Man of Sorrows

The painting you are looking at was completed in 1860 by the 19th-century Scottish artist William Dyce. It is called "Man of Sorrows." I think it's an odd painting, though on the surface it does not seem that odd. Without the title we might think it is a painting of Jesus in the wilderness or perhaps in the Garden of Gethsemane. But the title tells us something different. The phrase “Man of Sorrows” comes from Isaiah 53:3 ("He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.")

An internet search of this phrase shows us that “Man of Sorrows” paintings were commonplace during the Middle Ages. They were portraits of the scourged and wounded Jesus at the point of his humiliation, displaying the marks of crucifixion on his hands and side. Dyce's painting, however, looks nothing like this. Instead it depicts a unwounded Christ sitting on a rock. And yet, it is a portrait of a Christ who is clearly saddened. So how are we to interpret this painting?

It appears that part of the interpretation of this painting lies in our understanding that the landscape Dyce is depicting is not 1st-century Palestine. The landscape Dyce is depicting is the countryside of 19th-century Scotland. Christ arrives, but he is ignored. He is scourged, but not by whips and beatings. Instead, for Dyce he is scourged by indifference and apathy. He is the “unesteemed” Man of Sorrows. So I look at that painting and I’m ready to move on. But then I imagine for a moment: What if the landscape depicted by Dyce was not the countryside of 19th-century Scotland? What if it was someplace from the 21st century? What if it was my city? What if it was my neighborhood? What if it was my home?

Our Moments Big as Years

 O aching time! O moments big as years!   - John Keats

Tradition has it that after Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, the revived one never laughed again. Except once, while sitting in the marketplace watching a   thief steal a clay pot. He found that hilarious. “Clay, stealing clay!” Ah, the philosophical bent of those whose souls have temporarily stepped out of time and hovered above their own decomposing bodies.

Time is unruly, an elusive commodity temporarily spliced into the DNA of the universe. Whether we’re on time, out of time, or in the nick of time, we measure this invisible bafflement by simple things; the ticking of a clock, our breath, the movements of celestial bodies. Theoretical physicists like Sean Carroll offer visuals like his “arrow of time” that slices through a vast multiverse, where defining terms we recognize—causality, memory, progress, aging, metabolism—are attached to puny time’s events as they hang onto the arrow for dear life.

Yet here we are, mostly non-physicists, shuffling through the present, racking up piles of the past like old sales receipts, anxious about the future, and wasting time like crazy. So few of our recollections seem to inspire the sense that that event/obsession/outlay of energy was worth investing in, back then, when that was the now. We feel as wretched as Shakespeare’s Richard II: I wasted time, and now time doth waste me. If anything in life requires faith, it is the conviction that a worthy tapestry is somehow being woven from it all.

Think back to the night of your senior prom. You were supple and stunning in ecru muslin and pearls, he pressed a red rose into your hand, you danced to “Colour My World,” then slept within a stand of quivering aspen while sparks from your campfire wafted into open space, where Dr. Carroll’s “progress” or “causality” might or might not be relevant. Question: If sparks from a teenager’s campfire drift across the border from time into non-time territory, and no one is there to notice, is the power of young love strong enough to give the sparks causality?

Truth: The Deeply Rooted Idea

This morning an arborist is cutting down a white oak beside our house. The bark of the tree had started rotting off in chunks the size of dinner plates, and it was full of ants underneath as far up as I could see. Surprisingly, the inside of the trunk looked like healthy blond wood. This was also the case with our neighbor’s tree, the one that came crashing down two years ago in what the TV news called a “severe wind event” until some meteorologist introduced them to the cool new term derecho—wind like a tornado, but straight at you instead of swirling. The roots of his tree, it turned out, were weak and had given way.

As the arborist dismembers our tree, his chainsaw growling and roaring outside, I sit at my desk with interweb chatter buzzing in my head—gun violence, same-sex marriage, healthcare reform, wealth inequality, government, religion, science. I have gotten in the habit of following a number of news feeds, and now I get a daily diet of this stuff. Not that the issues aren’t important. They are. However, more and more I fear is that, if I don’t stem the flow, it will, if not ruin, cheapen my creative work.

In his book, On Moral Fiction John Gardner instructs writers—and all artists—to go after truth instead of focusing on “important but passing concerns,” which change as cultures change. Gardner admits that many artists “who disparage the pursuit of truth” do it because they “have merely grown wary of the word’s potential for pretentiousness and moralistic tyranny…” but he maintains nevertheless that only art concerned with truth can be called moral art. How does an artist do that? Gardner writes, “… before we can get to the great idea True, an emotionally charged symbolic construct for which innumerable men and women have died, we must first stare thoughtfully and long at a tree, Old English treow, which gave us the word true (treow), the “deeply rooted” idea.” An artist who neglects the deeply rooted idea “goes not for the profound but for the clever.”

Artists have the job of unearthing the human truth that cannot be found in any other way. For example, Gardner writes, “A brilliantly imagined novel about a rapist or murderer can be more enlightening than a thousand psycho-sociological studies…” This truth is in the deep-rooted place, which requires long and thoughtful staring. How can we go deep if we are spending our days surfing the web, digging yes, but here for a bit and then there for a bit, as if flitting around the yard with a gardener’s trowel?

Contemporary issues are important, but they are not lasting—what’s more, they are not resolved at the surface, where all the heat of argument occurs. Are you obsessing over issues, or are you staring thoughtfully and long at the tree, the deeply rooted idea?

What they never tell you about teaching...

“What they never tell you about teaching,” I say to my colleague as we're climbing the steps from the vestry to the sanctuary, “is that graduation is the worst.”

