Facebook, the Great Lie?

Many people don’t understand Facebook’s charms. “It’s not ‘real,’” Aaron Sorkin, famously said, “It’s posing.” Not that Mr. Sorkin would necessarily know. While Sorkin wrote the movie about the founding of Facebook,The Social Network, he defiantly claims that he has never used Facebook.

We on Facebook do not consider our posts “real”. Most of us leave out the relentlessness that plagues our lives, the rapidity, and yes, perhaps the boredom. For most of us, it is a way to share good news: baby announcements, children’s achievements, the rekindling of friendships or love affairs, recovery of health, a new job, an athletic achievement.

Screenwriter Bob Kaufman (Love At First Bite, Freebie and The Bean) once told me, “Movies are not the way life is. Movies are the way life should be.” That’s the lens through which I view Facebook. The social network site is a long movie with many, many scenes or perhaps, a novel filled with nuggets held together with the glue that fuels all art: “a great lie that exposes the greater truth.”

Life is hard for most of us these days. Culture is in free fall. Change is happening so fast that we cannot take a breath to contextualize what we have lost in contrast to what we have gained. Most of us take some reassurance in Facebook and its happy posts. We enjoy the foodie pictures, cozy pictures of family on their best behavior. Yet behind the posing, we know the charm of what people are really trying to say. Inevitably behind the veil, we return to love, family, mercy, justice, and the beauty found in a singular instant which points to the eternal.

No, Facebook is not “real.” Facebook is “super real”.

The Same Boat

In Florida we embark on summer's long, liturgical Ordinary Time as a voyage on the strands and foils of a variegated sameness–sun-buoyed air that yields ninety by noon, storms by five and somber evening skies. Part clockwork, part kaleidoscope, we navigate the elements laced around the odd hurricane and accrete the heartbeat of a six/eight seaborne shanty. After twenty-five years its rhythms return like a friend who reminds you of your best self. You sail, you smell the salt, you chart by stars and passing islands. Even down below, out of the sun, you feel your feet. But in this story, Ordinary Time is still three days away.

“I want to go to a movie,”I said to my wife. “The Tom Cruise flick. Edge of something.” The residual emotion from an argument with my son had short-circuited my recall.

“Tomorrow,”she said.

“It opens tonight,”I said as I walked away, at once glad she either did not hear or restrained from engaging. The demand to see a movie was a self-prescribed distraction after the phone tilt about a car repair, a car that seems irreparable and the onset of guilt. An instance overblown into raging crisis by the expectations of a father for a son who is so much like him. We go and it helps. Cruise is infected with alien DNA that allows his days to recur postmortem. He dies a thousand deaths and with each new life remembers better where the beast is hidden. It saves the world. That was Friday. Saturday morning I reviewed a script for Sunday about Pentecost wind and fire and three thousand births and I went adrift on something that felt like Melville:

“…for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”¹

Ordinary Time is winsome and resists particular answers. It blows out of the west and is the flash of the morning sun. It is the fump and skush of oars in a dead calm and the groan of rigging tacking into a gale. It is form, via negativa, by elements both unsubstantial and powerful. It is the strange exhale of letting high ceremony unfurl into open life. You need room to take it in. By Monday I texted an apology about love that is too often too loud. His answer returned like the wind in my sail. “I am grateful for every day,”he said.

¹ Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick

(Painting by Edward Hopper)

Proximity

I leaned in, only inches from certain death. A thin slab of glass was all that separated me from nearly five hundred pounds of claws and teeth. It was a rush standing there, stared down by a creature of immense power. Even with the many safety precautions that zoos maintain, it’s hard to avoid a visceral apprehension when confronted with an animal that could easily take my life. Though I understood well the security of my position, my recognition of and respect for this potential remained.

When you think of the word “awe”, what does it bring to mind? The situations that come to my mind almost seem disparate. Viewing lions at a zoo, getting lost in the wonder of the night sky at 13,000 feet, peering through the crowd at a tiny portrait of a faintly-smiling lady in the Louvre. Awe seems a malleable notion, here hinting at grandeur, there delving into mystery. But certainly it stirs something in us. It can give a disquieting glimpse of life much grander and more fantastic than we could know, or a world beyond our control.

