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If Mark's gospel, with it's straightforward narrative drive and it's objective distance, is Hemingway, then John the beloved's gospel is Faulkner: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning" (John1:1-2). Circular. Discursive. Doubling back. Right from the start. It's a verse that still confuses the life out of Jehovah's Witnesses when I try to use it as proof that Jesus is not just a demi-god. (Actually, their verses just drop the capital letters and they turn it back on me. Amazing what a jot and a tittle can do.)
No, John the beloved sees things just a little bit differently, writes passionately, gives us inside stories, crafts prose that we must soak in before they reach our core. John's way of writing, however, seems to be only part literary construct. John certainly has a unique perspective, a heart brimming with love for the world and his Master, but he also seems to be reconstructing the way Christ himself uses language. Listen to the way the Master himself talks: "On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you" (John 14:20). Honestly, at times when the disciples scratch their heads, I do too. There's something bigger here than we're used to dealing with, something akin to the doubling back of "I am who I am."
But John's text never lets us forget that it's a text--yea, a text that's meant to pursuade, that's meant to initiate faith. This happens in the fourth, post-resurrection appearance that John documents, the story of "doubting Thomas."
Again, this is a story that Mark wouldn't tell. He's not an insider first of all, like John, so he doesn't have the goods. John's gospel at times feels like a tell-all. We get up close and personal with the disciples in ways that are shockingly human. And so we see Thomas' brash statement that he needs physical proof, said with such vigor that we hear echoes of Peter in him--Peter who will be reinstated with the mysterious "feed my sheep" in the next chapter. We're dealing with epiphanies here in John, and to have epiphanies we need before and after. Thomas' before is gruesome realism: "Unless I feel those bloody wounds, y'all are cracked. And he's dead. Fini." That's doubt. Ugly, killing doubt.
And we know that Jesus makes him eat his words. But maybe not. Maybe it's encouragement, said with a laugh. "Okay, smart boy. I know what you said. Up this sleeve? Nothing. Up this sleeve? Nothing. You want to put your fingers through the holes? You want to see firsthand what a resurrection body is like? Be the first to try it out!" I'm not so sure there's not an "I'm willing to help you believe," here.
But it's the next passage that jumps off the page at us. In film study and the visual arts, they call it "gaze": when you the viewer, the watcher, realize your participation in the picture. In visual art it's something that draws attention to the fact that you the viewer are needed to make the meaning of the picture. It can be as easy as every person in the painting focusing on the critical point of the painting--excepts one person who looks directly at you. In any case, you the watcher become aware of yourself as watcher.
I suppose that's a little different than self-referentiality, when authors like Faulkner make us aware that they are constructing the text, that the text we are getting lost in is very much a construct. But in the Thomas passage we have both. After Thomas' confession, Jesus makes us aware that we have a stake in this game, that we don't just get to watch and be entertained, but that this scene involves us. "Because you have seen me, you have believed," he says. "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." And the words jump off the page to me, the reader, a participant in this as surely as Thomas was. I have the choice to demand physical proof, to give over to doubt; I have the choice to make this count in my life, to believe, to buy into a radically altered reality. And Jesus knows the difficulty of the feat. Just as surely as he encourages Thomas, offers himself and his humiliation-victory for evidence, he encourages the imagination and paradigm shift this will take for readers throughout the centuries.
And then in the next paragraph, John himself reminds us that this is not objective, that he too has a clear agenda in writing this, one similar to Jesus' words here. "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."
Not very subtle, there; not very literary. Actually, self-referential and blatant.
And beautiful, wonderful, life-changing. How could it be written any other way? How can one call for the paradigm shift it takes to believe in the resurrection but by story; by first hand, dirty-little-doubting-secret evidence; by direct call to faith that will alter the planet's very course?
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Monday, April 9, 2012
John Mark's Crucifixion
Mark's account of the crucifixion, I thought first after reading it to my children, reads like Hemingway: acerbic, third person narration blocked heavily by periods, only made diachromatic by almost unexplained dialogue tossed as life buoys into the choppy seas of a fated world. "It was the third hour when they crucified him. The written notice aof the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. They crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left" (Mark 15: 25-27).
Then, too, it's an orchestration, a drama that's carefully constructed. Everyone, as they say, has their part: the soldiers play an especially brutal part, conducting a mock-drama within the drama, going so far as to dress Jesus up, role-playing in a way that belies their desire to rise up against those who "lord it over them" and to let loose violence on those beneath them. Mark gets about as lyrical as ever does in this passage with the word "homage," connoting the complexity within the banality of the soldiers' actions. Immediately, then, Simon of Cyrene makes his way across the stage, a shout-out to Mark's modern day audience, the narrative vaccilating from violence to compassion in three verses.
There's setting as well, of course--setting plays a huge part though you don't have to notice it. For most of the gospel writers "Golgotha" echoed through the dimensions. "They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull)." The narrative dips into darkness and terror here, something Hemingway would never do. It's all deserts in Hemingway but this is horror. However, Mark returns to understatement, it would seem, in noting, "At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour." "By the way, the whole cosmos was off for three hours while Jesus died," the author tosses in here. "Make of it what you will."
Once people start talking, however, they all have their part, all with the same tone, almost the same words, like a Greek chorus. Yet the characters are not faceless and attempt to throw Jesus' words back in his face. "So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three deays, come down from the cross, and save yourself!" "He saved others...but he can't save himself." With all this emphasis on individual salvation, this could 21st Century United States instead of ancient Palestine.
When Jesus himself speaks the opening verse of Psalm 22, no one quite gets it. But "one man" acts: "One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink," then pronounces "Now leave him alone. Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down."
