the existential reality of the poor among us: he became homeless. For five months, along with a friend who decided to take the journey with him, he wandered the streets of several of America’s cities with no place to call home and no idea where his next meal was going to come from. While Yankoski might not exactly be an excellent writer (he’s a young guy), and the dialogue between him and his companion sometimes leaves something to be desired, in the end the idea acted out and some of the experiences he has are so compelling that one can’t help but be affected.

The book is a journal-like account of his experiences on this inglorious adventure into the sewers of America. Though he runs into a lot of interesting, and sometimes disturbing, characters, the picture that emerges is not at all pretty. The world from this perspective looks altogether different, with different priorities and concerns. The reader is hit strongly by the impression that the homeless don’t quite have the status of human beings in the consciousness of America, whether Christian or otherwise. It’s the underbelly of civilized reality we’re all tacitly aware of, but which seldom registers for long in our living consciousness (fleeing with rapid speed as soon as the traffic light turns green).

The essential message of the book is that Yonkoski’s experience is extremely dehumanizing, which is the common lot of his fellow sufferers who have sunk still further. But Jesus entered into the suffering of the lowest of the low, and the church needs to follow Him there. To be sure, the world is big, with many problems and battles to be fought in various arenas of life. But as the apostles summon, “They only asked us to remember the poor” (Gal 2:10). It’s amazing how many of the destitute have ears to hear the good news of Christ’s death for the sinful and broken. The vacuous thoughts and concerns of middle-class consumer culture drift away like mist in this context because they are familiar with the abyss of this fallen world—the need for the gospel is not theoretical but palpable in this context. But for my sake, does my present rhetoric have meaning if the result is not faith working itself out in love towards the poor? When we see the poor, are we like those who have eyes but do not see that we look as in a mirror at our own spiritual condition? Do we not know wherein true poverty and true riches lie?

And then, the morning came.

“[We] can only come to morning through the shadows.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

Right here in Central Florida, we have our very own mecca. Millions of pilgrims flock to it every year, but this mecca does not involve a deity, or worship, or a religion. Or does it?

It’s the mecca of happiness, where your dreams come true. These millions of pilgrims might not crawl there on their knees, but they often travel thousands of miles and pay a pretty price for their happiness, especially considering the cost of carrying a screaming baby around at 10:30 at night, while pushing two toddlers in a stroller, in an attempt to squeeze every bit of happiness out of the overpriced day.

Most of us worship our own happiness, maybe every day, or at least on occasion. We devote a lot of time and money towards it, but it’s always so elusive, so “just around the corner.”

And where does such a pursuit leave us when hard times come? When we lose a job. When a loved one dies. When, as much as we repeat and hear that “everything will be okay,” things still don’t work out as we had planned. When we just have a bad day.

There is no place for the pursuit of happiness in our quest. We will be forever treading water. The goal is to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever. This entails gratitude and thankfulness for where we are and what we have – even, or probably especially, for the hard stuff. This is very difficult. It is discipline. It requires the greatest effort. It is impossible…on our own.

He was despised and acquainted with grief. And then, the morning came.

(Painting by Edvard Munch)

Displacement

I recently walked through my friend’s house a week after it had caught fire. The plaster crumbled from the walls. The windowpanes had cracked in the heat, and smoke had stained the frames. I had lived in that house for two years awhile back, but the fire had made what was once familiar unrecognizable.

The rooms are now only alive in the memories of the people who once filled them.

The summer I was 8 years old, my mother painted my room. It was supposed to be a dark blue, but when she stated painting, she let some of the white show through in layers of cumulous clouds. At night I fell asleep to headlights arcing across the walls/sky like searchlights. She had made what was familiar—four walls—other than what it was.

The Jewish holiday of Sukkot—The Feast of Tabernacles—remembers the forty years of the Exodus. Families build shelters of plywood and cardboard. For a week these shacks are the venue for prayer and shared meals. During Sukkot, everyone is homeless.

I am looking for a house to rent. I have toured houses that are empty, some that are still lived in, others are piled with boxes. Each of these has not just been made habitable; they have been made into a temple, a resting place. But even Solomon’s Temple was destroyed.

After we sold the house I grew up in, the new owner painted the walls of my room white. Even now, the walls of my friend’s house has been reframed, the windows replaced.

The opening prayer of Sukkot both praises God, but also commands us to accept our displacement. We must dwell in sukkah:

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haolam,  asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu leisheiv basukkah.

Our praise to You, Eternal our God, Sovereign of all: You hallow us with Your mitzvot and command us to dwell in the sukkah.

There's something insulting about this . . .

A painting hangs in Room 30 of the National Gallery in London. It’s by the 17th-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). The title of the painting is a bit of a mouthful. It is called Christ After the Flagellation Contemplated by the Christian Soul. The painting depicts a scourged Christ still tied to his whipping post, an angel wearing a red robe, and a kneeling child dressed in white. If you look closely you can also see a thin beam of light traveling from Christ to the child. It is an unusual painting. It’s not unusual because Velazquez depicted a beaten Christ—plenty of artists had done that. No, what makes this painting unusual is the strange title and the presence of the young child. So we look at the painting, and we wonder, and it doesn’t take long to realize that the child and the “Christian soul” are one in the same. And what of the attending angel? It’s interesting that the attending angel is not attending to Christ but is instead watching over the Christian soul personified as the child.So what is Velazquez saying? Well, the best I can tell, the child is us. We’re the ones who are weak, we’re the ones who are broken, we’re the ones in need of comfort. Is that the meaning of the beam of light? Is the beam of light a symbol of Christ’s comfort and grace and righteousness offered us, even at the time of his greatest trial?