Perhaps this unease is what leads us to attempt to limit the experience of awe in our daily lives. We direct industry and technology toward reducing anomalies, preventing chaos. We channel our experience of awe into culturally acceptable forms - particularly in entertainment. We are ever more able to engage in “armchair awe”, carefully positioning ourselves to disengage at a moment’s notice should the experience start to get overwhelming.

With this pattern comes an increasing resilience to awe. The underlying “threat”, the power that grounds our awe, tends to deteriorate as we become more and more removed from it. Any impact an awe-filled experience might have is eroded.

The effects of this awe-resilience can be seen in relation to modern spirituality. The notion of worship has been widely blighted by a lack of awe. Dulled by the insular illusion that we are masters of our own fate, we have little interest in dwelling on fearful things. This insidious pull leads us to focus on God’s love so exclusively that He turns into the spiritual equivalent of a stuffed animal, meant only to be hugged.

That day at the zoo, I was awestruck by my position. The proximity to such ferocity grounded my gratitude for the protective glass, the barrier apart from which my life was forfeit. It is the sort of tension displayed in the final verses of Hebrews 12, where the author juxtaposes grateful worship with reverent awe. Do we take for granted our position behind the barrier, or do we recognize that beyond the unshakeable kingdom lies a God of consuming fire?

What are heroes for?

27 phoropter_big_o

I hope it’s no spoiler to consider for a moment how the structure of BBC’s Sherlock has become more self-aware. To be sure, Doyle’s original mediated our view of Holmes through Watson’s frame. (“As readers, we are always aware of Watson,” Mark Gatiss, one of the show’s creators, said in a recent documentary). The new series, in one sense, simply increases the frame rate: stories collapse into other stories, or rather, they hurtle out of one another, like the creation of an erupting phoropter, before being unified to a single point of focus in the thrilling final moments, when the truth is seen. 

I wonder if the dizzying ramification of the embedded narrative technique is another expert way that Gatiss and Steven Moffat have stayed true to the original text by finding analogues in today’s climate for the conditions of Doyle's Europe (as they have done with the technology Holmes and Watson employ).

After all, a few years after Doyle studied ophthalmology in Vienna, as he was crafting his stories of precise detection in southern England, a man back in Vienna was also hard at work creating a systematic way to interpret the apparent so that latent cause could be seen. In his seminal book on the structure of the mind, TheInterpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, Freud stresses the importance of “nodal points” (images and concepts emerging from the process of psychoanalysis that contain the greatest concentration of causal meaning). To describe the formation of these points, he summons Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who, in Faust, describes the "fabric of thought”:

The little shuttles to and fro
Fly, and the threads unnoted flow;
One throw links up a thousand threads.

Isn’t that just what happens at the end of the second episode of Sherlock’s third season? With a sudden flick of his mind’s wefting power, Sherlock links every narrative thread that, until then, was warping our perspective.

But Freudianism, along with the flying shuttle, is now largely obsolete. His methods, as Jeremy D. Safran wrote last year in Psychology Today, have come to seem "limited [in their] appreciation of the social and political factors that affect [our daily] lives.”That appreciation is, of course, one of the defining characteristics of our age, as we have become aware of myriad frames that condition our lives and perspectives: geography, race, gender, nationality—the list goes on. Macolm Gladwell even makes the case in Outliers that a significant percentage of professional hockey players in Canada can trace their success to being born in the first half of the year.

With its multiplication of embedded narratives, Sherlock takes as proven the claim literary critic Roberta Seelinger Trites makes in a recent article: nested narratives demonstrate that "life, as well as novels, is constructed through frames, and that it is finally impossible to know where one frame ends and another begins.”

And that is what makes Sherlock as thrilling—and as consoling—to us in 2014 as he was in 1900.  Our awareness of determinant frames that exist in the world, and of the overlapping number that exist within each of us, continues to grow at a dizzying rate. Making sense of just how many narratives our story is composed of and embedded within—personally and as a society—can seem impossible, and thus make meaningful action, whether to change our own course or to prevent others from harm, seem beyond the reach of our crude abilities. That is what heroes are for.