I want to know about "one man." Who is this "one man"? What is this action--this urgent action with deep ambivalence--all about? Apparently, Jesus drinking wine vinegar is fulfilling prophecy, yet Mark's streamlined narrative is not Matthew, fulfilling prophecy for a Jewish audience. Perhaps "one man" is every man, every reader sitting back and waiting to decide, waiting for proof, proving precisly faithless in the waiting.
But faith does have the last word of course. Faith springs from the horror of Golgotha precisely where this narrative started, with the brutality of the soldiers. Out of the stone hearts of military men comes the most profound statement of faith, as God brings forth the water of heaven from the rock of earth once again. "And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, 'Surely this man was the Son of God!'" John Mark saves one of his most layered sentences for this soldier: a title (centurion), a location ("he'd been standing right there, people, he had not only the closest view, but a brutal hand in this murder"), an interpretation (when he saw all these things, all these bizarre things--it all added up for him to a declaration), and an action, a step of faith.
True to his juxtaposition throughout the passage, John Mark turns his camera from this hardened soldier to the women at a distance, and the drama is complete, all humanity present even more so than they are in the symbolic Pequod from Moby Dick, and certainly more present than in the semi-fascist Hemingway.
It's tremendous writing, writing that stands back and sketches the scene powerfully, writing that draws us into the action in a way that forces us to confront our own belief or lack thereof: are we standing back with the false action of "one man"? Or are we more guilty--and more convicted--with the brutality and confession of the centurion? In John Mark's account of the crucifixion, he calls us to declare our allegiance once and for all.
Then, too, it's an orchestration, a drama that's carefully constructed. Everyone, as they say, has their part: the soldiers play an especially brutal part, conducting a mock-drama within the drama, going so far as to dress Jesus up, role-playing in a way that belies their desire to rise up against those who "lord it over them" and to let loose violence on those beneath them. Mark gets about as lyrical as ever does in this passage with the word "homage," connoting the complexity within the banality of the soldiers' actions. Immediately, then, Simon of Cyrene makes his way across the stage, a shout-out to Mark's modern day audience, the narrative vaccilating from violence to compassion in three verses.
There's setting as well, of course--setting plays a huge part though you don't have to notice it. For most of the gospel writers "Golgotha" echoed through the dimensions. "They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull)." The narrative dips into darkness and terror here, something Hemingway would never do. It's all deserts in Hemingway but this is horror. However, Mark returns to understatement, it would seem, in noting, "At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour." "By the way, the whole cosmos was off for three hours while Jesus died," the author tosses in here. "Make of it what you will."
Once people start talking, however, they all have their part, all with the same tone, almost the same words, like a Greek chorus. Yet the characters are not faceless and attempt to throw Jesus' words back in his face. "So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three deays, come down from the cross, and save yourself!" "He saved others...but he can't save himself." With all this emphasis on individual salvation, this could 21st Century United States instead of ancient Palestine.
When Jesus himself speaks the opening verse of Psalm 22, no one quite gets it. But "one man" acts: "One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink," then pronounces "Now leave him alone. Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down."
I want to know about "one man." Who is this "one man"? What is this action--this urgent action with deep ambivalence--all about? Apparently, Jesus drinking wine vinegar is fulfilling prophecy, yet Mark's streamlined narrative is not Matthew, fulfilling prophecy for a Jewish audience. Perhaps "one man" is every man, every reader sitting back and waiting to decide, waiting for proof, proving precisly faithless in the waiting.
But faith does have the last word of course. Faith springs from the horror of Golgotha precisely where this narrative started, with the brutality of the soldiers. Out of the stone hearts of military men comes the most profound statement of faith, as God brings forth the water of heaven from the rock of earth once again. "And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, 'Surely this man was the Son of God!'" John Mark saves one of his most layered sentences for this soldier: a title (centurion), a location ("he'd been standing right there, people, he had not only the closest view, but a brutal hand in this murder"), an interpretation (when he saw all these things, all these bizarre things--it all added up for him to a declaration), and an action, a step of faith.
True to his juxtaposition throughout the passage, John Mark turns his camera from this hardened soldier to the women at a distance, and the drama is complete, all humanity present even more so than they are in the symbolic Pequod from Moby Dick, and certainly more present than in the semi-fascist Hemingway.
It's tremendous writing, writing that stands back and sketches the scene powerfully, writing that draws us into the action in a way that forces us to confront our own belief or lack thereof: are we standing back with the false action of "one man"? Or are we more guilty--and more convicted--with the brutality and confession of the centurion? In John Mark's account of the crucifixion, he calls us to declare our allegiance once and for all.
Friday, March 30, 2012
There's No Place; Like Home
I'm not sure when I grew out of the hotel experience, but it seems long enough ago now that I can hardly remember any different. It used to be a major goal of life, to leave home, to drive somewhere far enough away that it became painful after awhile, far enough that picking the right stops for gas seemed like strategy, far enough that you got to sleep that exotic sleep in the womb of the humming car, only to arrive somewhere that was a castle with your own room, the scent of chlorine promising your own blue pool. Back then the immaculate rooms seemed new, made especially for you.
Who would have known then that it was all a ruse? An industry made to make you feel exactly like it was new when it wasn't at all--in fact, the opposite?
Part of disenchantment with hotels is simply the baggage of adulthood--hotels aren't cheap, after all, and when you're left holding the plastic at the end of a stay you realize you're paying someone for a bed in which you didn't feel comfortable in a room that was always either too hot or too cold in which you could only sleep or watch TV and from which you had to venture out into a hostile jungle to procure sustenance anyway.