I suppose there’s something insulting about the entire scene. We like to believe that we are strong, and that we have it together, and that our need is one of, perhaps, some fine tuning to smooth out a couple of our rough edges but hardly more than that. At our worst we might even be tempted to think that Jesus is pretty “lucky” to have us. But is that the portrait we see, either here in Velazquez’s painting or in the pages of Scripture?

Silent Retreat: Saint Meinrad Archabbey, Indiana

When we first arrived, before we entered the silence, we did Lectio Divina together. The words from 1 Peter 3:15 struck me: "In your hearts, set apart Christ as Lord." As we reread and listened to the passage, I kept hearing the phrase, "Christ as Lord." During the third cycle, which asks us to respond to what God is speaking, I prayed, "Christ, be Lord." The prayer moved me toward surrender, and centered me.

Despite that prayer, it took me a long time to be silent inside. The first night, my brain was spinning, my thoughts louder than the silence around me. I spent several hours wandering around the dark, yelling at God. Hope felt as far away as the quiet stars. Eventually I walked inside the dimly lit cathedral, the flap of my sandals reverberating in the emptiness.

I knelt down near the suspended crucifix and began to cry. After hours of wrestling with God, in a moment, the pain behind my anger dissolved into tears. I had the distinct impression that Christ was grieving with me, that I was not alone. I didn't find answers, but I knew God was there. The tears were not only a cathartic release; they became a symbol of surrender.

Silence is a type of surrender. It's a letting go of the incessant spinning within—the worry about what's next, about what I'm not doing, about the people I love, about the people who drive me crazy. Silence requires me to stop whining at God. This is the necessary cessation if one is to inhabit silence fully.

By morning, I felt as if I had accessed a river of peace. I walked around St. Meinrad not so much thinking as being. When people came to mind, I prayed for them, but the prayer felt more like a gentle lifting of them to the Lord than a cognitive exercise. Put in different terms, I felt as if I had accessed the subconscious. A great space broke open in me.

***

Richard Foster says before we can speak or write, we must be silent. We need to be still so we can hear what God is saying to us. Otherwise our words come from a place of noise. I have experienced the truth of this paradox at different points in my spiritual journey as well as in my writing life.

I am a writer. Last year at this time, I could barely choke out those words. It felt audacious, yet I couldn't deny the primal pull words had for me, calling me like the shore calls the sea. I had to respond. A central theme of this past year has been exploring and embracing that identity. I've asked myself, what does it mean to be a writer? A writer of faith? What do I have to say? Why should anyone listen? Does it even matter?

Silence is helping me keep the work I've been called to in perspective. At best, I don't enter silence with an agenda, to have an experience I can write about later. That may happen, but it isn't why I'm silent. I pursue stillness because God has called me to stillness (Psalm 46:10). Stillness not only helps me connect to God, it helps me connect to this work of writing.

Writing well feels like surrender. I open myself to another place where words flow like water. When I stop striving and am still, sitting in God's presence, I leave space for Him to be God. The same, I'm learning, is true with writing. When I write from a place of rigidity and noise, my words feel stiff, contrived, narrow. When I sit with the white page and let go of my preconceived notions of what's supposed to happen, it works—some of the time, anyway.

Yet stillness isn't a formula that gets me something. Instead it allows me to connect more deeply to myself, to God, and to my work. Some days it feels far away. But the retreat taught me that the river of stillness is closer than I think. I just have to slow down enough to enter it.

Guest blogger Diana Meakem is a senior English creative writing major at Taylor University in Upland, IN. A native of North Carolina, she’s an Ockenga Honors Scholar, member of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honors Society, and was the 2014 Editor-in Chief of Parnassus, Taylor’s literary magazine. She has accepted a fellowship at the University of Maine, where she will begin work on her MA in the fall.

(Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Of Beauteous Saints

I find something indescribably haunting about the “woman most beautiful of all” in George MacDonald’s Lilith, for on her “stately countenance” rests a “right noble acquiescence” and “assurance, firm as the foundations of the universe, that all ... [is] as it should be." For me, the white-haired woman who captures the intrigue of the protagonist, Mr. Vane, is an image of what a physically and spiritually mature approach to being human might look like. In the gallery of my mind, her resplendent repose reflects an organic and wholesome response to her world rather than a hasty effort conceived in restlessness. Ultimately, when I think of the portrait of this pulchritudinous lady, I think of an individual who has overcome our inborn resentment of time; she is one who, as Byron penned, “walks in beauty.”

Indeed, the more I think of the characteristics of this unnamed lady, the more I am reminded of the saint which Gordon T. Smith depicts in Called to Be Saints: An Invitation to Christian Maturity. For Smith, in a saint, we encounter “beauty, integrity and congruence." He suggests these characteristics are not achieved by merely trying to emulate Christ’s life on earth. Nor are they attained by adhering to some sort of a moral code. In fact, he suggests that in striving for rigid perfection, we dislocate ourselves from a spiritual life that genuinely flourishes. Instead of toil, Smith advocates humble response; instead of fear, Smith draws our attention to hopeful faith; instead of proving ourselves through our work, Smith reminds us of Love’s work. Ultimately, he reminds us that He is the vine and we are the branches; there is great rest in understanding that instead of trying to be like Christ, our call is to realize we are in Christ.