He nods knowingly. Graduation is the worst. Not because it means melting into grossness underneath a scratchy cap, billowy robe, and velvet hood every year right as the weather is going from warmish to hot—though a few hours beneath the hot lights has, on occasion, made me curse silently and wish for a popsicle.

No, to me the reason is simple. I always hated my own graduations because they were sad, and they involved all these awkward goodbyes where you said “see you later” but what you really meant was “maybe I'll see you some day, and maybe I won't, but I don't want this to feel too final.” I hated the feeling of being dropped off a cliff, of missing all the structured life from the past four years, the comfortable circles of friends, disappearing into thin air as if they never existed outside pictures and some scattered memories.

But what I discovered when I became a professor was that you have to do that every year.

The college I teach at is small and we have only four majors, and I teach some of the core courses in our largest major. So by the time they reach their senior year, some of those students have had a class with me every semester since they were freshmen. And freshmen are funny, especially where I teach: they're new to New York City, usually a little on the hopelessly clueless side, scared but bright-eyed and ready to take on the world.

Over the course of four years, I try to unseat their world a bit, help them root out some of the things they never thought about, hold them up to the light, turn them and look at them from every angle, and then help them build a more solid foundation. I see it happen over and over, and I see them — in some real way — grow up. Then I see them at graduation and realize: they're adults. They may still be 21- and 22-year-olds, with all the attendant weaknesses and insecurities, but they're not children anymore, and I had a part in that.

It makes me feel responsible, and lately it makes me wish I had more opportunities in my life to stop and ceremoniously look at the people around me and notice that they've changed. And that I've changed. That we are changing each other.

Love Letters from Cell 92

Not long ago I had a conversation about a few of the respectable – or at least often mentioned – names in Christian theology. You know the ones, people who are associated with the “serious” kind of precise Christian foundational, and pristine – if not a little tart – triune doctrinal correctness: the first names that come to mind are Calvin, Luther, Knox, Edwards etc. For many, the term “serious” often identifies the most pertinent associations with theologians. Indeed, while the Oxford English Dictionary has quite a few connotations associated with the word “serious,” amusement, pleasure-seeking and amour are not – most gravely too, we might note – associated with it. “Serious,” I am afraid, means just what we think. It seems to me, most people think that “if it ain't heavy, sober and serious, it aint theology”! Indeed, seeing the name Bonhoeffer— the author of the sober sounding The Cost of Discipleship and Ethics, pretty weighty texts for those who know them— on a conference announcement sprung my mind into “serious” mode. Even while reading about his “religionless Christianity” and the inseparability between a theologically-centered life and a life-centered theology, I was still reading with my “serious” eyeglasses on. Concepts like God’s “ineluctable reality” and God making himself a mediator between man and reality can often sound rather ... “serious.”

Then I read Love Letters from Cell 92. This correspondence between Bonhoeffer and his fiancée, Maria, made the “serious” part melt like a popsicle beside a Jacuzzi jet. To be sure, in the aftermath I realized that I had not lost any of the good stuff, only the “serious” took on a newer, more replete and vibrant meaning. I found that in the midst of the deep stuff there was also the soft and delicate and gentle flowering of beautiful emotionally dripping romance in ... yes, Bonhoeffer. Reading Love Letters alongside his other works is like putting on a pair of 3D glasses which bring to clarity the fuzzy image before us; it seemed that here in Bonhoeffer was serious theology concomitant with joyous[1] emotionality.

I heard fizzing sounds come from my head. Sure, both of those things can fit together conceptually, but in actuality? Many can even connect the blood and flesh in the Eucharist, but a theology that is both serious and joyous? Is it possible? Apparently, Bonhoeffer the serious theologian could just as easily entertain solemn ideas of thick theological import as enraptured romps of romantic fancy. Take the following note to his sweetheart, “you need to know what I am really feeling and not view me as one born to be a hermit on a pillar ... the desires I have ... are very earthly and tangible.” Bonhoeffer ends his letters with soft sentiments of love: “I give you a long tender kiss and embrace you”; and, “now, my beloved Maria, be tenderly embraced and kissed and loved, more and more, by your Dietrich.” In case we are wont to think such words as mere formulaic convention, Bonhoeffer laments in a letter to a friend that, as a couple, he and Maria had to “deliberately repress” all the normal aspects of engagement: this included the “sensual and erotic elements.” I figure this adds a good bit of clarity to the not being “a hermit on a pillar comment” for any who might be confused.

So, in returning to Bonhoeffer’s idea that a theologically centered life (let’s insert the word “humanity”) is inseparable from a life-centered theology, I am reminded that true life/humanity has, along with its seriousness, both joy and – at least for some – a good bit of romance. I was reminded that we also need not be trepidatious about embracing the most joyous aspect of humanity – love. After all, Bonhoeffer did – seriously.

[1] In a letter to Maria, Bonhoeffer quoted Adalbert Stifter, who said, “pain is the holiest angel who reveals treasures that would otherwise have remained hidden.” Bonhoeffer continued on in saying that, while he appreciated the angel pain, ”there is an even holier angel than pain and that is joy in God.”

(Photo by Judy Bandsmer)

Fargo and the Force of Evil

I tend to think of evil in three categories. The first is the snake-in-the-garden tempter. The second is an immovable force of destruction like a tornado or a hurricane. The third is a bad guy with a gun, the classic antagonist. What happens when you roll all three into one character? (Drum roll, please!) You have Lorne Malvo from the new TV show Fargo. And where you find Malvo, you’ll find the bolito.

