Lessons from a Lusty Toad

I haven’t always been partial to George Orwell. But, curmudgeonly, chauvinistic and often prone to hyperbole as his work can be, he has become somewhat of an earthy voice of exhortation for me. True, certain phrases and images like, “if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever”from 1984; or, the unjust and deeply troubling shipment of Boxer, the loyal and lovable workhorse, to the glue factory in Animal Farm; or, Gordon Comstock, the nonconformist protagonist from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who is characterized by sentiments like, “this is the life we live nowadays! It’s not life, it’s stagnation, death-in-life…we’re all corpses. Just rotting upright ”are hardly uplifting. However, to limit our vision of Orwell to Room 101 or vague announcements of “oh, how very Orwellian”is to miss out on something really important.

Perhaps my appreciation for Orwell began sprouting its first buds when I encountered his essay entitled “Thoughts on the Common Toad.” In this short(ish) first-person narrative, he describes his profound pleasure at the discovery of spring’s first amber amphibian: the unassuming toad. He relishes in its voracious appetite and transformation from scrawny to strong and delights in its big chrysoberyl eyes. (I’m not sure I appreciate the comparison of a rather emaciated look being a “spiritual look”in his essay; and, I am certain G.K Chesterton would have most heartily and robustly disagreed with it. Nor do I enjoy his use of the term “sexiness”in reference to a mere rapacious libidinal impulse which characterizes the toad’s attempts at breeding anything and everything he comes in contact with. However, these are small detractors compared to the spiritually significant impact I find in this piece.)

Perhaps I liked that he decided to write on something as banal as the toad because, as he says,“[the toad] never had much of a boost from poets.”More likely though, it is because of his conscious decision —and I think it must often be conscious—to nurture a capacity for delight: “people, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and [people mistakenly believe] it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already,” Orwell warns. He adds, “…if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?”Sure, Orwell simply can’t resist the urge to politicize his enjoyment of spring’s miraculous treasures, framing his delight in terms of resistance to the hegemony which is, in his opinion, in perpetual league to stamp out nature-derived pleasure whenever possible. But his message isn’t just political.

His admonition to find beauty in the toad’s gargantuan golden-globe eyes ennobles everyday enchantment with the perceived commonplace. And if, as Wendell Berry believes, “the world was created and approved by love… [;] it subsists, coheres, and endures by love…[; and,] insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love”(The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays), I can’t help but think that as children of heaven, part of our privilege is to meaningfully and lovingly delight in the flourishing of a good creation, knowing full well nothing is ever merely commonplace.

Boyhood

Richard Linklater made a movie about growing up called Boyhood. He cast a six-year-old boy named Ellar Coltraneto play Mason, an ordinary American boy growing up in ordinary American suburbs. Then he shot the story of Mason’s life over twelve years, ending as he graduates from high school and moves into his first dorm room in college.

There’s no plot to Boyhood. Or there is—Mason gets older, and so does everyone else. But that barely qualifies as a “story.” There isn’t a central conflict, exactly. There’s no motivation, no villain, no three-act structure with a climax and a resolution.

And yet the movie is gripping, in my opinion; funny and sweet, sometimes heartbreaking. It’s also gentle. You can sort of settle back into it and let it remind you of the best—and some of the not-best—bits of your own childhood.

This is a marvel to me, because as a writer of nonfiction I struggle all the time to shape “what happened” into a story. Bare facts don’t make a story. For writers of creative nonfiction, bare facts are the building blocks. Your job is to put them together so they make something with shape and meaning and substance—and something that will help the reader live her own life through yours.

The measure of a good memoir or personal essay, then, is that at the end the reader has not just learned something about you, the writer, but also something about themselves. They have navigated a trial, or relived an experience, or been given a roadmap for something they have not yet encountered. They have been put through an emotional experience and experienced a sort of holy catharsis, an empathy.

The story of Boyhood—perhaps more than any other film I can remember seeing—is unique, in that it is just as much about you out there in the audience as it is about Mason up on the screen. Watching the film leaves you feeling as if you’ve just relived your own childhood. It feels, oddly, as if you’ve been given a second passage into adulthood. Mason, and Linklater, have empathized with you. You leave the theater, and step into the light, and know yourself better.