Which brings me back to MacDonald’s lady: in her stately countenance, I see the reflection of a wisdom grounded in an understanding of interdependence and borne out in humility. In her noble acquiescence, I envision an approach to work that glorifies the divine; she is not frenetic or flustered, but rather content with what time she has been gifted to live in and work with. In her assurance, I visualize a life of joyfully ordered affections because she has an inkling of the depth, width, and breadth of the creator’s love. And so, in “this woman most beautiful of all,” I see a portrait of Smith’s saint; for at the marrow of Smith’s invitation is the reminder that our creator’s call does not only save us from, but saves us to: to an abundant life which results from restfully abiding in our maker.

Maybe, for me, she is an image of Smith’s saint because in time she has grown wiser, not just older. She has employed her minutes, hours, days and years not in despising time, but embracing its facilitation of her growth.  In nurturing a life-affirming delight in God’s good creation she has not indulged in ignorance of the horrific evil at work in the world. Rather, her peaceful gaze assures me that, like a true heroine, she has lived out her days in a grace and gratitude and wonder that holds fast to a belief in an impending Eucatastrophe: a swiftly advancing redemption so beautiful its event will bring forth tears of joy.

Trusting Dante

I grew up in a poor town along the Elk River in West Virginia. Elkview had no leash laws, and flea-infested mongrels ran free. We lived beside a garbage truck garage and a busy stretch of US Route 119. Dogs found the hot reek of trash irresistible, and I saw many of them ripped open by cars and strewn down the road. Hunting was also big in Elkview. It was also a town of hunters. The sight of a boy hiking toward the woods with a gun slung over his shoulder was common—also the sight of gutted deer. Memories of these things come to me every time I return to Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I think if those mongrel dogs when I read Dante’s description of souls writhing in the seventh circle of hell, plagued by fire from above and burning sand from beneath: “They were in fact, like a dog in summertime / busy, now with his paw, now with his snout, / tormented by the fleas and flies that bite him.” In reading this passage, I can imagine Dante as a boy watching, just as I did, a dog continually scratching and biting at its relentless parasites.

I think of shot and gutted deer when I read his description of one who sowed schism in life, ripped bodily in half, “from his chin to where we fart…. Between his legs his guts spilled out, with the heart / and other vital parts, and the dirty sack / that turns to shit whatever the mouth gulps down.” I know what a physical body looks like when split open and the innards dumped out; I believe our poet knows as well.

Dante intended for his writing to work on four levels: literal, allegorical, moral or didactic, and anagogical. While he saw his art this way, what makes me trust him is the fact that he has so carefully observed the literal. His descriptions are so concrete and physical that, though his characters are in this fantastical hell, they have real flesh.

In On Moral Fiction, John Gardner goes as far as to claim that a writer’s failure to pay close attention to the literal amounts to a moral shortcoming because the writer “is not deeply involved in the characters’ lives.” He maintains that, “what truth the writer might have discovered if he’d carefully followed how things really do happen we will never know.”

In my experience, though you cannot tell immediately what a fiction writer’s worldview is from her fiction, if she has cared enough to pay close attention to concrete reality, you can be sure that, whatever she tells you will contain truth and have value. The same goes for any artist—any human being—who wants to communicate with other human beings. Are you concerned with truth? Look at what is in front of you and describe what you see.

Theories and Bragging Rights

I've long been a fan of the AMC series Mad Men, which looks at America in the 1960s through the lens of Madison Avenue at the time. The seventh season started in mid-April, and I've been writing recaps of each episode. To prepare, I watched the fifth and sixth seasons again and was struck this time by how carefully written they are. There is far more going on in a season, or even a single episode, of Mad Men than meets the eye: metaphors, allusions, symbols, all the elements of a good literary novel are present in the show. It rewards a re-watching.

I've also been reading a lot about the show, and one thing anyone who's read seriously about Mad Men knows is that fan theories abound. Last season, they were mostly about whether Megan Draper, Don's second wife, was in fact a sort of Sharon Tate character, destined to be offed in a manner like Tate. Speculation arose because Megan wore a shirt that matched one in a photograph of Tate, and so, fans reasoned, perhaps Matt Weiner, the show's head writer and executive producer, was dropping clues about her eventual demise.

Fair enough. But the show has been dropping hints about everyone's demise right from the start, because the show is at least sometimes a show about mortality (though one popular fan theory last season posited that Don Draper himself was already dead, with screenshots and symbols to back it up).

Such theories treat the show as a puzzle to be unlocked, a sort of trail of breadcrumbs that might lead a savvy viewer down the road toward guessing what happens in the finale, set to air in 2015 along with the back half of the seventh season. Now the race is on: who will guess first, or best? Who will get the bragging rights?

A similar phenomenon happened when the HBO show True Detective (which I loved) aired earlier this year. Viewers scoured the show for clues: who was the Yellow King? Why did Rust Cohle wander around quoting esoteric philosophy and poetry? What was actually going to happen? I think of this as the Lost school of television watching: the goal of a close reading is to follow the hints dropped by the show in order to unlock the mystery and win arguments in comments sections on articles.

True Detective disappointed some fans by having a rather straightforward ending that didn't satisfy any theories, though by my lights it was a satisfactory ending. And I'm fairly confident that Mad Men, though it is dropping ostensible clues left and right (some of which I've pointed out in my recaps), won't end the way anyone expects, either. I have more faith in the writers than that.

things-to-be-grateful-for

Lately I’ve been reading and rereading Jane Kenyon’s poem Otherwise. It’s a very short poem and you can read it here and many other places online. It might have been otherwise is the refrain in what is essentially a list of blessings. Like a shadow, the words sidle up to each bright moment Kenyon names.