But for me, now, it also has to do with hotels being no place. Oh, granted, in the hotel we stayed at recently we could pull the drapes completely in our swanky poolside room so that when I woke up I had no idea if it was six o'clock and dark or noon and broad daylight. Where else can you have that experience? Malls and casinos, the other places that try to make you forget where you are on planet earth. Of course, the point of hotels is to "get away" and to be able to forget the alarm clock, so on one hand it makes sense that one would be able hole up and forget for a night the patterns of the earth. But when you add the price tag in to doing this, then you realize that sequestering you is part of the strategy for keeping you, part of the plot against you being anywhere else but in a dark room with the intermitting flashes of tv scenes lighting up your face.
And stepping outside, too, just sends you right back in. The hotel that we stayed at was just off the freeway, next to another hotel, adjacent to a pizza place, across a four lane street from a trendy strip mall with a Spanish tile roof--in Minnesota--and just down from some storage sheds and warehouse-type buildings. This meant acres and acres of parking lots and pavement. It was literally impossible to walk anywhere. From outside, the castle wall revealed cracks; the parking lot moat was turning to rubble. I went back in, to the facade of the new, but in the hallway the maids--toward whom I tried to be overly cheery becuase I've just reread Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed--were Central American and embarrassed me by the ladder that I knew separated our lives.
Scott Sanders and others talk about the purpose of travel, of leaving home to experience other places so that one might return home with a new sense of life, so that one might infuse home with the wonder of the world. And I did hear at least two stories of "city experience" that got passed around by travelers from our town at the state tournament: two girls and a guy kissing in a hotel pool (ours); a transvestite on the monorail. Unfortunately, these stories were already being used by the travelers as a perfect reason to return to the womb of home and leave it completely intact.
Another metaphor for this excursion was pilgrimage, especially since our entire town traveled to the city, mainly to attain the relics associated with the state basketball tournament--"to Minneapolis we wend," that sort of thing. However, the relics attained were really for adorning the sense we have of ourselves rather than emphasizing the experience of touching something other.
And the places we stayed, I'm saying, helped to insure all of this, to insure an insularity to the travel, to insure that we didn't here stories or experience places that moved us with the wonder of the world. Sure, my wife managed to eat at Wally's Falafel and Hummus without me, and we had some overpriced Thai food, and I ventured into St. Paul with a friend of mine for coffee at a non-chain place, but the signature experience was sitting poolside as the kids swam till they were drained and their eyes blood red from an over-chlorinated pool, and then we slept, and then we went home. There was no inn keeper to spin yarns of his childhood or musicians to play a reel we'd never heard before as we shared a pint of ale and forgot ourselves.
No, no place had been prepared for us in advance, a safe, secure womb of false newness that is anything but virginal, and we indulged it and went home seeminlgy none the worse but definitely none the better.
Who would have known then that it was all a ruse? An industry made to make you feel exactly like it was new when it wasn't at all--in fact, the opposite?
Part of disenchantment with hotels is simply the baggage of adulthood--hotels aren't cheap, after all, and when you're left holding the plastic at the end of a stay you realize you're paying someone for a bed in which you didn't feel comfortable in a room that was always either too hot or too cold in which you could only sleep or watch TV and from which you had to venture out into a hostile jungle to procure sustenance anyway.
But for me, now, it also has to do with hotels being no place. Oh, granted, in the hotel we stayed at recently we could pull the drapes completely in our swanky poolside room so that when I woke up I had no idea if it was six o'clock and dark or noon and broad daylight. Where else can you have that experience? Malls and casinos, the other places that try to make you forget where you are on planet earth. Of course, the point of hotels is to "get away" and to be able to forget the alarm clock, so on one hand it makes sense that one would be able hole up and forget for a night the patterns of the earth. But when you add the price tag in to doing this, then you realize that sequestering you is part of the strategy for keeping you, part of the plot against you being anywhere else but in a dark room with the intermitting flashes of tv scenes lighting up your face.
And stepping outside, too, just sends you right back in. The hotel that we stayed at was just off the freeway, next to another hotel, adjacent to a pizza place, across a four lane street from a trendy strip mall with a Spanish tile roof--in Minnesota--and just down from some storage sheds and warehouse-type buildings. This meant acres and acres of parking lots and pavement. It was literally impossible to walk anywhere. From outside, the castle wall revealed cracks; the parking lot moat was turning to rubble. I went back in, to the facade of the new, but in the hallway the maids--toward whom I tried to be overly cheery becuase I've just reread Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed--were Central American and embarrassed me by the ladder that I knew separated our lives.
Scott Sanders and others talk about the purpose of travel, of leaving home to experience other places so that one might return home with a new sense of life, so that one might infuse home with the wonder of the world. And I did hear at least two stories of "city experience" that got passed around by travelers from our town at the state tournament: two girls and a guy kissing in a hotel pool (ours); a transvestite on the monorail. Unfortunately, these stories were already being used by the travelers as a perfect reason to return to the womb of home and leave it completely intact.
Another metaphor for this excursion was pilgrimage, especially since our entire town traveled to the city, mainly to attain the relics associated with the state basketball tournament--"to Minneapolis we wend," that sort of thing. However, the relics attained were really for adorning the sense we have of ourselves rather than emphasizing the experience of touching something other.
And the places we stayed, I'm saying, helped to insure all of this, to insure an insularity to the travel, to insure that we didn't here stories or experience places that moved us with the wonder of the world. Sure, my wife managed to eat at Wally's Falafel and Hummus without me, and we had some overpriced Thai food, and I ventured into St. Paul with a friend of mine for coffee at a non-chain place, but the signature experience was sitting poolside as the kids swam till they were drained and their eyes blood red from an over-chlorinated pool, and then we slept, and then we went home. There was no inn keeper to spin yarns of his childhood or musicians to play a reel we'd never heard before as we shared a pint of ale and forgot ourselves.