Linen Closet Theology

“‘Do you know I like this room most of all in my baby house,’ added Meg, a minute after, as they went upstairs and she looked into her well-stored linen closet. Beth was there, laying the snowy piles smoothly on the shelves and exulting over the goodly array.”

Long before I had a linen closet of my own, the “snowy piles” of a “generous supply of house and table linen”in Little Women captured my heart. I imagined damask tablecloths, pressed linen napkins, bed sheets with sprigs of dried lavender layered between lace-edged pillowcases, and masses of soft white towels, folded in threes. I had a similar appreciation for a passage in Little House in the Big Woods:

“The little house was fairly bursting with good food stored away for the long winter. The pantry and the shed and the cellar were full, and so was the attic . . . The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.”

More than a century after the Ingalls family, my parents also spent many late summer days growing and preparing food for the winter. Bins in the basement contained bushels of bright orange carrots and homegrown potatoes. Gleaming glass jars of tomatoes, peaches, pears, grape juice, and homemade mincemeat lined the shelves. My mother kept meticulous records of her work, and in one of her best years, she announced that she had prepared over 500 containers of canned and frozen foods. We showed our friends the cellar shelves and smiled with satisfaction at the homely beauty of the neat rows of Mason jars.

I admit to a great love for home and hearth, but I wonder if there is more at work than just the appreciation of the domestic in the resonance of these images. Perhaps it has something to do with abundance. Meg’s linen closet is bountifully supplied, and so is the Ingalls’ attic. The Marches and the Ingalls have what they need—and more. One clean white towel is nice, and necessary, but stacks and stacks of clean white towels and napkins and tablecloths is arresting. One pumpkin is rather ordinary, but an attic full to the bursting with orange pumpkins, “dusty”green spices, and bright red peppers is astonishing. The sheer number of things makes me smile, and, like Beth, I “[exult] over the goodly array.”Is the distinctive sensual appeal of images like these due, in part, to the bounty of the display? We like to see big groupings of the same object: the repetition of a single element in an artist’s design creates emphasis and draws our attention, àla Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans.

Perhaps these images of plenty remind us that that we have been provided for, even that we are loved. Not only will there be enough, but great abundance has been stored up for us as well. This earthly extravagance reminds me of the abundance of love, the “plenteous grace” lavished on us by the lover of our souls. And on the occasions when life’s circumstances dull my perceptions of his great love, reflecting on literary and artistic images of plenty provides a helpful reminder that he has come that we might have life, “and have it more abundantly.”

Fairy Tales, for Life

It was a hot summer Saturday when I uncovered a book of fairy tales at a vintage shop. It sparked a conversation with the shopkeeper, who asked me to recommend fairy tale books for her two young daughters. They wanted stories about fairies, princesses, dragons, witches — stories about adventures and quests for true love and truth.

Not until later, as I mused over my nephew playing in the darkening yard, did I realize how precious that conversation had been. It seems a rare thing, now, for children to want fairy tales. In a world full of iPads, structured play dates, and a relentless focus on academics and test scores, it seems that fairytales are being crowded out of everyday life.

And what a shame that is! Academia certainly has its place, but the lessons to be learned from fairy tales are not lessons often found in test tubes or classrooms. Fairy stories lend us a belief in the magical, in the un-provable. They teach us that bad things happen to good people but good will triumph; that things are not always as they seem; the value of love, and bravery, and kindness; that dragons, as G.K. Chesterton once beautifully put it, exist and that they can be killed.

In a skeptical world, fairy tales foster a sense of wonder, an appreciation for the unexplained and the magical. They’re morality tales, practical warnings, glimpses of the magical world that exists in the “black boxes”science and logic can’t explain. Princes and witches and dragons aren’t just frivolous stories; they teach us to love, and to hope, and to fight for truth, and to make your own way in an uncertain world.

I hope my nephew reads fairy tales. I hope he looks under bushes for gnomes and into streams for sprites and pixies. I hope he seeks redemption in desperate situations, that he dreams of magic and of eucatastrophe -- the sudden, inexplicable happy ending. I hope he fights dragons and quests for Fairy only to discover, as Tolkien phrased it, “that sudden glimpse of the truth…a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us."