People like this poem. On one level, it’s a simple reflection on gratitude. Given what we know about Kenyon’s adult struggle with depression and her battle with the leukemia she knew would one day take her life, the poem’s simplicity makes it all the more poignant and powerful. Kenyon was suffering when she wrote this quiet prayer of thanksgiving.

This is part of the reason I like this poem, and I think it’s why I’ve been returning to it often recently. There are times when the struggle to reconcile gratitude with sorrow can feel like an impossible task. That Jane did it so beautifully and with such tender precision brings me comfort. That she found little comfort from her faith and yet persisted in her hope and her longing for God is remarkable to me.

“Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus,” Paul reminds us. All circumstances—not just the easy ones. My family keeps that old Thanksgiving tradition of going around the table, everyone naming their gratitude for the past year. Some of the younger cousins think it’s corny, but I love it. I love this window into our lives, this frame around each person’s story that gets us to say what’s important. I love this frame because it often gets us to name and embrace the difficult things, too.

That’s the extra layer to the poem for me—or rather, its negative image. In this world, perhaps, it could not have been otherwise. The reverse of the poem is also part of the full mystery of gratitude. This life of small pleasures is also this life of struggle and darkness. The circumstances of Kenyon’s life included this “ripe, flawless/peach” and this walk in the woods, and also this depression and this leukemia.

When I read “Otherwise”, I see the concrete realness of the things-to-be-grateful-for in my own life. My husband’s laugh. Snowy cherry blossoms. The purring cat. But in the space outside the poem, or maybe, in the silence surrounding Kenyon’s voice, I hear my own not-knowing. If I am grateful for my life because of the joy I feel in my marriage and work, should I not also be grateful for my life because of the grief I’m feeling after incomprehensible loss?

Yes, “it might have been otherwise.” Though I’m ignorant of so much, I am aware of my many privileges: the simplest things I take for granted are extravagant luxuries for others. Even those in my own city. Probably my own block. Yet I want also to be grateful for what I don’t understand, for every part of the life I’ve been given.

(Painting by Norman Rockwell)

Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!: A Challenge to Christian Supermen

Hey Nostradamus! is Douglas Coupland’s most theologically complex novel, an exploration of questions about the problem of evil in the context of a Columbine-like school shooting. The first part of the story is recounted by Cheryl, a young victim of the absurd massacre, as she speaks from an unnamed, mysterious purgatorial space. In one particularly poignant section, Cheryl, a sincere and devout convert to the Christian faith, speaks frankly (and perhaps even prophetically) about many of the Christians that she has encountered:

“It always seems to me that people who’d discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they’d gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they’d lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls…”.

Cheryl’s involvement with an oppressive, judgmental youth group named “Youth Alive!,” as well as her relationship with her legalistic father-in-law, leads her to these conclusions. Yet she remains faithful, convinced that there is something beyond religious posturing, something in the Christian narrative that actually points to wholeness, depth, and meaning rather than pompous superficiality. Cheryl’s clarity of vision as she critiques the “religious” is rich and biblically informed:

“There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.”

Cheryl’s comments are poignant and instructive, a call to self reflection; and they bring to mind the moments when Christ himself expressed the most visible righteous anger. In both Matthew 21: 12-17 and Matthew 23, we see Him rebuking religious hypocrites because of their exploitation of the weak, their self righteousness, their shortsightedness.

In The AntiChrist, Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1888 polemic tracing the roots of our supposed misuse of the concepts of “good” and “evil,” he spends a large amount of time denouncing the sacrifice of Christ, an action that is repulsive to him because it supposedly “thwarts the law of evolution,” a law that propels us to follow our desires for power. But some of Nietzsche’s unrestrained insults are strangely beautiful and truthful descriptions of Christ:

“But this god of the “great majority,” this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew…a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the world!... His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom.”

Cheryl’s concern that religious self-righteousness can harden us to the concerns of “the weak and the lost” remind us that Christians can so easily posture as sad Nietzschean supermen, using the motions of “faith” as a means to power and pride rather than a call to serve. Nietzsche’s description of this “god of all the dark nooks and crevices”... whose “earthly kingdom” is a “ghetto kingdom” reminds us that Christ’s act of great strength (which Nietzsche reads as weakness) was to empty himself of the very power that was rightfully His as a way to both save and identify with the “weak and the lost.”

Neither Douglas Coupland nor Friedrich Nietzsche are Christians. One carefully and respectfully critiques Christian culture; the other hatefully and blasphemously bludgeons both Christ and Christians. But the writing of both can, on careful reflection, cause us to think about what a life of faith actually means. Coupland’s Cheryl laments the notion that “the religious” lack “a willingness to connect with unconverted souls.” Is this a call for us to begin looking more closely for the God-given truths that can be revealed even in “the dark nooks and crevices”?

Horror and Resurrection

Johann August Nahl, The Tomb of Madame Langhans

First impressions are too revealing, especially mistaken ones. When I first laid eyes on this porcelain copy of Johann August Nahl’s The Tomb of Madame Langhans at the Getty, my eyes over-saturated with snapshot impressions, I registered the gowned Gothic lady breaking through the crust of her marble tomb, saw the swaddling infant at her breast, and thought: horror. She’s dressed like a Mary Shelley character, but it was Bram Stoker’s Lucy who sprung to mind, the nocturnal lady in white creeping from her crypt in search of children to devour. Puzzled, I stood by the plexiglass case to take in all the details. What was I looking at? Night of the Living Dead: Sturm und Drang Edition?