No, no place had been prepared for us in advance, a safe, secure womb of false newness that is anything but virginal, and we indulged it and went home seeminlgy none the worse but definitely none the better.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Bounce
My son, a second grader, was practicing dribbling a basketball through his legs yesterday, from his left hand to his right, something he no doubt picked up at school or from seeing at a high school basketball game. I didn't stop him; in fact, at one point I asked him to try going from his right hand--his strong hand since he's left handed--to his left. After all, it's never too early to work on your weak hand.
I came to love basketball not from my dad, who loved all sports responsibly, as a way to be active and part of something communal. He played catch with us, taught us to hit; the only time I remember him shooting a basketball was when he showed us how to shoot a freethrow--underhanded, which also showed just what boat he got off of: Noah's.
No, I came to love basketball from the pageantry of high school sports, the impetus put on it by an entire community, the wonder of tournament games on the radio announced over scratchy microphones, the frenzy of a live game-winning shot that drowned my own voice and made me cover my ears. I loved it because I heard the older boys talking about the Los Angeles Lakers and then I watched the Lakers perform legerdemain with a basketball on Sunday afternoons and cheered for them as if my life depended on it. Then I got a Nerfhoop and I was the Lakers and I scored 100 points a game and earned the adoration of imagined crowds and whatever current imagined girlfriend, too.
And so I can't say that I loved basketball in its own right; there was definitely a cultural context that predisposed me to it.
But I also began to critique it fairly early on. I didn't do well under pressure, even imagined seventh grade pressure, when I tried to write a story about inner city ballers who were friends but also rivals, characters lightly disguised for me and a friend of mine. In high school I also critiqued it some, trying to take the bigger perspective that basketball wasn't all there was in life. Though undefeated my junior year, we ended up losing in the district semifinals. I'm not sure self-consciousness on the issue really helped anything.
Upon graduating, I went off to play at Bethel College, even started a few games my junior year, then forewent the basketball season in order to go on the England Term program my senior year, where I really sold myself to literature and writing, my major. This is how "sold" I was: at one point on the bus, no doubt beset by a certain subconscious homesickness, I had the most intense flashback to a basketball game from the year before. At that moment I would have traded the whole England Term experience--really a transformative time in my life--to go back and give hoops one more shot.
Now, our family goes to high school basketball games and my son and his friends idolize the players. The cultural context from when I grew up is largely the same. It scares me: I want him to be well-rounded, don't want him to get caught in the smallness of the sport, don't want him in that particular small town rut. And yet I want him to belong to a place, and in this place basketball continues to play a significant role. And yet, as an insider of sorts, I also find myself wanting to teach him the game; I want to teach him a pretty J, wouldn't mind if he'd become a natural impresario off the dribble, a beautiful skill I never came close to.
Oh, boy. Even in my rhetoric, I betray myself. "An impresario off the dribble?" "I"? Who or what is this about?
There are a million traps in parenting it seems to me lately. My children are fixated on video games, on obtaining personal hand held devices. At a basketball game recently, I found my youngest son sequestered in the farthest corner of the lobby, playing a game on the phone of a complete stranger--a high school fan from the other team. My daughter, 11, dreams of having an iPod touch and the other day asked out of the blue, "Can I have a TV in my room?"
High school sports can be an idol, I know; but the other ruts that are forming in our lives are just as deep and feel even more dangerous and seem to be part of the larger rut that builds itself in our lives: American middle class insularity.
All my life, it seems, I've been trying to avoid staidness, insularity. For many of my first 18 years, I made sure everyone knew I was headed for Someplace: the city. Then, I went to college in a suburb and wanted out of suburbia; I returned "home" to teach but often encouraged small town kids to leave for college. For the last four years my wife and I have had our sights set on moving to Worthington where she works, a small community with an absolutely crazy level of diversity, telling ourselves that the diversity of the place would somehow save us, would push us beyond the boundaries that form in our even smaller community.
Yesterday, after four years, I took the for sale signs down outside our house.
Today was black and gold day in the local Christian grade school, in anticipation of the section championship tonight, and so I dug out my high school warm up jersey and sent my son to school in it.
And so the rut deepens.
Perhaps ruts are inevitable, but I'm American enough to think I can buck them--until this point, by leaving for Somewhere Else.
But now, with the signs down and the ruts getting deeper every day, perhaps discipleship really begins in earnest. In my staid life, what does the gospel mean? In American middle class insularity, how does one truly follow the narrative of scripture? How does one live out a biblical faith of "faithful improvisation"? And what part, pray tell, might a crossover, through-the-legs-dribble play in all of this?
Perhaps only this: it's never to late to work on my weak hand.
I came to love basketball not from my dad, who loved all sports responsibly, as a way to be active and part of something communal. He played catch with us, taught us to hit; the only time I remember him shooting a basketball was when he showed us how to shoot a freethrow--underhanded, which also showed just what boat he got off of: Noah's.
No, I came to love basketball from the pageantry of high school sports, the impetus put on it by an entire community, the wonder of tournament games on the radio announced over scratchy microphones, the frenzy of a live game-winning shot that drowned my own voice and made me cover my ears. I loved it because I heard the older boys talking about the Los Angeles Lakers and then I watched the Lakers perform legerdemain with a basketball on Sunday afternoons and cheered for them as if my life depended on it. Then I got a Nerfhoop and I was the Lakers and I scored 100 points a game and earned the adoration of imagined crowds and whatever current imagined girlfriend, too.
And so I can't say that I loved basketball in its own right; there was definitely a cultural context that predisposed me to it.