More Popular Than Jesus

As I prepare to host some friends for a 50th anniversary screening of the The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, I've been thinking about that period in history when people went so nuts that John Lennon could suggest The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Beatlemania really was something like a religious experience; kids acted as if rock and roll could save them.

Some American Christians responded to John's comment by burning their Beatles records and banning their songs from the radio. Today Lennon might only get some "Farewell, John" tweets, some blog posts about our anti-religious culture, and then some counter-responses trying to rise above the fray by suggesting there might be some truth to the idea.

I also imagine a facebook meme, in black and white, of Jesus in a collarless Beatle-suit being chased by adoring fans down a London street over the word "JESUSMANIA." This would be an inevitably ironic reference to the opening scene of Hard Day's Night, which, if anything, dramatizes the very phenomenon that sparked Lennon's comment. And it's hardly even drama; the film used actual fans and The Beatles themselves were amateurs, so what we get is not just a New Wave realism but nearly cinéma vérité. Nor are we over The Beatles; witness the number of tribute bands, or the continual release of repackagings of their music, or even The Beatles Rock Band. I myself avoided them until college precisely because "everyone" was into them, but when I actually started listening, they quickly won me over. I can't imagine myself getting flushed and sweaty and screaming just for being in the presence of the Fab Four, but maybe a part of me is fascinated by that ecstasy, that longing for a fantasy of total freedom. I rarely have that in music, art, or faith. In fact, I suspect it, like they did in the 18th century, of "enthusiasm."

After all, rock and roll channels a liberative, individualistic, often sexual energy that the Church will always be in tension with. Rock says: It's all about you. If it feels good, do it. Christianity says: It's all about the Christ. If it pleases Him, do it. That will never be a popular line.

Christ also said to cut off your hand if it offended you, so it's not entirely far-fetched to think it better to burn your Beatles CDs than to burn in Hell, but we also know to suspect absolutes: some people might need to trash their CDs, but that doesn't mean we all do. It's not necessarily The Beatles that should concern us but our relationship to them. If they really were more popular than Jesus, that couldn't be their fault (nor should it probably be very surprising).

What's strange (or not) is how we look to things like rock groups (or politicians or self-help gurus or Bachelors) to save us. It's the old "you have to serve somebody" line. The Beatles' broad appeal enables them to offer an attractive version of the self as acceptably erotic and rebellious. You can't found your whole life on that, but you can enjoy it for what it is for the brief time you're engaging it if we understand the difference between enjoying and idolizing.

If you've never seen the film, the anniversary is a decent excuse to enjoy a movie characterized by creative cinematography, an anarchic sense of humor reveling in wordplay, a reflexive system of metaphors for celebrity, and really fun music. I have to think God likes us to enjoy these things so long as we don't depend upon them.

Storytelling and Slenderman

Two 12-year-old girls recently lured a classmate into the woods and stabbed her with a knife 19 times. They left her to die, but she survived. Those who attempted to take her life said they wanted to prove Slenderman exists. They planned to escape to his mansion in the woods.

Slenderman is a character of mythical Internet proportions — a tall figure in a business suit with tentacle-like arms. He preys on children. Created in 2009 in a horror genre Internet forum, Slenderman is a striking example of a fun project taking on a crowd-sourced life of its own in the imaginations of millions. It’s a testament to the power of stories and the possibilities of the imagination to create new, perhaps even unthinkable, realities. It’s shocking, though, how a story can compel children to find meaning in acts of violence and some have called for the censorship of stories like Slenderman. But the answer is not censorship. Instead we need to write better stories.

Creating them is no light task and we cannot do it by pushing dogma and happy endings while ignoring evil. We can’t create better stories by isolating ourselves from reality and by painting perfect pictures of a perfect world. We can, however, offer meaning in spite of the violence and evil we encounter. We need stories that address evil truthfully and directly, stories that equip us to address evil truthfully in our everyday lives.

The young girl who survived 19 stab wounds will have a more powerful story to tell than her classmates. Because she lives, her story will transcend a horrid act of evil. That’s the story we look for — the story the world needs.

Jesus as Teacher

During Lent, on the advice of a friend, I read my way slowly through the book of John. I had told her I wanted to meditate on the mystery of the cross. I found a short commentary -- A Simple Guide to John by Paul J McCarren -- and tucked it into my bag along with my Bible, and I read passages during my light rail commute to downtown Portland, where I work as a language teacher.