Reading art through the lens of genre is not so unusual. The established patterns and precedents give us a leg up in making sense of new experiences. When we get the genre cues wrong, though, the miscategorization can result in surreal unintelligibility, as in my case. I wasn’t misreading The Tomb of Madame Langhans. That’s not a strong enough term. It was as if I were reading an alternate, wholly different work––and even now, studying the photograph, it doesn’t line up with my memory at all. The Tomb in my head is more macabre, reimagined to better fit the assigned pigeonhole.

My mistake is too revealing because it shows that, in my mind, the best fit for a work like Nahl’s is in the horror genre. This is strange because I am a Christian, and The Tomb of Madame Langhans is in fact a depiction of the Christian hope of bodily resurrection.

Maria Magdelena Langhans, a pastor’s wife, died in childbirth on Easter Sunday. The death of mother and child on the day Christians celebrate Christ’s victory over death inspired the hopeful vision commemorated on the tomb. Together they are raised on the last day in triumph. The pathos of the scene struck a chord with eighteenth century audiences, too: porcelain copies like the one in the Getty circulated far and wide, exercising an influence on the budding Romantic Movement reminiscent of the craze inspired by Goethe’s Werther. The original audience, Enlightened though they were, did not see the tomb and think of Mary Shelley but rather St. Paul. They possessed a cultural category by which they could properly assess the cues, one that over time has come to be overshadowed even in the minds of those of us who still believe in the doctrine of resurrection.

Can the doctrine alone constitute a hope? Can I call it hope in the fullest sense if it is incapable of recognizing its own reflection in art? Perhaps more is required.

I take a perverse delight in introducing the topics of bodily resurrection and St. John’s vision of a new heaven and new earth by first assuring Christian audiences that “you will not spend eternity in heaven.” Their eyes flare in astonishment. Yet the disembodied future we’ve been taught to anticipate would have been thin gruel to early believers, who expected a future in the flesh. Am I much farther down the path of understanding, if my mistaken my first impression of Madame Langhans’ tomb is anything to go by? Perhaps not. I have eyes that see horror when they look on hope, when I’d be better served with eyes that can see hope when they look on horror.

The Eyes the Window, The Mind the Poem

The Eyes the Window by Marci Rae Johnson (Sage Hill Press, 2013)

I'm a smart guy, but I'll admit to liking poets who tend to take a little more direct approach to their work. If I feel a poet intentionally creating obscuring prisms or building brick walls of her erudition, I tend to lose interest. Such poets are either engaged in some other conversation than that which interests me, or they are not trying to engage in a real conversation.

Marci Rae Johnson's The Eyes the Window is a rare exception. One actually senses that Johnson is literally feeling through the poetry, and yet she remains always just out of reach. It's a fascinating collection that makes you feel at once a witness to intimate moments and a stranger outside of true intimacy.

The first of the book's three sections introduces the "thought problem" of existence, or, more specifically, of consciousness. In the tradition of the Modernists, and before them the modern philosophers, Johnson begins with the mind reflecting upon itself, alone and therefore unable to substantiate its own existence:

To be. Infinitive. From the Latin infinitas as in the mind of God, the universe the space before and after. —"Showing Existence or Condition"

The self cannot, it seems, be in the infinitive. Memory, for instance, is too spotty and changeable. Johnson's search for the stable places of the self recall Stevens's "poem of the act of the mind." This is a book of somewhere's, maybe's, and could be's. Significantly, it is a book of desiring, and of desiring relationship. "To be loved" seems an attractive, plausible way to be.

But again, Johnson's work is so ambivalent. She writes in impressions and isolated thoughts that read something like watching Persona or L'Avventura, somehow working together into a whole through the desiring self. The reader stands right beside the speaker of her poems, breathing on her neck as she watches the waves on a lake outside her window. She confesses her desires, confesses her ambivalence, and then seems to recant her faith in everything she just said.

Is existence possible? Is love possible? In the second and third parts Johnson develops two journey narratives, one by car and one by train. Are these metaphors for the stale motions of a disintegrating love, or play spaces where love is possible just before it is impossible again? There is a heaviness to it all, and so many episodes of missed opportunity that I want to read it as the former, but there is such pathos in the desire that I want to believe these poems attempt to honor the brief moments of connection rather than mourn all the absence.

Johnson unabashedly commits the affective fallacy and contorts the world to projections of her own mind or emotions. These are poems in search of a real outside the self, after all, so it is appropriate that they presume a hyper-subjectivity. But this also allows her to playfully turn the banal into the beautiful. Quantum physics serves to multiply the possibilities of romance, road signs become subtle metaphors for poetry or for stages of relationship, and even Google suggests the conceptual poem, "28 Results for 'I.'"

Get this book and read it on a quiet morning with a cup of coffee. It will get inside you and linger and, what would not be the worst thing, unsettle you.

(Painting by Rene Magritte)

Resonance

It’s a measure of my addiction to House of Cards that I wound up watching an episode on my laptop, earbuds firmly in place, while, in the same room, my wife watched Into the Wild on the television.

As my show progressed, an episode that contained a subplot about a local BBQ joint that gained sudden notoriety, I found my gaze vacillating between my screen and the one behind it. It’s an all-too-familiar feeling—my attention tentative, or skittering along the surface tension of reality.