But I also began to critique it fairly early on. I didn't do well under pressure, even imagined seventh grade pressure, when I tried to write a story about inner city ballers who were friends but also rivals, characters lightly disguised for me and a friend of mine. In high school I also critiqued it some, trying to take the bigger perspective that basketball wasn't all there was in life. Though undefeated my junior year, we ended up losing in the district semifinals. I'm not sure self-consciousness on the issue really helped anything.
Upon graduating, I went off to play at Bethel College, even started a few games my junior year, then forewent the basketball season in order to go on the England Term program my senior year, where I really sold myself to literature and writing, my major. This is how "sold" I was: at one point on the bus, no doubt beset by a certain subconscious homesickness, I had the most intense flashback to a basketball game from the year before. At that moment I would have traded the whole England Term experience--really a transformative time in my life--to go back and give hoops one more shot.
Now, our family goes to high school basketball games and my son and his friends idolize the players. The cultural context from when I grew up is largely the same. It scares me: I want him to be well-rounded, don't want him to get caught in the smallness of the sport, don't want him in that particular small town rut. And yet I want him to belong to a place, and in this place basketball continues to play a significant role. And yet, as an insider of sorts, I also find myself wanting to teach him the game; I want to teach him a pretty J, wouldn't mind if he'd become a natural impresario off the dribble, a beautiful skill I never came close to.
Oh, boy. Even in my rhetoric, I betray myself. "An impresario off the dribble?" "I"? Who or what is this about?
There are a million traps in parenting it seems to me lately. My children are fixated on video games, on obtaining personal hand held devices. At a basketball game recently, I found my youngest son sequestered in the farthest corner of the lobby, playing a game on the phone of a complete stranger--a high school fan from the other team. My daughter, 11, dreams of having an iPod touch and the other day asked out of the blue, "Can I have a TV in my room?"
High school sports can be an idol, I know; but the other ruts that are forming in our lives are just as deep and feel even more dangerous and seem to be part of the larger rut that builds itself in our lives: American middle class insularity.
All my life, it seems, I've been trying to avoid staidness, insularity. For many of my first 18 years, I made sure everyone knew I was headed for Someplace: the city. Then, I went to college in a suburb and wanted out of suburbia; I returned "home" to teach but often encouraged small town kids to leave for college. For the last four years my wife and I have had our sights set on moving to Worthington where she works, a small community with an absolutely crazy level of diversity, telling ourselves that the diversity of the place would somehow save us, would push us beyond the boundaries that form in our even smaller community.
Yesterday, after four years, I took the for sale signs down outside our house.
Today was black and gold day in the local Christian grade school, in anticipation of the section championship tonight, and so I dug out my high school warm up jersey and sent my son to school in it.
And so the rut deepens.
Perhaps ruts are inevitable, but I'm American enough to think I can buck them--until this point, by leaving for Somewhere Else.
But now, with the signs down and the ruts getting deeper every day, perhaps discipleship really begins in earnest. In my staid life, what does the gospel mean? In American middle class insularity, how does one truly follow the narrative of scripture? How does one live out a biblical faith of "faithful improvisation"? And what part, pray tell, might a crossover, through-the-legs-dribble play in all of this?
Perhaps only this: it's never to late to work on my weak hand.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Gaining Access to "Otherness"
It's hard for me to imagine a place more "other" than Laos. At times, as I attempt to look objectively at what attracted me to my wife, I wonder if that's it--her "otherness." Of course, when I became attracted to her--at 15--I had no idea intellectually about "otherness" or what it entailed. Rather, I had an American ideal of class-, gender- and racelessness in mind that amounted to something like this: underneath your skin we're all the same--you're exactly like me. Fortunately, I've learned since then that the midwestern American male is anything but the common denominator in global personality.
My tour through "otherness" first happened through food. Not long after we started dating, my mother-in-law made me kwa mi, more famously known as "pad thai," literally stir-fried noodles with chicken pieces and probably some green onion. Of course there was sticky rice and sai gok, dark red-brown Chinese sausage, and that other Chinese staple, egg rolls. But later there was pho, beef noodle soup seasoned to your own personal liking by mixing four flavors: sweet, sour, salty, and--that completely "other" flavor to the upper midwest--spicy. And then there was the unimaginable: tripe and ant eggs and on and on. In short, for me the revolution in "otherness" that was Lao food was not unlike Peter's shock at the vision of the sheet coming down from heaven, introducing him to pork: it blew my little mind.
Over the years, I've become exposed to other things Lao if not immersed in them: music, dance, dance, gaming, family customs, sport. However, a larger reality looms. We are seriously exploring the possibility of a month-long trip to Laos, which leaves me to contemplate just how serious we are and I am about this trip into otherness. Why undertake this voyage that will knock a hole in our savings, going to an unpredictable country with children who will probably not see the point of it? I have visions of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dancing in my heads: children who are hot and miserable and spoiled whining about just wanting to go home to play video games.
But after 20 years of my wife's acquaintance, this possible trip to Laos has led me to another level of "otherness"--that of language. After 20 years of picking up about one word a year (words for food, bathroom, mother, yes, no, thank you, spicy, sweet, sour, bitter, salty, meat, assorted food dishes, go, home, hot, cold, play cards, and, oh yes, I almost forgot, the private parts of both men and women, which have substituted for the English words as we teach our children about the world), I bought a Lao for Beginners book and CD set which I can listen to on the commute.
It becomes even more apparent to me now how arrogant I've been in thinking I can have access to an "other" culture without knowing the language. Without language one can't think inside another culture, only think outside it. This is not to say, of course, that with three beginning Lao CDs--that have taught me such things as that great insider phrase, "Please speak slowly so I can understand you"--that I suddenly have real access to the culture. Rather, with the hours and hours of work that I've spent trying to learn the difference in tones between "ma" (dog), "ma" (horse), and "ma" (come), I've realized how infinitely far I have to go to really gain access.