In Cormac McCarthy’s script for The Counselor, a drug-dealing businessman describes how Mexican cartels use the bolito to kill its victims. The bolito is a loop of wire that slips around the neck. A small motor is turned on and the wire pulls tight and tighter until the victim bleeds out or is decapitated. In many of McCarthy’s stories, evil is like a powerful, motor-driven force with no off-switch. A blood bath always ensues. That same evil is the driving force in Fargo where Malvo brings a bolito to the small Minnesota town of Bemidji.

Lorne Malvo is a humorous character who fits Fargo’s Coen-esque dark-humor. But in Bernidji we find that no matter how random Malvo’s killing, no matter how silly and misinformed the good, the story still pits evil against good. And this evil is always aided by both our inability to recognize it and/or our lack of courage to hunt it out.

Fighting evil is always an active pursuit of the truth, no matter how crazy, confusing or bloody. As in much of McCarthy’s canon, the force of evil seems irresistible, enveloping the unaware and the weak. It may give great temporary power to destroy, but it will always kill them.

And Fargo demonstrates how it tears apart the fabric of the community. Duluth officer Gus Grimly asks himself, “Am I supposed to put myself in danger or just let it go?” That’s the question the town must ask itself. Is it the question we should ask ourselves?

The Ridiculous Boat Called English

I am teaching more these days than I have at any other time in my life, and every time I walk into the classroom I am visited by the same butterflies. They’re probably the same species of nervousness that visits everyone, but they’re also in on a secret. I’m a teacher, and I have no idea what I’m doing.

When I first began teaching English to speakers of other languages, I felt like a tightly wound ball of rubber bands. I suspected I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know my grammar well enough, and I certainly didn’t know enough of the pedagogy particular to teaching English language learners. Conversations in the staff room only confirmed my suspicions. I didn’t know as much as the other teachers did, and no one could find this out.

So I got myself a good grammar textbook and a survey of contemporary linguistics, and began studying at night. It seemed only fair, since that’s how my students spent their evenings, after five hours in the classroom and however many English-tinted hours they spent commuting home from school. The more I studied, I thought, the better armed I would be in the classroom, against their terribly trusting stares and the questions I was convinced I would be unable to answer. I needed to master English, so I could shake out all its tricks into a smooth set of operating instructions.

The more I learned and continue to learn about this language, however, the more ridiculous the idea of mastery seems. It’s like naming myself captain of an ancient, unwieldy paddle boat and assigning the students seats, then showing them how to operate the vessel.

What I’ve discovered is that learning alongside my students is exactly where I want to be. I don’t want them to be idle passengers, expecting me to shield them from every wave and iceberg. I want them with me at the wheel, figuring it out as we go. While a little bit of protective filtering is helpful, it’s extremely useful for them to see how native speakers wrestle with language, too.

I love this ridiculous boat called English. I’ve made my life in it. Teaching language is just one more phase in my love affair with the words I’ve been drinking in since birth. That’s the only thing I can really say I “have” to teach. I want to keep learning, but I am trying to let that be a means to an end rather than the end.

Van Gogh and Victor Hugo Meet “in the center of the starry night”

“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream,” Vincent van Gogh reportedly said. In the case of his most famous painting, The Starry Night, he may not have dreamed it, but may have found it in the words of Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo and  Vincent van Gogh never met in person. However, an avid reader of fiction, Van Gogh was extremely moved by a passage in Hugo‘s masterwork, Les Miserables. This is, according to William J. Havlicek, Ph.D., author of the marvelous Van Gogh's Untold Journey, the passage from Les Miserables which inspired Van Gogh:

“He was out there alone with himself, composed, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart to the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts that fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart as the flowers of night emit their perfume, he lit like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding in ecstasy the midst of creation’s universal radiance, perhaps he could not have told what was happening in his own mind; he felt something floating away from him, and something descending upon him, mysterious exchanges of the soul with the universe.”

We often think of Vincent van Gogh as a nut job: a reckless artist who cuts off his ear as a gift to his lover, a man in so much pain he offs himself. If we take the time to actually glimpse the pentimento beneath the true portrait of van Gogh, we might find a very different painting. This portrait might show the artist as an avid reader, a thoughtful writer (writing over 1000 letters in his brief lifetime),  an artist devoted to evoking the divine in his work, and a follower of Jesus.

In a Letter to Emil Bernard on June 26,1988 van Gogh wrote,

“Christ lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made…living men, immortals.”

This letter was written a year before van Gogh checked into the asylum in Saint-Remy France. He moved into the asylum for sleep disorders and fits. The latest information points to van Gogh suffering from chronic sleeplessness due to a combination of genetic epilepsy and brain damage from absinthe abuse. New information gathered from Pulitzer Prize winners, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, indicates that Van Gogh did not commit suicide, but that he was killed by some local town ruffians when a gun malfunctioned. In a pointed assumption by the writers, they believe because of van Gogh’s “Christian nature,” he kept the incident from the authorities. It took several days for the artist to die, and while he was dying Van Gogh told the authorities that the wound was self inflicted (he was terribly sick anyway). The theory is that he did not want the accident to destroy the young lives of his assaulters.

As a culture, we are fortunate that Hugo and van Gogh met not in real time, but “in the center of the starry night”. For without Hugo’s writing, van Gogh may never have been inspired in the way that he was to paint what has become one of the most beloved and recognized paintings of the modern epoch.

(Painting by Vncent van Gogh)

The Good Apocalypse

When doomsday literature goes highbrow, you might expect real-life survivalists to cheer. My favorite criticism of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, however, comes from a popular survivalist forum, where the book and film were taken to task for presenting an apocalypse with “no hope for the future.”