But then a moment happened when the gap between my knowing one screen and knowing another contracted, drawing both together. So it was that I saw two women, who’d known each other only from a fellowship hall, share an intimate first kiss in bed even as I saw men gather on the street outside, tearing at their barbeque ribs with their hands.

Of course it was coincidence. Characters in Sean Penn’s film happened to be eating what characters in House of Cards had been eating. But for an absorbing moment, I believed I was watching two scenes from the same show at once, each counterpointing the other. It was compelling.

But the convergence also gives me pause. More and more, I see my high school students as a mesh of interactivity. “Is it really possible to work a laptop, a cell phone, and an iPod simultaneously, while ‘doing homework?’” one mother recently asked rhetorically, on Facebook.

I’ve always assumed the answer to that question to be no, which is why in my literature classroom, I try to create conditions for entrance into what Sven Birkerts calls deep time (contemplative space where we can come to know the resonance of the data we’ve accrued), conditions I find increasingly at odds with the culture’s. We read aloud. We read slowly. We look up words. We read by candlelight.

And yet what we discover at those depths seems to be the very awareness of multiplicity and convergence that I found when the art on my wife’s screen became entangled with the melodrama on my own. We find the arguments and images that etymologies form. We find charges of thematic meaning around which opposing words scatter. We follow lines of allusive thought. In our deep time, we learn to see narratives that run like programs in the background.

Why does it bother me, then, to think that the idea of being offered merely one narrative at a time in a movie theatre or on a television screen might soon seem simplistic, or worse, inauthentic? What is the danger that our minds may be changing such that split-screen (or multi-screen) storytelling, in our multi-tasking culture, will become the only way to communicate in a way that feels true?

After all, couldn’t the evolution of consciousness—toward the meshing of seemingly competing attractions for attention—be reflective of a growing understanding of the deeper reality quantum physics gestures toward: a world of superposition and entanglement?

Maybe. But if so, when given the choice between attractions that arrive in our laps in high definition and the kind that are indistinguishable from darkness until our eyes are trained to see them, I am afraid that I and many of my students will increasingly choose what comes to us.

Reflecting natural forces is not the same as embodying truth, and it’s not the same as knowing either one. If we are to feel and know the resonance of all that converges, if we are interested in wisdom, we must, again and again, learn how to read. That, I see here beneath the words, is why I teach.

(Self-portrait by Rene Magritte)

Go and do likewise

In rereading Victor Hugo's collected works , I was struck by the ire the author held against the church. Victor Hugo had no issue with the divine but rather with the bureaucrats with “large mitres” who built institutions to “administrate” the sacred. Today, we are made to feel small in the modern church . If we haven’t brought in new “pelts” to the pews, we haven’t lived up to Jesus’ great commission.

I recently had the privilege of spending time with Knox Thames, Director of Policy and Research at the United States Commission at the U.S. Department of State. Yes, he is Christian who works under Obama. Knox revealed to me the harrowing levels of persecution that is going on in the rest of the world to Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists – and of course, in most cases, these are Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists doing violence to one another. I am not a Universalist. I am a Christian. I believe that Jesus is the Way. But in the face of the violence that is happening, it seems that the first order of business is to aspire to charity and kindness toward the other religions.

As Knox Thames, so eloquently put it, we need to look at Jesus’ example of loving. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite passed the half dying man who had been beaten and robbed on the road. It was the Samaritan, the lowest of the low in that society, who stopped. The Samaritan ministered to the fellow in the road, and carried him into town. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus instructed his followers. Perhaps we should be more focused on loving our neighbor before we start judging or converting them.

As Victor Hugo said, “What a grander thing still, to love!”

(Painting by Vincent Van Gogh)

Gods and Janitors

Of the gods, my favorite is Janus. He was the god of beginnings, transitions and portals. The month of January is named after him. His name heads the oldest lists of Roman gods. His temples were oddly small and made of wood, yet, he was sometimes referred to as divom deus, or god of gods. He was said to be present at the beginning of time and guards the gates of heaven. He was invoked at the celebration of every other god and he alone was worshiped at the first of each month. He is usually depicted with two faces, one bearded and one smooth-shaven, one looking aft, and one fore.

Among these disparate traits, though, my favorite thing about Janus is his place in the derivation of the word “janitor.” It's wonderfully counter-intuitive and paradoxical, but in an ideal way it makes sense. If you're like me, your first encounters with janitors were in elementary school. Common but revered, they were ever-present, uniformed and kept a cart with special equipment. They had exclusive and intimate knowledge of attics and basements and a ring of keys to unlock every door. They had a pink powder that transformed every spill into a sweepable material and bravely neutralized even the most disgusting post-lunch mishaps. But we don't idealize janitors that way anymore, do we?

Perhaps we should. Maybe we should even identify with them. Jim Carey was once a janitor. Ben Affleck's dad was a janitor at Harvard. (Aha! Good Will Hunting!) Janitors have made for many memorable television and movie roles. They show us something about ourselves. Some are sage like Fortune, the janitor from “Rudy”, while others seem foolish like Carl the Janitor from “The Breakfast Club.” There are portrayals of idiocy like Joe Dirt and necessity like Dr. Richard Kimble. They walk among us but as from another world like the un-named “Janitor” from “Scrubs.” There is something true and essential about them no matter how they are portrayed. Something wise in their futility, something constructive in their duality. Something of the god in their humanity. Custodians of time and space with history and possibility in view.