Unexpectedly, I found myself meditating on the role of Jesus as teacher. Again and again, the sensitive writer of the commentary drew my attention to the many ways in which the book of John is the story of Jesus’ tireless, endless work as a teacher. John is the story of Jesus’ brilliant success, in his triumphant lesson on the cross, but it is also the story of his many failures. True, they are not his failures so much as his students’ failure to learn. Yet as a teacher myself, I found profound comfort in knowing that Jesus had mostly hard days in his classroom on earth.

Reading the gospel of John sent me into my own classroom each day with new eyes. I’ve often prayed before class, asking for Jesus to calm my nerves and keep my focus on him and on my students—not on myself. But with the words from John fresh in my mind, I started seeing teaching itself as an act of faith.

On page after page, I was seeing Jesus with new eyes. Jesus learning (learning, like us!) at the wedding at Cana. Jesus repeating the same lesson over and over again, with infinite patience. Jesus using stories and miracles to teach—metaphor both physical and verbal. Jesus teaching without degrees, without permission, without accolades and publications. Teaching in the midst of danger. Teaching in the midst of his own grief, loneliness, fear.

Over and over in John, Jesus invites those who would learn from him to admit their ignorance, and then to pay attention to their lives and their thoughts. He invites them to notice the gap between who they are and who God is, between their behavior and what they say they believe. “If you want to learn from me, you’ll have to follow me,” he says (12:26). In this way, though he is human like us, Jesus is the perfect teacher. Who he is and what he teaches are one.

Since March, I’ve continued to reflect on Jesus as teacher. I think about the slow apprenticeship of my own hard heart, the years of my wary approach to the cross and to Jesus, and how at first, I protected myself from the painful beauty of the cross by regarding Christ as one teacher among many. “I think he was a great teacher, like Buddha or Ghandi,” I said then. “He was one in a long line of prophets and teachers.”

It seems short, small, the distance between these arrogant, fearful words and the confession of faith I made years later. But the distance is huge. A canyon, a chasm. It’s an impossible journey I could not have made on my own. Grace carries me across this distance daily, nestling me into the strange reality of Jesus as both teacher and lesson, as both God and human. How grateful I am to be a perpetual student of Christ.

What is writing for?

Is the purpose of writing to communicate something to readers, or to mystify them? It’s been almost fifteen years, and James Miller’s article in the now-defunct Lingua Franca pitting clear communication (personified by George Orwell) against mystification-as-profundity (poster boy: Theodor Adorno) has stuck with me. First reading it fresh from grad school, where both perspectives were drilled into me with equal vigor, I’ve seen this either/or proposition reproduced in almost every argument over the goal of good writing that I’ve been dragged into since then. Whatever battle lines are drawn — literary vs. commercial, spiritual vs. secular — the old antagonists return to fight. Advocates of clarity are accused of dumbing ideas down, while advocates of mystery are chided for hiding their confused or commonplace thoughts behind a curtain of obfuscation.

I wish I could claim to have kept above the fray, but I’ve been a partisan more often than not — and for both sides, too, my allegiances shifting with the context. If I’ve switched sides back and forth, it’s not for lack of conviction. It’s just that neither side embodies what I’m actually attempting to do when I write fiction.

To me an unread story is a gesture of love left unconsummated.

Unrequited might seem a better word, but it’s not: there are books you haven’t read but for which you still feel affection. (Consider the American love affair with the Bible.) In some cases not having read the story keeps the love alive. The pages do not always contain what we’ve been led to believe.

As a reader I don’t seek consummation for reasons of clarity or mystification, although both sensations are part of the experience. What I look for is something closer to communion.

To me an unread story is like bread and wine left untasted on the table, an author’s gifts placed before readers out of a thwarted desire to know and be known.

Some of us don’t like to think of readers at all. We write for ourselves, telling the stories we’d like to hear. Art for art’s sake, with no hint of accommodating the audience. Mystification for its own sake, feeding your inner Adorno while your inner Orwell starves. This is a pose I’ve sometimes adopted, yet it seems more and more to be a mere shield against rejection: “You didn’t love me? That’s because you didn’t get me. This was never meant for you; you couldn’t have understood it.”