But wait––Isn’t hopelessness the whole point of the apocalypse? Doesn’t the popularity of end-of-the-world stories (whether the end is brought about by zombies, nukes, aliens, or melting ice caps) draw back the curtain on a bleak cultural death wish? If you’re one of those cultural critics always looking to trace our pleasures back to our pathologies, the answer is probably yes. Threatened by the pace of change, powerless to adapt, we find solace in fantasies of apocalypse, misanthropy writ large.

Maybe so.

I’ve always been fascinated by these stories, however, and find them shot through with a perverse optimism. They appeal to people who, for whatever reason, want the end to come. Environmentalists cheer as nature takes out the human trash in The Day After Tomorrow. Social Darwinists cheer as the niceties of so-called civilization are stripped away in favor of survival-of-the-fittest reality. Religious conservatives cheer the punishment of the wicked. After the cataclysm a better––or at any rate, more honest––world emerges. The coming fire, as it destroys, will also cleanse. Once the decadence of the old order is purged, the apocalypse, paradoxically, brings hope. We envision an end of the world which does not encompass our own end.

Survivalists may daydream about living in their own version of 1990s Bosnia or modern-day Syria, but they don’t move to such places, or to Haiti, to live the fantasy. The dream is not to suffer, but rather to live in a world better suited to people like you. It’s important for such dreams that the disaster befall your world, not someone else’s.

The society you want to see destroyed by the good apocalypse is your own.

The greatest apocalypse is that of St John, which has had Christians longing for the world’s end since the inception of the faith. In some ways the anticipation of a final reckoning that persists in our culture seems like a distorted echo of that ancient eschatology, which might explain why hand-in-hand with the orgy of destruction comes a ray of light.

“The end is nigh,” proclaims the street preacher’s placard in so many doomsday films, leaving this question unanswered: the end of what? What Christians long for is not the end of the world but the end of the world under sin. Not an end to existence, but an end to captivity. The rule of sin is creation’s ruin, but the Savior’s reign restores the world.

(Photo is a still from the film The Road)

Building Barns and Bridges

They should never have built a barn there, at all – Edward Thomas

In “The Revolt of Mother” New England wife Sarah Penn learns that husband Adoniram plans to build a barn on a piece of land set aside for a new house. Sarah speaks directly to her husband later that same day, imploring him to build the new house instead of another barn. Adoniram is unmoved by her eloquent and reasonable argument, and says several times: “I ain’t got nothin’ to say.” The issue is unresolved, and the construction of the barn takes place without further discussion.

When Adoniram is called away on an errand, Sarah takes action. She moves the entire household from the old cottage to the empty new barn. Upon his return, a shocked and then remorseful Adoniram finds Sarah and the children living quite comfortably in the barn.

In Sarah Penn, writer Mary E. Wilkins Freeman gives us a model for conflict resolution. When confronted with the knowledge that Adoniram has decided to build his barn without including her in the plans, Sarah refuses to criticize, telling her daughter, Nanny, “You hadn't ought to judge father.” There is little evidence of smoldering silences, nagging, or family discord. Sarah goes on with her work----baking, cooking, sewing, cleaning---until eventually she takes advantage of Adoniram’s absence to move the household to the barn.

What might have happened if a resentful Sarah had badgered and hectored her harried husband, and then taken over the barn? Adoniram might have set the hired hands to moving things right back to the little house, and he may have felt perfectly justified in doing so. Or what if Sarah had ignored her needs, stayed in the little house, and lived out the remaining years of their marriage in silent resentment? Think Ethan and Zeena Frome.

Sarah Penn refuses to criticize her husband, and she refuses to set aside her own real needs to languish in self-imposed unselfish silence. Refusing to rebuke Adoniram for his barn building, she effectively preserves her husband’s dignity and the dignity of their marriage. She bridges the gap between the two of them with virtuous behavior. There is no accusatory tone in Sarah’s voice when she explains the move to the barn:

"We've come here to live, an' we're goin' to live here. We've got jest as good a right here as new horses an' cows. The house wa'n't fit for us to live in any longer, an' I made up my mind I wa'n't goin' to stay there. I've done my duty by you forty year, an' I'm goin' to do it now; but I'm goin' to live here."

Finally, Adoniram understands. He yields the barn and weeps as he experiences real remorse at his own unjust action. He even agrees to build partitions and buy new furniture. I suspect he will find life in the large new house with a contented wife rather pleasant after all. If Mother ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!

(Painting by Arline Kroger)

Will There Be Stories in Heaven?

The question, "Will there be stories in heaven?" became an issue for me only when my son was two or three and we started letting him watch a limited amount of TV. Now, this isn't a post about why we let our kid watch TV, even though that would likely get a lot of hits. This is about all these nonviolent alternatives to G.I. Joe and Transformers that are, frankly, dreadfully dull.

Take Caillou, which is maybe an extreme case but is for me the epitome of dull children's programming. Nothing happens! Even in shows I kinda like, such as My Big, Big Friend or Pinky Dinky Doo, nothing much really happens. It concerns me to think that somehow the violence is what makes the difference. It would be tantamount to saying that sin is necessary for interesting conflict and thus for narrative itself. And if that's true, and if one day all sin will be redeemed for good, then it's not clear what our lives will look like—what our very identities will consist in—without story.

I hope it's not strange to say our identities depend on story. Even God tells us who He is through stories in Scripture, and the primary way we know who Jesus himself is is through the stories of the Gospels. Can we imagine ourselves, purified, but without stories, especially without new stories?

Is there narrative without sin and the violence it entails? Most of our Bible stories presume it, even those about Christ. There's much to be said on the subject of violence/nonviolence in children's TV, but I want to focus on when narrative gets "interesting."