The Study of Contrasts

“Well, you know what they say, right?" The portly Christian gentleman leaned back in his chair, nodding confidently at his conversation partner. “The Secret Service trains their agents in detecting counterfeit money by only giving them real money to study. See, if you just focus on the real stuff, the fakes are obvious. That’s how it goes with truth, you know.”

The conversation meandered on, but my eavesdropping screeched to a halt. I was stuck on his analogy, a bold pitch for an easy discernment. It sounds so appealing, doesn’t it? Just study the truth. Just know what’s right. If you do, any falsehood will be startlingly obvious.

In theory the idea sounds promising, but does it hold up in practice? Let’s say an avid hiker bought a guide to edible berries, and opened it to find zero information on deadly varieties and no identifying factors for underripe or overripe fruit. The guide considered it sufficient to describe only ideal forms of the best berries. It may be somewhat informative, but it would be far from useful in the field. Nature rarely conforms to ideals or best examples, the human psyche less so.

Perhaps this is why Proverbs, the most recognized volume of wisdom literature in history, is a study in contrasts. The cascades of comparisons are relentless: wisdom cries out against folly, the righteous are compared to the wicked, the way of honesty is juxtaposed with the path of deceit. Discernment develops in a marketplace bustling with distortions, growing in its unrelenting contrast of truth with lie.

These contrasts fill and shape all of human activity. In secular arenas we often discover provocative graces, while in religious circles we can find piously-robed falsehoods. I headed to the Secret Service's page for detecting counterfeit money and discovered that the story I had heard about their agents was false. In reality, agents carefully examine fake bills and the methods of their creation, closely comparing them with the originals.

The Secret Service analogy turned out to be a counterfeit itself, an enticing claim with a dangerously false premise. Can discernment thrive where there is presumption without contrast? After all, a tree may appear good for food, a delight to the eyes, a thing to be desired to make one wise…

Grant Us Peace

Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. Osanna, Osanna in excelsis.

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Benedictus qui venit. Osanna, Osanna in excelsis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, Dona nobis pacem.

Heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Hosanna, hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is He who comes. Hosanna in the highest.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, Lamb of God,

Grant us peace.

-----

As the melody climbed higher, the voices of the choir filled the cavernous ceiling of the cathedral. Agnus Dei. Lamb of God. People in the audience lifted their countenances, spirits soaring with the melody as the new key carried them away.  I glanced around, furtively wiping away the tears in my eyes, only to notice that others were doing the same. After standing and singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” we walked out into the cold winter night, exclaiming to one another about the loveliness of the evening---an annual choral concert in our small Midwestern town. “It was all so wonderful, but ‘The Ground’ was my favorite.” I agreed wholeheartedly and wondered what made this piece by contemporary composer Ola Gjeilo such a favorite.

A few months later I looked at the score and noticed the key changes. For a few measures, dissonance was introduced into an otherwise lovely melody and it became almost painful to listen. But in the measures after a key change, the melody was transformed---it soared, it spoke, it gave hope to the listener. Gjeilo, a Julliard-trained composer from Norway, has suggested that contemporary music has focused almost exclusively on the suffering and pain of human life: “the Modernists were brave to delve into parts of the human psyche that are dark and edgy, but I do think they got somewhat stuck in that.” Further, says the composer, “I think people naturally and instinctively want to experience “transcendence, resolution and the feeling of redemption, joy and peace that the resolving of discord can yield.”

Perhaps key changes are a way of seeing the dark and difficult experiences in our human lives---illness, job changes, loss, disappointment, uncertainty, unfulfilled expectations. Although painful in the moment, these transitions may be understood as temporary and transformative, allowing us to look forward with hope to a new key, a soaring melody, and perhaps a richer and fuller knowledge of the Creator’s love for us.

And the Truth to Speak

I was surprised to find a sheriff's deputy on the doorstep when I answered his knocking. I was even more surprised at the language on the subpoena. Under the header it read: "To all and singular the sheriffs of the State of Florida - Greetings" for an opening salutation. It sounded like a good way to start an Epistle, but a strange way to address me about a summons to traffic court.

Things got stranger still in the body of the letter:

"You are commanded to appear before the Honorable ____________, of this court, at the location listed below on this [date] at [time] to testify, and the truth to speak, in a certain matter pending before said court and to wit."

I was jarred at the force of the language.

Lest I doubt his seriousness, the Honorable __________ closed the letter with: "Witness my hand and the seal of the said court this 7th day of March, 2014."

The syntax and the formality in this form letter, (hand-delivered by a man deputized and representing the man whose hand I was supposed to witness behind the printed stamp signature) felt biblical and Shakespearean at the same time.  It was just a shadow, I felt, but one with enough weight to register somewhere in me: Justice is more than an abstraction. I will appear. I will testify. It will be the truth. So says the judge. There are, I believe, images, elements of the natural world and unexpected pockets of language that make parts of a hidden world plain and believable. Which is so much the better, since the hidden is true.

Even in The People's Court or an episode of Judge Judy, we can't escape a feeling or a sense of something real, and something important underneath the campy melodrama. It happens at weddings and funerals, too, even the most non-religious ones.

When I registered my car recently, the clerk, after 15 minutes of asking rapid fire questions and staring at her monitor while she typed, stopped, swiveled her gaze to meet mine, and said more slowly: "Do you solemnly swear, under punishment of perjury, that all the information you've given me today is correct?" Do I swear? Do I do anything solemnly? Is the truth really that important?