And yet knowing even little glimpses into how the language is constructed in relation to reality begins to open up that world of "otherness" in little ways. For example, the list of family relationships which seems to not just differentiate older and younger brother and sister by modifiers ("older," "younger") but by a special term says something about the importance of family relationships. As another, the word for river is ma nom, literally (I think) "mother-water," a word that communicates the importance of the Mekong river both mythically and economically to a landlocked country.
In light of this discussion of language and otherness, it becomes striking to me that there is such a lack of emphasis on teaching another language in our schools. It speaks of us being satisfied with the world we know--our world as it's constructed by our language. But how do we know we haven't maligned our world in the way we see it through our language to a degree that makes it unimaginably different than what it is?
Perhaps this attributes more power to language than it should. I don't mean that we necessarily construct a world through language, but it certainly fashions our vision. However, if--especially as Christians--we're serious about knowing our world and knowing ourselves, then we need to know "otherness," and if we need to know "otherness" we can only gain access to that otherness, it seems to me now, through language.
My tour through "otherness" first happened through food. Not long after we started dating, my mother-in-law made me kwa mi, more famously known as "pad thai," literally stir-fried noodles with chicken pieces and probably some green onion. Of course there was sticky rice and sai gok, dark red-brown Chinese sausage, and that other Chinese staple, egg rolls. But later there was pho, beef noodle soup seasoned to your own personal liking by mixing four flavors: sweet, sour, salty, and--that completely "other" flavor to the upper midwest--spicy. And then there was the unimaginable: tripe and ant eggs and on and on. In short, for me the revolution in "otherness" that was Lao food was not unlike Peter's shock at the vision of the sheet coming down from heaven, introducing him to pork: it blew my little mind.
Over the years, I've become exposed to other things Lao if not immersed in them: music, dance, dance, gaming, family customs, sport. However, a larger reality looms. We are seriously exploring the possibility of a month-long trip to Laos, which leaves me to contemplate just how serious we are and I am about this trip into otherness. Why undertake this voyage that will knock a hole in our savings, going to an unpredictable country with children who will probably not see the point of it? I have visions of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake dancing in my heads: children who are hot and miserable and spoiled whining about just wanting to go home to play video games.
But after 20 years of my wife's acquaintance, this possible trip to Laos has led me to another level of "otherness"--that of language. After 20 years of picking up about one word a year (words for food, bathroom, mother, yes, no, thank you, spicy, sweet, sour, bitter, salty, meat, assorted food dishes, go, home, hot, cold, play cards, and, oh yes, I almost forgot, the private parts of both men and women, which have substituted for the English words as we teach our children about the world), I bought a Lao for Beginners book and CD set which I can listen to on the commute.
It becomes even more apparent to me now how arrogant I've been in thinking I can have access to an "other" culture without knowing the language. Without language one can't think inside another culture, only think outside it. This is not to say, of course, that with three beginning Lao CDs--that have taught me such things as that great insider phrase, "Please speak slowly so I can understand you"--that I suddenly have real access to the culture. Rather, with the hours and hours of work that I've spent trying to learn the difference in tones between "ma" (dog), "ma" (horse), and "ma" (come), I've realized how infinitely far I have to go to really gain access.
And yet knowing even little glimpses into how the language is constructed in relation to reality begins to open up that world of "otherness" in little ways. For example, the list of family relationships which seems to not just differentiate older and younger brother and sister by modifiers ("older," "younger") but by a special term says something about the importance of family relationships. As another, the word for river is ma nom, literally (I think) "mother-water," a word that communicates the importance of the Mekong river both mythically and economically to a landlocked country.
In light of this discussion of language and otherness, it becomes striking to me that there is such a lack of emphasis on teaching another language in our schools. It speaks of us being satisfied with the world we know--our world as it's constructed by our language. But how do we know we haven't maligned our world in the way we see it through our language to a degree that makes it unimaginably different than what it is?
Perhaps this attributes more power to language than it should. I don't mean that we necessarily construct a world through language, but it certainly fashions our vision. However, if--especially as Christians--we're serious about knowing our world and knowing ourselves, then we need to know "otherness," and if we need to know "otherness" we can only gain access to that otherness, it seems to me now, through language.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
The Nature of Improvisation: the Improvisation of Our Nature?
As far as I'm concerned, it's the key to education--the difference between dry discipline and soaring creativity, between earthbound drudgery and ethereal effortlessness, the difference between science and art.
I'm talking about improvisation, that skill that's not really a skill but is built on skill. The ability to take the basic skills than many can simply do but combining them in a way that includes your own style, that includes heart, that includes that breath of creativity that brings something to life. Perhaps I'm simply thinking about style--the ability to put your own mark, your own flair upon something.
For me, it was the piano that remained forever lifeless, a monolith that oppressed, that remained flat and two-dimensional no matter how many times I tried to play it--which admittedly wasn't that many times.
My dad tried to get me to catch the vision a couple of different ways. One of them was simply by insisting that I practice. But being forced to sit down to drudgery didn't do it because I didn't have my own spark, didn't have any appreciation for the music that I was supposed to be making, so a second thing he did for me was model what might be.
It's still one of the grandest visions of my life, a moment of sheer transformation: my dad, perhaps 46 sitting down at the piano, built like a stout piano himself, with stubby fingers at least two keys thick from milking cows for at least 44 of those 46 years. Immediately he went from Mack truck of a man to light-hearted dancer, dredging up from somewhere in his memory the opening bars of "The Entertainer," his hands jumping with life over the keys, giving off an energy that moved the room itself, his whole torso swaying as if the piano was an alternator generating physical shocks that were animating his body. I could hear the difference, see the difference. That was music. It had life and style--it had the life of him in it.