Something Sacred? God in the Things We Eat, Especially Citrus

Lee Price paints women in private spaces—beds, bathrooms—usually binge eating. A row of ice cream pints along the edge of the bathtub. McDonald’s bags full of fries and burgers spilled on the sheets.

In an interview with The Other Journal, Price says her art deals with “how we give objects of obsession/compulsion (in this case, food) qualities that we should be giving to a higher source (e.g., God or our inner voice). We see food as sacred.”

But in many of her recent paintings, food no longer holds control over the women. They sleep in beds with a serving of sliced peaches beside them. They hold a cup of tea in the bath. In the painting above, “Lemon Slices III,” the subject isn’t even eating. It’s simply the citrus itself in which this woman may be looking for something sacred.

And there is something sacred about citrus.

I moved to Seattle in December and hardly saw the sun. I felt fragile and transient and wanted some kind of comfort, something tangible, a sharp and beautiful detail to emerge from my cloudy anxiety. I called my mom and she told me to go to church, to pray and be in God’s presence. I went to a bakery instead.

I bought myself a “winter fruit tart,” made with slices of sharp citrus that cut through the diffused gray. It was drizzling and I sat in my car, parked on an unfamiliar residential street. The crust crumbled when I bit into the thing.

It was all glazed oranges and grapefruit slices on a puddle of cream. I thought of the way the Eucharist is “fruit of the vine and work of human hands,” and I thought that these bakers working with seasonal fruit were blessed stewards of creation. I thought God must have orchestrated that pastry to comfort me in that moment.

The next day was Sunday, and I went to church to pray and be in God’s presence. I received the Eucharist. The wine tasted sharp and I savored it.

Telling the Depraved: Cormac McCarthy's Hard Stare at Evil

I don't think anyone paints evil like Cormac McCarthy. Part of what I mean is that I don't know of another author who has looked that deeply and clearly into what evil is, and what it does, and how it works itself out in our time. I think he's telling the way-down truth about what greed looks like, and what it does, when I watch The Counselor. I think he is speaking most honestly and most earnestly about lust when I read Child of God. I think he sees the darkness of life untethered from what is true, good, and beautiful more clearly than anyone when I try and take in The Road, or am afflicted with what I remember of Blood Meridian. That would all be horrifying and weighty enough, but I read The Sunset Limited, and I saw it played out (thanks, HBO) about as well as it could be since Michael Clarke Duncan couldn't be cast as Black. And it is dramatically more horrifying to realize that McCarthy, to a degree, gets it: he understands and can write the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ more compellingly than most pastors I listen to.

The list of things I am not, or not much of, is unbelievably long. I don't make bones: I'm no theologian. Or literary critic. But I do know a lot about work. And I know this about prophets: their work, their job, is to speak for God, to us. And I believe McCarthy is prophetic. See? I can't even say it straight, I have to edge up to it. I believe Cormac McCarthy is, perhaps unwittingly or unwillingly, but in actuality, acting and writing at the insistence of the God of the Bible, my beloved Papa, our worshiped and rejected Abba. We could try and talk (here, below in the comments thread) about epistemology, or eschatology, or a proper understanding of false prophets, or my literary pedigree, or my story and how I've come to believe I know Jesus when I hear Him. But what I really want to talk about is the mystery of how and when, and through whom, God chooses to speak.

Empathy

Writing is often an act of stepping outside of one’s self. The skin we inhabit is not our own; we live in many rooms. The best writers, the ones that show us something familiar in a new way, that transport us from ourselves to something else, that cause us to experience sensation with linguistic sleight of hand, are also the most empathetic.

Tragedy strikes every day, each time wearing a different mask. But when the lightening strikes far away, how are the observers affected?

Several years ago Manny Fernandez of the New York Times reported on the murder of four women: Megan Waterman, 22; Melissa Barthelemy, 24; Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25; and Amber Lynn Costello, 27. All four of them had been reported missing with very little police response; all four of them were prostitutes.

I cut the article out and hung it in my room. To save it was a compulsion. I did not save it because “it could be me”—though how easy it is for our lives to gain momentum away from what we had planned them to be—but rather because I wanted to remember that these women had lived, for no other reason than that I didn’t know that they were alive before they were murdered.