In the tedious plots of Caillou and shows like it, there is often no real moral dilemma and thus no real stakes. A child may care a little about whether Caillou makes it through his dentist appointment, but they won't care as much as they will about whether Wolverine defeats Juggernaut again. The stakes in the Wolverine battle are simply higher and so overcoming the conflict means more. It is important that Juggernaut is evil or wants to commit evil acts and that Wolverine is a force for good competent and powerful enough to counteract that evil.

My son even likes the villains. I have decided not to freak out about this. Villains are powerful, and for a time, anyway, they get to do more or less whatever they want. Their wants are, as with many sinful wants, pretty limited and kind of stupid—a fantasy of total freedom. For a kid, this is pretty attractive, even as it is also scary. You don't want Juggernaut or Magneto to get his way in everything, but you might like to get your own.

Of course, some Caillou plots are more staked than others. Going to the zoo is pretty boring, going to the dentist may actually be kind of interesting. It taps into our finitude and our fears of pain and illness and of the body torn or violated. Even an adult may be interested in how a child comes through a dentist appointment. The problem here really is something like ignorance, but more than this, it is about real risk, about something that is legitimately frightening.

A stake in a narrative conflict, then, isn't necessarily the same as a sin or the possibility of sin. It is some part of our understanding of ourselves as human beings that is put into question or to some test. Conflict in this sense does not require an active evil force to drive it.

But it's more complicated, still. The Christian understanding of evil denies that evil is a thing, anyway. We call evil that which falls short of or lacks the good. Our whole broken world is evil in this sense. Narratives about scaling mountains or getting trapped in ravines or being attacked by a bear are part of this kind of evil that is not active but is clearly not good.

The enlightened response to natural evil is to say that we misname it, that the world "is what it is" and we shouldn't moralize it. And it's true we tend to view the world solipsistically, as if the universe were designed for my personal benefit and must be somehow broken if I am not entirely content. However, it is possible to have faith that the (recreated) world can become a true home for humans generally without requiring that it meet all my desires individually, in which case this world is still not what it could be—or I am not yet all I could be.

So let's imagine a revised creation in which humans have access to what they need not only to survive but to thrive (which may already be the case) and where we live so in the light of God's glory that we not only clearly perceive the good but also understand how desirable it is and pursue it joyfully and eagerly (which is emphatically not the case). Can we imagine narrative conflict here?

I think we must still, at least, have the old stories. If we remain in any way finite, which is to say, still human, though living eternally, then we will still need stories to make sense of things with our limited brains. Perhaps stories will be like little breaks from the reality of God rather than glimpses of it. And perhaps hearing the stories of people who erred and had to be brought back may inspire some occasional poor souls to rebel in their little way—the stories would still be open to bad interpretations, after all.

But if we continue to develop the gifts we've been given in meaningful work and relationships, then we will still desire things, and we will still find parts of the world resisting or creating obstacles to that desire, and these will be the seeds of new narratives. Desire, in a world that is not merely there for my benefit, only indicates the ability to imagine something more, and for a finite creature with an infinite soul, we can always imagine something more.

The possibility of narrative in eternity depends in a real way on the doctrine of God's abundance. If God is infinite and his creation is infinitely abundant, then finite creatures cannot cease to find new adventures in exploration and discovery of this abundance.

I'm not sure this is entirely satisfying, though it's the best I've got for the time being. It may be that I am still too broken to appreciate how satisfying narratives of discovering God's goodness could be when my and others' understandings and hearts have been perfected at last. I only have the current stories to go on, and perhaps 90% of the time I find them intolerably naive and egotistical. There's too much darkness in me to have much patience with easy narratives of encountering the light. But that 10% of the time when it works for me, well, then I feel a profound compulsion toward the light, a deep desire for my own story to end that way, at least some times, and this desire seems beyond reproach, even essential. Whatever happens in eternity, we can have no stories here without that desire to find our hearts' true home.

(Painting by N. C. Wyeth)

L'Abri Fellowship: A Vulnerable but Secure Shelter

Perhaps more than anything, L’Abri Fellowship provides a space that invites, encourages, even fosters vulnerability. It is almost impossible to explain what L’Abri is in one word—or even one succinct phrase. Its name means “shelter” in French—and the word has a rich, multilayered meaning. Francis and Edith Schaeffer began the work of L’Abri in 1955 in Huémoz, Switzerland as their home became an open space for dialogue and honest questions for the locals and friends of their children. Word spread quickly, and L’Abri was born as a communal study center, a home open to any who want to come and seek answers to life’s big questions.

There are now eight residential L’Abri Fellowship communities around the world, and I am here as “Writer in Residence” at English L’Abri for a summer term. I have walked through the heavy wooden front door of this manor house many times before, each time both exciting and frightening; although the days at L’Abri are very structured, almost everything else, except for the warm welcome, is unpredictable, fragile, vulnerable.

According to English L’Abri director Andrew Fellows, the founders of L’Abri, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, created an organization that was “intentionally flimsy.” After asking themselves whether their lives would be different if every reference to prayer and the Holy Spirit evaporated, they honestly answered “no,” and decided that the work of L’Abri must be based not on strategic planning, recruiting, and well planned financial security, but on a visible, vulnerable dependence on God. Because of this, L’Abri was founded on four “intentionally flimsy” principles: 1) not advertising for students 2) not advertising for workers 3) not fund raising, and 4) not having a plan. Although the Schaeffers (and current L’Abri workers) do not speak against advertising, fund raising, etc.—and even verbally support some Christian ministries that do this—they feel/felt a specific calling to demonstrate the reality of God’s provision and presence through intentional vulnerability.