A story must communicate, or so they tell me. The question is, how? Must we follow the expected patterns, tap out only the approved rhythms, and keep culling the word horde until all the mystery is gone? Start thinking of what we do as mere communication and before long you find the reader can be quantified, reduced, understood –– and that a better term than reader is consumer. If writing for myself was a dead end, writing for consumers is even worse.

This is why, instead of communicating with readers, I want to commune.

I’m not aiming at blasphemy here, or even irreverence. It seems important to me that the creative act be understood in terms of incarnation, and the Christian Eucharist provides an apt metaphor. In spite of Walker Percy's belief that “the incarnational and sacramental dimensions of Catholic Christianity are the greatest natural assets of a novelist,” here I find Calvin’s notion of spiritual presence helpful. The author’s presence in the paper and ink or the pixel, though not physical, is nevertheless real in a way that can only be impoverished by ascribing it only to symbolism. Entering into the story is, at least for “worthy receivers,” to commune with an author who is actually, though spiritually, present in the work.

Somewhere between demystification and mystification for its own sake –– or perhaps I should say, somewhere above them –– there is a place for something both mystical and substantial, an experience of one another through words that has become almost a secret, a guilty pleasure none who know it feel entirely comfortable talking about. It does not always happen, but when it does, we remember why we read and write to begin with, just as there are moments in church with the taste of bread on the tongue and wine on the lips when we, for an instant, recover the true urge that brought us there.

"The Tree of Life" and Our Collective Cultural Discomfort with Recognizing "The Glory"

A few years ago, when preparing notes for a class discussion on Terence Malick’s 2011 film, The Tree of Life, I began to feel very uncomfortable about typing notes and viewing the film simultaneously. I realized that Malick’s film, which pushes the viewer into a disorienting space where he or she must explore what the film’s opening voiceover calls the “two ways to live”—the way of nature and the way of grace—, demanded my complete attention. Watching the film felt like participation in a sacred act, and my rather clinical academic analysis seemed like a violation of sorts. The film is both abstract and concrete as it invites us to consider the relationship between its macro-narrative — God, the creation of the world, and the moral structure of the universe — and its micro-narrative of the O’Brien family as they grapple with questions of suffering, justice, and the knowledge of God. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) follows the self-serving, purely pragmatic “way of nature,”until he finally realizes that “I dishonored it all and did not notice the glory.”O’Brien learns that, in order to love his family, God, and the creation, he must notice its complexity and allow himself to be ushered into a space of awe and wonder.

The Tree of Life, a highly conceptual, impressionistic coming of age film focusing particularly on the internal landscape and spiritual journey of son, Jack O’Brien, is also a film that causes its viewers to think about their own relationship with beauty and its ultimate source. Our attentiveness, or lack thereof, to the “glory”of the film tell us something about our own sojourning, about the particular kind of attentiveness, amidst both pain and beauty, that is formative in the development of our own spiritual autobiographies. By forcing his viewers into a sometimes uncomfortable state of confusion, Malick often leads us into a state of wonder.

The film demands patience, contemplation, attentiveness; and these are things that many moviegoers, nurtured on quick and easy Hollywood feel-good formulas, are not ready to give to it. Sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno claimed that popular art has been “standardized;”by this, he means that what he called “the culture industry”provides simple, formulaic “art”forms that are created in order to tell us what we want and then sell it back to us. In this sense, we are formed in the image of our culture as we find comfort and false sustenance in these things that we have been trained to think we need and love. Perhaps this is one reason we (the American public) find ourselves so uncomfortable in front of abstraction that cannot be understood immediately.

In a sense, we are culturally trained to become Mr. O’Brien; we learn that the most important things are instant and formulaic, giving us a false sense of fulfillment because they meet one of two goals: increasing our power (through wealth, efficiency, etc.) or entertaining us. These are the standardized norms of mass American culture, and anything that challenges these norms is often simplistically labeled “boring”or “weird.”How fascinating it is that Mr. O’Brien is played by Brad Pitt, the twinkling star of so many mass produced Hollywood flicks. Interestingly, many moviegoers felt led astray, cheated, and angry when seeing this film; they wanted their money back.

But Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien teaches us to be humble in front of the mystery of both beauty and suffering; he teaches us to become like children and re-enter a state of wonder: “I wanted to be loved because I was great; A big man. I'm nothing. Look at the glory around us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn't notice the glory. I'm a foolish man.”

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.