But I never made it, never got to any level where I can remember a song I played that I loved, that I returned to just to play and hear it for its own sake.
My daughter takes piano lessons. Within her first year she'd attained the level that I never did in five years of lessons. All it took was for me to compliment her on a song or two--one of them with that lilting eeriness of a snake charmer's song; another with the stalking measure of a cat after its prey; a third with the staccato of a rainstorm. "Ooh, I like that one, Sommer," I'd say with an accompanying description of what it sounded like to me. Almost inevtibably she'd return to it in succeeding days to please me, and then it was an easy switch to return to it simply to please herself.
She'd found the formula of style, of improvisation: a song on the page, plus her own skill, imagination, and life giving the song a life of its own, a new creation put into the atmosphere.
But how many different areas can style and improvisation be applied to? Professor Bill Elgersma is teaching an education class, something like Strategies for Secondary Education: he can teach his students the tricks of lesson plans and they can plug something in, but if they can't make the students care, can't hit that level where gimmicks and passion get a lesson plan off the ground and airborne where someone might get caught up in it, where the time passing in classroom might cease to matter, the lesson will remain exaclty that: gimmickry. So certainly it works in education. Might it also apply in nursing? In physical therapy? In accounting?
I'm certainly not expert enough in these other areas to know where improvisation and style might matter, but certainly in human existence on earth, these elements remain the breath of life, the heart of the creation itself, put there by a Creator who after setting his masterpiece in space pronounced it "very good."
I'm talking about improvisation, that skill that's not really a skill but is built on skill. The ability to take the basic skills than many can simply do but combining them in a way that includes your own style, that includes heart, that includes that breath of creativity that brings something to life. Perhaps I'm simply thinking about style--the ability to put your own mark, your own flair upon something.
For me, it was the piano that remained forever lifeless, a monolith that oppressed, that remained flat and two-dimensional no matter how many times I tried to play it--which admittedly wasn't that many times.
My dad tried to get me to catch the vision a couple of different ways. One of them was simply by insisting that I practice. But being forced to sit down to drudgery didn't do it because I didn't have my own spark, didn't have any appreciation for the music that I was supposed to be making, so a second thing he did for me was model what might be.
It's still one of the grandest visions of my life, a moment of sheer transformation: my dad, perhaps 46 sitting down at the piano, built like a stout piano himself, with stubby fingers at least two keys thick from milking cows for at least 44 of those 46 years. Immediately he went from Mack truck of a man to light-hearted dancer, dredging up from somewhere in his memory the opening bars of "The Entertainer," his hands jumping with life over the keys, giving off an energy that moved the room itself, his whole torso swaying as if the piano was an alternator generating physical shocks that were animating his body. I could hear the difference, see the difference. That was music. It had life and style--it had the life of him in it.
But I never made it, never got to any level where I can remember a song I played that I loved, that I returned to just to play and hear it for its own sake.
My daughter takes piano lessons. Within her first year she'd attained the level that I never did in five years of lessons. All it took was for me to compliment her on a song or two--one of them with that lilting eeriness of a snake charmer's song; another with the stalking measure of a cat after its prey; a third with the staccato of a rainstorm. "Ooh, I like that one, Sommer," I'd say with an accompanying description of what it sounded like to me. Almost inevtibably she'd return to it in succeeding days to please me, and then it was an easy switch to return to it simply to please herself.
She'd found the formula of style, of improvisation: a song on the page, plus her own skill, imagination, and life giving the song a life of its own, a new creation put into the atmosphere.
But how many different areas can style and improvisation be applied to? Professor Bill Elgersma is teaching an education class, something like Strategies for Secondary Education: he can teach his students the tricks of lesson plans and they can plug something in, but if they can't make the students care, can't hit that level where gimmicks and passion get a lesson plan off the ground and airborne where someone might get caught up in it, where the time passing in classroom might cease to matter, the lesson will remain exaclty that: gimmickry. So certainly it works in education. Might it also apply in nursing? In physical therapy? In accounting?
I'm certainly not expert enough in these other areas to know where improvisation and style might matter, but certainly in human existence on earth, these elements remain the breath of life, the heart of the creation itself, put there by a Creator who after setting his masterpiece in space pronounced it "very good."
Saturday, March 10, 2012
A Mythic Reality
I've known for some time that my paradigm needs shifting. Somehow my operating system got too existentialist-deist: the mountain of the urgency of the moment has combined with God as the audience of one that we perform for to sufficiently impact how I see activity on the world stage. Meanwhile, Don Delillo, in Point Omega, suggests that our attempts at self-consciousness regarding our worldviews may be all for naught, that we're tiring collectively of the analysis--especially self-analysis--that the western worldview has awakened us to. For my part, at least half the time, I agree.
Two things made me consider again how it is I look at the world. The first was an accident, a head on collision between two men from town just outside another town. The odds that these two men would hit each other traveling too and from a community 20-plus miles distant is not huge, but okay.
However, it was more the manner of the accident--and the response of the lone survivor--that again shocked my worldview.
The accident, as I said, was head on. One of the drivers, the survivor, drifted for an unknown reason into the other driver's lane. Perhaps he fell asleep, since he doesn't remember a thing about it. In any case, the other car must have popped over a hill and that was it. No breaks, no swerving, just the impact of 55 mile-per hour metal projectiles impacting each other; one man dead, the other with a smashed face and arm who was back in church three weeks later.