The L’Abri philosophy and practice is very much evident in the lunch discussions that occur five days out of the week in workers’ homes or the manor dining room or kitchen. A L’Abri worker heads the table, and ten or so students assemble at each lunch table. After we have all been served (lush, homemade) food, the table is open for any of the students to ask a question that will be discussed for the next hour and a half. Any question is a good question as long as, as the workers put it, it is an “honest question.” In a sense, the lunch discussion is a representation of the heart of L’Abri, a belief that, in the context of a life of faith, everything should be open to questions. It is also a testament to a deep acknowledgement of the importance of listening to one another, to truly believing that there are, as Schaeffer says, “no little people,” but a collection of glorious, broken individuals all made in God’s image, all longing for wholeness and community.

Fellows claims that “the heart of community is interpersonal dialogue,” a space where each individual can both hear and be heard in an ongoing reflexive relationship. He also emphasizes that L’Abri has, since the beginning, “championed the question;” this act of gathering to ask a question and grapple together towards an answer—or sometimes just a larger set of questions—is perhaps even countercultural in an age where many have, according to Fellows, “lost their questions.” Asking questions takes both humility and faith as we acknowledge our lack of understanding and hope for an actual answer. It also reminds us to be curious, to regain a sense of “childlike wonder” that, as Wordsworth reminds us, is so often lost in the ongoing distractions of adult life.

When Christ says in Matthew 18:13 "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” perhaps he is calling us to be vulnerable. And in doing this, to become more and more curious, to learn to ask questions, to turn away from apathy (not caring enough to ask questions) or arrogance (thinking that we know all the answers or can find them fully ourselves). To ask an honest question and seek an answer is a bold, brave, vulnerable move—and it implies a deep trust in the idea that an answer can be found, as well as a trust in those being asked (both God and those discussing the question).

L’Abri’s focus on prayer is clearly a demonstration of vulnerability before God, of curiosity and wonder in front of the mystery of our lives in His image. Because of the safety of God’s provision in the midst of this particular community that acknowledges both human frailty and beauty, L’Abri has created a shelter where students can ask questions of the workers, of one another, of themselves, of God. With this honest, and sometimes painful, vulnerability, we become like little children seeking a home where arms are open and answers can be found.

(Photo by Mägi May)

Chiasmus

Watch what happens in this lovely poem by Karen An-Hwei Lee:

Dream of Ink Brush Calligraphy

In prayer:

quiet opening,

my artery is a thin

shadow on paper—

margin of long grass,

ruderal hair, sister to this

not yet part of our bodies

your lyric corpus of seed

in rough drafts of pine ash,

chaogao or grass calligraphy

in rough drafts of pine ash—

your lyric corpus of seed

not yet part of our bodies:

ruderal hair, sister to this

margin of long grass,

shadow on paper,

my artery is a thin

quiet opening

in prayer.        

Do you see? The end mirrors the beginning. It is a palindrome working phase by phrase.

Poems like this require considerable forethought for the writer as the reading transforms the way the reader reads. There is a moment in the middle when everything changes as punctuation and comparative meanings remake both sides. There is instant engagement with the formation and transformation of the content. It takes on a spatial quality. There is continuity and contrast. There is the rise and fall of story. Memory and discovery are integrated. Even more, a conversation starts. A way is lit. Details expand and time slows. The ordinary is made extraordinary.

A story is told in which the post-resurrection/pre-ascension Jesus is talking to a couple of disciples, but they do not recognize him. He explains the events of his crucifixion in light of Old Testament history and later breaks the dinner bread as he had at the last supper. At this, the disciples knew him, and then he disappeared. Is it because the the disciples couldn't see him, or rather in that moment, they were suddenly seeing everything through him? Do you ever think about what is written in the middle of your story? How it lets you see?

(Photo by Bruce Kirby)

A Better Way to Fail

 

The crumpled piece of paper had gotten stuck in the back corner of the cubby, wedged into a gap in the cherry veneer. I had been slowly working my way across the row of shelving, clearing out the academic residue of another sixth grade year. With a bit of wrangling the paper came loose, unfolding to reveal an old Latin quiz I had given my students months earlier.

I stared at the D minus, following the page down through the misconjugations and blank spaces. Papers like this usually made me pause and reflect. Some days it was on how my pedagogy might have fallen short, what I hadn’t conveyed effectively. Other times my thoughts were on the kids, disappointed at their squandered potential or saddened by a knowledge of their poor home environments.

That afternoon, though, I realized I held in my hand a sixth grader’s approach to failure. It was something to be discarded, neglected, suppressed. It provided no value, only a poignant mix of apathy and shame, crushed into a crinkled symbol of disappointment.

In my teaching experience, this concept of failure seemed to be the norm. It’s a bit odd, considering the popularity of contrasting tales. Thomas Edison and his 1,000 failed light bulbs, Albert Einstein’s educational struggles, R. H. Macy’s multiple store closures…history is littered with great artists, scientists, inventors, and industry leaders whose successes were forged through their use of failure as a stepping stone for improvement and growth.

We may tip our hat to all sorts of rich paradigms for understanding failure, but do we make any effort to incorporate them into our educational methodology? The dusty paper in my hand said otherwise. It spoke of failure as static, as a terse, single-minded declaration: “insufficient”.

Such an approach to failure is useful in one way, at least —it provides a quantifiable, universal notion that fits well into political sound bites on the state of modern education. But if seen as an exclusive definition, it threatens to suck educational policy into a vicious cycle driven only by a desire to lower the number of such “insufficients”.

But my intention is not to delve into the politics of education, it is to open an inquiry: What if we were to handle failure less as a judgmental declaration, and more as a constructive conversation? What if it was seen less as an end, and more as a beginning?