Leslie Jamison’s collection of essays, The Empathy Exams breaks down the human capacity to share someone’s life. She writes that, “when bad things happen to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.”

Some who saw the New York Times article hanging above my desk asked me if I knew the victims. I did not, but my response to their deaths was just as real as if I had.

To inhabit someone else’s tragedy is an act of surrender. Of giving up ourselves, what makes us individual, in exchange for someone else’s individuality. “We care because we are porous,” Jamison claims.

It is this porous-ness that is both our salvation and downfall. We are vulnerable to tragedy, whether it is our own or someone else’s. But it is this vulnerability that fosters compassion.

The Eye Made Quiet: Symmetry, Uniqueness and "The Last Supper"

While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

~ William Wordsworth

I love the symmetry I find in life, and I love its representations. The jangled, disordered musings of Jackson Pollock for all their beauty and interesting “patterns” have never been mine. Give me Leonardo da Vinci and “The Last Supper” every time.

And yet, and yet. My love for symmetry cries out for verification. In a world where uniqueness dominates, how can I so highly value the conformity of symmetry? Even God in His majestic creative power has built a diversity into the world that regularly surprises us, breaks our molds, our patterns. Am I opposing our King to hold balance and reflection in such high regard?

Of course the question is silly. God has built beautiful, orderly patterns into everything around us without violating the principle of the uniqueness of beauty. The sun comes up with such regularity we can time and explain the sunrise in staggering detail. And of course such regularities are, like Heraclitus noted long ago about the river, always the same and always changing. One gets both the diversity of unique beauty and the unity of regular science in every sunrise.

And so Leonardo’s masterpiece. Of course Jesus is dead center with six apostles to his left and six to his right. Despite what Dan Brown says, he points with the upturned left hand to the bread and with the downturned right to the cup. Even the apostles are grouped in threes, with Peter, Judas and John—the central characters perhaps in the apostles’ side of the drama, which is drawn from John 13:21ff.—forming the threesome to Jesus’ right. Of course the four panels to the left and right of the group, the three windows in the back, the paneled ceiling, the table with its pairs of legs intersecting the lines on the floor with perfect harmony, give the picture an atmosphere that is remarkably stable and symmetrical in every detail.

And yet, there is Peter’s knife—presumably the one with which he cuts off Malchus’s ear (John 18:10)—clearly in his hand, but being held at an awkward angle, an instrument of disorder. For its use, he will be rebuked by the Master. And there is Judas’s bag of money, clutched tightly in his right hand, while with his left he reaches for the bread of life, however tentatively. Woe to the world for stumbling blocks!

How these details, so small and insignificant in the painting as a whole, give color and life to it! But how meaningless they would be, if not in the context of the order Leonardo has given us, where things do not fall apart and the center does hold.

What is the imagination?

Is it important to have a good imagination? Or is it, as at first glance we might be inclined to think, perhaps a little trifling, maybe something important for children but not very necessary for adults? I guess that depends on what the imagination is. I fairly recently came across a very interesting definition of the imagination while listening to an interview of Stephen Prickett discussing George MacDonald, an influential Scottish writer of fantasy (and other genres) in the Victorian period, who had a particularly profound influence on C. S. Lewis. Lewis, in fact, described his initial encounter with MacDonald’s imaginative work as a conversion or baptism of his own imagination; “It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later… The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live” (George MacDonald: An Anthology, xxxviii). So here we already see the great, potentially even transformative, power of one imagination upon another. It altered the way Lewis saw the world and the realm of the possible. And it’s perhaps telling that his imaginative transformation was more basic for him than other aspects of his nature; it set the groundwork for the rest of him to follow. It was Lewis, I believe, who first made me step back and consider what imagination is, before which I, perhaps naively, conceived of it (based upon the root word) simply as the power of the mind to contain and produce images. But Lewis, in the weirdly titled essay “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” intriguingly referred to the imagination as “the organ of meaning,” whereas reason is the “organ of truth,” the former being the more basic. These points certainly present the imagination as something far beyond a trifling affair, and rather something that is at the very heart of the human person.