I felt the weight of testifying in traffic court and, somehow, that was weightier because it reminded me of an irrevocable, greater summons to every man. One where the truth will indeed be told, and witnessing the hand of the one who commands will shake us, each and every one.

I was surprised, in part, because I don't expect letters anymore. And for all my love of it, I guess I don't expect much from language, from just a word, anymore. Not all this, anyway. What is that? And isn't there something – someone -- at your door and mine, even now, knocking?

The Fifty Year Sword

In Mark Z. Danielweski’s novella The Fifty Year Sword, a recently-divorced seamstress named Chintana attends a 50th birthday party for her husband’s mistress, Belinda Kite. A storyteller at the party tells Chintana and several orphans the story of his epic quest for a mysterious weapon, the Fifty Year Sword. The invisible sword cuts every victim just like a non-magical sword, but with one catch; the wounds inflicted by the blade don’t manifest themselves until the victim turns fifty years old. Belinda Kite, in a bid to prove to the frightened children that the story is hogwash, slashes herself repeatedly with the sword. Later that night, as she and her guests toast her 50th birthday, Belinda falls apart piece by piece, a victim of her bravado and the Fifty Year Sword.

The story is full of images pertaining to the cutting, slicing, and severing of threads while characters try ceaselessly to bind up the pieces. Chintana heals a gash on her thumb and the wound of her recent divorce, the storyteller goes on a dark quest to heal an unknown grudge, and Belinda Kite falls to pieces while Chintana tries desperately to hold her together. The characters flounder in the aftermath of violence, haphazardly stitching themselves together before the next round of chaos or despair. Their efforts invariably fail.

It is interesting that Danielewski’s book deals so extensively with stitching and sewing. For millennia, mankind has been preoccupied with weaving, stitching, and mending. Some of the earliest recorded gods and goddesses in history were dedicated to those arts; the goddess Ixchel from the Mayan civilization, the Greek Muses, Frigg and the Norns from Norse legends, and the Navajo’s Spider Woman are all mythical weavers. They wove men, their destinies, and the universe itself. Thread and fabric are ancient symbols of life, and the severing of threads is symbolic of death or chaos. In myth, managing the fabric of a man’s life was the responsibility of his deity.

In the story, though, the act of binding and mending is left to the characters, not to any higher power. If art and literature are windows into the human experience, what does Danielewski’s novella say about our fears and beliefs? Chintana and the others are scarred by violence -- physical, spiritual, or emotional -- and they alone are responsible for mending their wounds. The fabric of their lives is repeatedly slashed and torn, but no intervening higher power helps them bind up the gashes. The cycle is exhausting and never-ending. They are truly alone.

And don’t we often feel alone? Our lives are often disrupted by our own actions or by circumstances beyond our control. The slashes come again and again; it’s easy to get caught in the endless battle to sew ourselves up again, alone, before we try to battle on. It is easy to forget that we are not alone; it is easy to forget the promises made by Jehovah Rapha, the Great Physician, who said, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.” How much more hope we have than Chintana! We must strive to not forget it.

Why Didn't I See It the First Time?

The first time—in fact the first two times—I watched 12 Years a Slave in preparation for my annual lecture on the Academy award nominees for best picture, I really saw nothing about the faith of the slaves in the picture. But in fact, in one crucial scene near the end of the movie, Solomon Northup, the main character in the movie, has a “conversion” of sorts, when he is at the funeral of a fellow slave. While the slaves are singing “Roll, Jordan, Roll”, Northup is so despondent and has faced so many disappointments in his attempts to get free that he at first is silent, clearly refusing to sing. But the words seem to work on him, and eventually he joins in, tentatively at first but in the end with great gusto. In addition, at several other times in the film, the slaves sing spirituals while working in the fields.

How could I have not seen this? Why, in the first version of my lecture, did I accuse the filmmakers of an historical revisionism, which completely avoided the faith of the slaves in the antebellum South?

The answer of course lies to some degree in my inattentiveness, but I do not believe that tells the full picture. The tenor of the movie so strongly depicts the Christian faith being used as an oppressive tool in the hands of the Masters, that it was impossible for me to see any positive reference to the faith. Three times in the film, there are extended Sunday morning “services” in which the slave owners preach sermons to their combined household of family and slaves. The sermons are biblically-based, and in one case directly related to using the Scriptures out of context to justify their oppression. The most evil character in the film, Master Edwin Epps, played by Michael Fassbender is the greatest offender.

A second problem in my estimation is this: the filmmakers don’t seem to consider the faith carefully or have much time for it. This comes out clearly in a comparison of the film with Northup’s memoir on which the film is based. A number of times in the memoir, Northup says kind things about some of the slaveholders he knew, but none of these comments are found in the film. Even more important, in the film his journey is one that is portrayed humanistically emphasizing his own perseverance and courage and never his dependence upon, and gratitude for, the providence of God, a theme that is clear in the memoir. Even in the film’s version of Northup’s resurrection from despair by joining in the singing of “Roll, Jordan, Roll” (a scene that is not in his memoir at all), the slave looks to be simply gathering up his courage for action, not acknowledging his Source for help in a time of trouble.

The point is this: the actual content of a message is a mixture of philosophical, linguistic and historical data set into a particular context and portrayed a certain way. That context and portrayal are crucial to how a message will be perceived, and this is particularly true in a medium like film, which uses such powerful musical, visual, and verbal tools. The bravery of the slaves in the actual 1840’s was due in large part to their dependence on a living and true God; when that bravery is portrayed in terms of self-reliance, the message becomes clouded and confused.