Perhaps I would not have discovered the abandoned quiz that day, had its young recipient known a better way to fail.

(Photo by Elliott Erwitt)

Radical Correspondence

cloud-tree_wallpapers_37642_1152x864

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

– William Butler Yeats

I was twenty when I learned what is essential about metaphors. The poet Albert Goldbarth asked his introductory class to open the bundle of photocopied poems he'd made, and directed us to a page that lay, purposefully out of time, between Wordsworth and Sappho. Upon it were twenty words by Gregory Orr:

Washing My Face

Last night's dreams disappear.
They are like the sink draining:
a transparent rose swallowed by its stem.

I well recall the pedestal sink and pipe that Goldbarth drew with chalk to ensure we saw the shape the poem made. And I remember the way he drew the shape within the shape: surface petals made of water draining into a moving column of its making. And surely then he must have noted the iteration of that shape within us, for it comes so readily to mind: atop a column, the wakeful brain, an outgrowth of a stem. Further and further, he led us into the poem even as he led us deeper into ourselves. We talked of the cleansing agency of dream life, of the ways water and dreams relate. Only the clock stopped us.

Though I did not know Emerson's work at the time, I was starting to see what that cheerful visionary said was "easily seen": metaphors "are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there," but essential offshoots of our nature. Man, he said, has been "placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him." He described this relationship as a "radical correspondence," root-level connections that allow the world and ourselves to feel "full of life."

Wakeful life is draining; it can come to feel empty. That is why I read, and why I write, and why I try to teach. It is twenty-four years since first I felt a ray arriving from Orr's transparent rose. Now I am the teacher with the bundle of poems, endeavoring to draw the water.

Bright and Shining

I finished revising my debut novel and graduated from an MFA program in the same month. I am tired. I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write. Of course, one of the first apocryphal rules you learn when you start writing is do it every day. Put that butt in the chair and fashion yourself after the Postal Service. Snow? Sleet? Debilitating fatigue? Doesn’t matter. Put those words down, son.

So when my friend Sara asked me what I was doing for Lent, I laughed. This was the first year in over ten where I wouldn’t be a church worker and I was sleeping in on Sundays like it was my job. While I appreciate the discipline of Lent – I’d taught it how many times? – I was on sabbatical from anything that wasn’t Mad Men or Game of Thrones. And that included God.

Thomas Merton went to Gethsemane to remove himself from the world, to seek God with integrity. As everyone knows, the world came knocking on the doors of his monastery in the way of literary fame. Merton was stuck between his desires for solitude and – this is my assumption – a calling to write. But then, on a routine trip to the doctor in Louisville, he had a vision. Him, being held up by (and inextricably connected to) the world he once hoped to spurn. He described the experience as inevitable, saying, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

I eventually texted Sara back and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll say the Lord’s Prayer every night.” It was something I’d never done. And if I’m being honest – it was a discipline I had no real interest in keeping. But much like the pull I feel every time I walk past my laptop – like there is something I should be doing – once I was lying in bed I couldn’t escape words. Our Father… I don’t claim a Merton-like moment of transformation. Everything I learned was a lesson I already knew. Yet, sometimes it is good to be reminded that the work will always be there when you’re ready. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that we are bright and shining.

(Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt)

Have you been writing lately?

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us…

It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from, when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

- From “Ars Poetica?” by Czeslaw Milosz

“Have you been writing lately?” I cringe a little every time I’m asked that question. There is no good answer:

Yes, I’ve been writing and no, you can’t see it; or

Yes, I have been writing but it’s all terrible; or

No, I haven’t been writing, and please please please don’t ask me why.

Writing poetry is not a pleasant process. Any writing is uncomfortable, I suppose, but there’s something uniquely dreadful about poetry. Czeslaw Milosz says a poet is a demoniac city; poems rise up like devils, unannounced, before they are exorcised by page and pen. A poet’s demons are caught, subdued, and arranged in neat stanzas for other’s perusal.

Pinning down your demons to be scrutinized like bugs under glass is a profoundly uncomfortable experience. No human is comfortable being openly frail and vulnerable in front of other people. When a poet writes, they struggle to capture the total essence of their humanity; their fear, rage, ecstasy, sadness, and joy. It is not easy to display yourself at your most human and your most vulnerable.

Yes, I have been writing lately. It is not a comforting process. No poet’s process is. Poetry is wrestling with your demons like Jacob wrestled with the angel; it’s private, it’s desperate, and, hopefully, there’s redemption at the end.

A Modern Voice Can Survive

I collect books about hunting and fishing from the 50s, 60s and early 70s. In them I see the images and hear the voices that taught my father to hunt and fish, to be outside in pursuit of something, and I hear strains of how he taught me: this is a personal obsession much more than an academic one. Still, I love titles like Why Fish Bite and Why They Don’t (1961), and Game Cookery (1967). I love the examples of some of the first mass printing of color photography, and captions that read “A quiet afternoon on the lake is the best way to enjoy the Great Outdoors.” I love the authoritative voices of the authors detailing the best way to build a duck blind, or how to tie an Improved Clinch Knot.

These books were produced as Modernity was making its last stand in the American Academy, in the years leading up to, and just through, the succession of Postmodern intellectuals and the seismic cultural shifts that have followed. Those shifts are visible now in the ways we talk about conservation of natural resources, sportsman and environmental ethics, and generally, what going into the wild to catch and kill and eat means.

The books I collect are just another lens for me to look at these things when I can’t stomach another Cormac McCarthy novel or blog post about evangelism in our Postmodern world today. We haven’t improved the Improved Clinch Knot, but we think we’ve bettered the way we teach and talk about everything. Isn’t it good, we say, that we aren’t pretending things are so simple, so black and white as the photos in my books? Knowing what is true, teaching what is true, isn’t simple because it means a doing and experiencing to know Truth. Eventually that will mean some kind of bloody engagement with what has been made, the world we have to live in.