Similarly, I came across a description of the imagination in an essay by David Bentley Hart (for my money perhaps one of the most insightful minds currently writing) titled “The Pornography Culture,” in which he speaks of the central importance of the imagination, and by implication the need to guard it from depraving influences. There he writes (reminiscent of Pr 4:23), “the imagination is, after all, the wellspring of desire, of personality, of character.” Here, again, we have the imagination described as of profound central importance to the human person, such that how one’s imagination is formed will determine the possible range of meaning that one can perceive, and the possible ways in which one may view the world.

On yet another note, also striking is Mary Midgley’s statement, “Facts will never appear to us as brute and meaningless; they will always organize themselves into some sort of story, some drama,” pointing to the inevitably “storied” nature of the way we see the world (Evolution as Religion, 4). The form which that story takes will naturally depend on the character of our imagination.

Similar to these perspectives, I think, is the one Prickett recounts of George MacDonald’s view (via Samuel Coleridge) of the imagination. As he explains,

It was [conceived of as] a great integrating faculty that brought all our sense impressions, all our thoughts, all our understanding, together into a single package. And of course each of us has a different imagination because each of us has been through different experiences. I once went for a walk in a very beautiful part of the country with a friend of mine who is an expert on birdsong, and he said, “How many birds can you hear?” And I listened and I very boldly said, “Five or six.” And he said, “I can hear forty.” He had a trained ear, and that was, if you like, the difference between our imaginations at that stage. He could form and integrate what was coming into him into a far more profound pattern of sound than I could.

Here imagination is the central, integrating faculty of the whole person, involved in a dynamic relationship with the world, ever expanding as it interacts with reality (that is, ultimately, God); or, no doubt, diminishing as it entertains false reality. These accounts approach the nature of the imagination from different angles--seemingly not irreconcilably so--but in every case the imagination is something connected to the deepest part of ourselves, forming the range of possibility of what we can and cannot see of reality. One is reminded of Goethe’s commonly quoted line, “Few people have the imagination for reality.” It perhaps informs the fabric or framework of our whole inner world, through which we interpret everything else, having to do with “the power that underlies thoughts,” as MacDonald said in The Fantastic Imagination. Do we give enough attendance to these truths? Do we seek ways in which to enrich or even “baptize” our imaginations, thereby renewing our minds and our vision of the “divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live”? Indeed, how might we do that? If Lewis is a guide, encountering those with rich and profound imaginations embodying deep (perhaps even pre-cognitive) truths is one way. In any case, these, I think, are questions worthy of reflection.

Get Closer

She is an old woman. A double amputee with age spots and flaking skin. Would she attract your attention by that description? Would you seek her out? Probably not, yet millions travel to the Venus de Milo every year, sometimes crossing the world to view her at the Louvre. It’s interesting that though she is broken we consider her a masterpiece because of her beauty and antiquity. But also because her brokenness lends an air of mystery that leads us to want to engage with her. So we stand in front of her and silently wonder.

Contrast the reaction to the Venus with how society views the flesh and blood “broken.” Pro Infirmis, a Swiss organization for disabled individuals, created a video titled "Because Who Is Perfect? Get Closer." Mannequins, modeled after the disabled, were placed in storefronts in one of the world’s most glamorous shopping districts in Zurich. They were stooped, had crooked spines, and were missing limbs.

The project sought to challenge society’s view of what is beautiful and to showcase the disabled; the often invisible among us. It’s a double paradox, that when we do “see” the disabled, we both stare and turn away from them. We stare because we’re curious. But why do we look away? Because the world is broken and we keep expecting it not to be; because disability is a painful reminder of suffering; because it mirrors and reminds us of our own internal deformities?

There are different responses to the displays in the video. The models are clearly pleased with their mannequins. They caress them, hug them, and one model gives his mannequin his prosthetic and shoe. They contemplate how the public will respond. One model says, “the people passing will be really irritated.” The public reacts diversely. Some glance and look away. Some look pensive, perhaps realigning their own ideas of beauty. One tries to shape her posture into the same twisted angles as one of the mannequins. This was perhaps the best response: a spontaneous gesture of empathy, a simple attempt to experience life as one of the models.

Walt Whitman writes, “Agonies are one of my changes of garments,/I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”1 This is the flame Pro Infirmis hopes to light. To see the invisible, not with pity, or just compassion, but with an empathy that leads to engagement. The video hopes to do what Ralph Ellison attempted in The Invisible Man, to bring song from where we don’t expect it, to “make music out of the invisible.”

The Venus de Milo is one of a handful of masterpieces at the Louvre before which people spontaneously stop to stare.2 While stopping to stare at the disabled cuts across all societal norms. What is the best way to empathize? What does it mean to get closer?

Minor League

. . . for my dad, Daniel Bowman, Sr.

“Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.” ― George F. Will

The dog days of summer are just around the corner, and I’m thinking about baseball. Anyone who’s been around the game knows that it has long been considered a metaphor for life, or a metaphor for America, or a metaphor for…something. The daily grind, the peaks and valleys of success and failure: the rhythms of baseball reflect our experience.

At the big league level, we put our faith in larger-than-life heroes who can change the fate of the team with one swing of the bat, or streak across the field in a display of elite athleticism available only to a few. And for his trouble, the worst player on the worst MLB team, in today’s high-stakes sports world, is making the kind of money that none of us will ever see in our lifetimes.

As a native New Yorker, I grew up a Yankees fan, and I still love and follow major league baseball. But as I get older, I think back to the games my dad took me to when I was a kid: Single-A New York-Penn League games. All over again, I’ve become enamored of the minor leagues, where baseball and its attendant metaphors play out in different ways. The towns aren’t glamorous; the fields, though nice, are not obsessively manicured. The players—and their salaries—are not larger than life. They feel more like me, my family, my friends and neighbors.

In recent years, when I lived in western New York, I often made the trek to the humble baseball town of Batavia, home of the Single-A, short season Muckdogs, an affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals. Dwyer Stadium in Batavia seats 2,600, making it one of the smallest of the hundreds of minor league venues around the US and Canada.

Some MLB stars have passed through Batavia in recent years. No doubt a few more will have a stint there en route to the Bigs, giving the locals a brush with greatness, a story to share.

But the proud list of Muckdog alums who’ve made it to the majors is not, to me, the most interesting aspect of minor league baseball. I love to show up early (parking is easy and affordable!) to see the ambitious young players, either just out of college or sometimes just out of high school, taking batting practice. These kids were just recently drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals, a legendary franchise with the most World Series titles of any club in the National League. With a six-dollar ticket, you can get right up on the dugout; you can see the determination and naïveté on their faces. They are playing their first professional games. They are beginning a journey.

Somewhere on the bench (especially when you’re at a double- or triple-A game), there’s a guy who just turned thirty, which is ancient in professional sports years. He was a winner, a champion and record-holder in high school and college, and a sure-thing to breeze through the minors on his way to a multi-million dollar big league contract. But something happened. He hurt his knee. He couldn’t hit the curveball. Or worse: there was no single factor to blame. He just didn’t pan out. He’s not fooling himself any longer; he knows he missed his chance at fame and millions. But he stays on the club because he still has something left to offer on the field. And he’s starting to get a kick out the fact that the young kids look up to him as a veteran leader in the clubhouse.

Those aren’t the only two kinds of players in the minors. There’s everyone else, everyone in between whose names won’t be remembered, people at every stage of the journey. All of us. Truly, with the cheap tickets and intimate ballparks, there’s very little separating us from them—both literally and metaphorically. It’s a quest narrative for the players, and for fans as well. Whether we’re young with stars in our eyes, older and wiser, or somewhere in the vast middle space; whether we had our best day or a terrible outing we’d rather forget…we’ll all get up tomorrow and do it again.

Corny? Yes. But one of these days, go sit on the hard bleachers at the local minor league park with friends and neighbors, eat a hot dog, and see the next batter step up to the plate. Feel that little thrill: the enchantment of possibility. Let it get inside you. This might be the night. Watch him connect, blast the tiny sphere right over their heads.

And when you jump up and cheer, don’t tell me it’s only for the players on the field. It’s for all of us.

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.