Yesterday I found a two-page spread describing, with small grainy photos, how to fillet a fish with seven strokes of a sharp 10 inch knife. Where are you going to look? How are you going to learn?

Twist and Shout: Sex as Metaphor

When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1964 singing “Twist and Shout,” the veins in John Lennon’s neck bulged as he screamed the lyrics above the noise of the crowd. There were 700 in attendance that night, but 50,000 people had requested tickets to see the Beatles perform and 73 million people watched from home. What did the Beatles tap into that wrung screams and tears from their audience? It was something a little unexpected: metaphor. Metaphor has two parts: tenor, which is the subject of the metaphor, and vehicle, the way that subject is delivered. While teens around the country were over the moon with the Beatles’ sexy looks and lyrics – the vehicle of their art – what hit a nerve and gave them lasting celebrity was their tenor of longing. Sex is reflected everywhere in our culture; music, films, TV shows, books, and a lot of times, there is no metaphor, just sex. But many artists know that sex is an apt vehicle for longing.

Doesn't Mad Men show us this? Is it really just sex that Draper, in all his dalliances, is after? We know by now he’s plagued by a confused sense of identity and feelings of abandonment. We’ve seen Draper’s longing surface as he reads Dante’s Inferno, takes his kids to see his childhood home (a brothel), and when he finally tells the truth (when “it wasn’t the right time”) even though it resulted in being put on indefinite leave. Sex, the vehicle, in Mad Men is everywhere, setting us up for the metaphor’s tenor of longing.

Sex is also used as a metaphor in the Bible. Jesus is the Groom, the church is the bride of Christ. In fact, the Hebrew reverses our sense of longing with God’s longing for us. The word used for sex in the Old Testament is yada, used to “describe God's knowing and his longing of his people.”1

When John Updike published his first novel, Rabbit, Run, Knopf had him cut out some of the more explicit scenes (though they were restored in later editions). In a 1960 New York Times review, David Boroff predicted that some of the descriptions would “shock the prudish.”2 Updike was a professing Christian. Did he intentionally write a book to scandalize people? How do we know if there is a vehicle of metaphor in play or if it is just sex? In Updike’s case, he placed a signpost at the start quoting Pascal in his epigraph: “The motions of grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.”

How can we differentiate sex as metaphor in films we see and books we read? Sex is pervasive in our culture’s art. What does that say about our longing?

1 http://www.todayschristianwoman.com/articles/2014/march/love-and-longing.html 2 http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/updike-rabbitrun.pdf

Gnostic Noah

Should we care that Darren Aronofsky depended on gnostic texts for much of his story?

I loved Noah the first time I saw it. I still love Noah, even after reading, and agreeing with, the in-depth analysis by several writers, showing that much of the detail of the film comes from the Kabbalah and other ancient gnostic and pre-gnostic sources.

Perhaps the most complete, and certainly the most sarcastic, compilation of elements in the movie that demonstrate its Gnosticism is by a blogger named Brian Mattson. Check out his screed here, if you’re interested. Mattson draws attention to the luminescent Adam and Eve, the prominence of the snake, the names of the fallen angels and many other details that come out of sources like 1 Enoch, but he and some of his followers go on to blast “Christian leaders” for the “scandal” of endorsing the film, proclaiming “shame on everyone who bought it”.

With my background in Biblical studies, I recognized many of those references, when I saw the movie, but here’s why I don’t particularly care that Aronofsky has given us a largely gnostic Noah: almost everyone watching the film, who could be hurt by buying into an heretical, gnostic vision of the flood narrative, is going to interpret the movie through their own, orthodox grid and for the most part not be affected by his slant on the story.

Don’t get me wrong. Gnosticism is as much a heresy today as it was in the 2nd century, and it is a lie. But Gnosticism doesn’t present a danger unless it is explained in detail and persuasively advocated as a system of belief in contrast to the teaching of Scripture. Showing people a movie with gnostic elements hardly accomplishes that.

Mattson’s confusion is with the nature of communication through film. Film does not teach doctrine per se. Yes, a movie can demonstrate the views of a filmmaker, if he or she is trying to propound those views through the movie’s narrative (which Aronofsky has explicitly denied any desire of doing in Noah,by the way). But those views will of necessity be general and vague; art does not have the capacity to carry on detailed conversation, much less instruction in the subtleties of theology.

That’s why the propositions of theological reflection are a good thing. Movies might illustrate some of those propositions, but cannot argue for or against them, and so can’t persuade us for or against them either.

There is another, perhaps unique, reason why the Gnosticism of Noah simply won’t have any real negative effect on Christian viewers, while it can have a very positive effect of entertaining them and making them think. The reason is that unless viewers are coming from a gnostic belief already, they are not going to recognize the Gnosticism anyway, and therefore it can’t have any ill effect on them.

An illustration of this principle is the use of the name “The Creator” for God in the movie. Mattson makes much of the lower, gnostic demi-urge, called “The Creator” in the literature, who is an evil god for creating matter in the first place. Certainly, Aronofsky picked this name up from his sources and thought it was a great name to get around the vague and uninteresting word “God”, so he used it.

But what are Christians going to hear, when they hear the words “The Creator”? Will images of angry, ignorant, gnostic gods leap into their minds, as they do when actual Gnostics hear them?

No. “The Creator” merely refers to the God they know from Genesis and their tradition’s interpretation of it. Now, that may be bad enough, but it’s not gnostic indoctrination.