What does one do philosophically about car accidents like this? Or, worse still, about the young father who was killed by a Sturgis motorcyclist who, leaving the interstate at a random exit ramp, ran a stopsign and hurtled into the family's minivan? Word has it that the survivor of the former accident chalks it up to God's will--that it was the other driver's time to go and so God used the survivor as the angel of death with the only expense to himself of about 12 broken bones.
I find this problematic for a number of reason. First, accidents like this are the necessary outcome of 55-mile per hour projectiles driven by finite, contingent creatures on two lane roads. The same, I suppose, can be said of any mode of transportation. Even regressing to horses, a certain amount of injuries and deaths can be expected in the equation. This means that the cause of these accidents is a bit deeper, built into the fabric of the world itself. Death will happen as these forces intersect each other; however, in our culture we're willing to live with the possibility of death at every meeting of vehicles.
This realization reminds of part of the philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien, who built into his larger vision of Middle-Earth the idea that death was a gift to the world of men. Rather than to live on and on in "endless serial living" as the elves did, humans got to escape that circle to the "straight road" of something beyond. It's a helpful vision for me, one that suggests a possibility for death tied to the garden of Eden, where God ensured that humans wouldn't eat of the tree of life and live forever in a miserable world. Death is an out into something beyond.
Still, this doesn't account for the pain of death too soon. One of my professors along the way recounted the story of a wise Chinese sage, who, when asked for a profound teaching by one of his disciples, said, "Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies." That is, when the progression of life and death goes as it should, it's a beautiful thing--perhaps as good as can be hoped for on this side of the veil.
What do we do with do with the trauma of Job, though, with the disruption of that line of orderly succession by horrific tragedy? It's hard for me to say that the Angel of Death was there at the accident, soothing the survivor to sleep and coaxing him into the lane of oncoming traffic, or propelling the motorcyclist full bore through the stop sign.
But perhaps my faith is simply weak. I heard the survivor's philosophy second hand in a conversation at church. Another man in that conversation, whose younger brother died at a crash at an intersection, talked about the odds of that accident ever occurring, how just a second or two difference would have meant the collision never would've happened. It smacks of destiny, and therefore, to Christians, of pre-destiny.
It's only recently that I've come to appreciate the Calvinist bent toward God's sovereignty. At the end of the day, to confess--despite the horrors of the world--that God is in control is an amazing statement of faith, and it's no doubt all one may have left. However, it seems to me that many in the Calvinist tradition are so bent toward God's sovereignty that they ignore the malignant forces that, by nature of the freedom built into the universe we live in, play an authentic and not simply benign role in the world.
This is the second reason I find the survivor's explanation of the event problematic: it fails to consider that there may be forces that are simply trying to destroy something, to ruin his life and the lives of others. To acknowledge God's sovereignty may be to circumvent the lack of faith that evil forces may be trying to engender--or it may simply tell the wrong story altogether, attributing good and evil to a God who is only the source of good.
As I said, this was one of the recent events to challenge my vision of reality. God was there at that crossroads, at the spot where car meets car. But so, I would say, was another force. And this, then, adds up to my revision of reality: the world we live in is much more mythical than we tend to think, much more the place of conflict between supernatural beings that result in conflicts that can only be told in mythic stories--stories like that of Job where ideas, forces, and beings seen and unseen come into conflict in a way that only stories can capture.
My gut tells me that Don Delillo is also right: self-consciousness about our worldview is no longer enough. It doesn't work for those people who are not by nature self-conscious or analytical, who don't want to reflect on how they reflect. Rather, we must return to stories that move people, that allow them to understand how they are actors in a world where forces bigger than themselves are at work.
And so this entry is call for storytellers and mythmakers. There are a thousand ways that the Story can get taken captive: by the mountain of the present and scientific reality and dualism and Manicheanism and reductionism and even by a God who's controlling in a way that he may not be. But to understand the Story of scripture as an over-arching story that continues into our world is a place to start. And to tell that story in a way that makes sense of our actions--both the daily repetitions and life-changing traumatic events--is a way to makes sense of life in a world that continues to be a mysterious intersection of good and evil, of the physical and the spiritual, of the human and divine.
Two things made me consider again how it is I look at the world. The first was an accident, a head on collision between two men from town just outside another town. The odds that these two men would hit each other traveling too and from a community 20-plus miles distant is not huge, but okay.
However, it was more the manner of the accident--and the response of the lone survivor--that again shocked my worldview.
The accident, as I said, was head on. One of the drivers, the survivor, drifted for an unknown reason into the other driver's lane. Perhaps he fell asleep, since he doesn't remember a thing about it. In any case, the other car must have popped over a hill and that was it. No breaks, no swerving, just the impact of 55 mile-per hour metal projectiles impacting each other; one man dead, the other with a smashed face and arm who was back in church three weeks later.
What does one do philosophically about car accidents like this? Or, worse still, about the young father who was killed by a Sturgis motorcyclist who, leaving the interstate at a random exit ramp, ran a stopsign and hurtled into the family's minivan? Word has it that the survivor of the former accident chalks it up to God's will--that it was the other driver's time to go and so God used the survivor as the angel of death with the only expense to himself of about 12 broken bones.
I find this problematic for a number of reason. First, accidents like this are the necessary outcome of 55-mile per hour projectiles driven by finite, contingent creatures on two lane roads. The same, I suppose, can be said of any mode of transportation. Even regressing to horses, a certain amount of injuries and deaths can be expected in the equation. This means that the cause of these accidents is a bit deeper, built into the fabric of the world itself. Death will happen as these forces intersect each other; however, in our culture we're willing to live with the possibility of death at every meeting of vehicles.
This realization reminds of part of the philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien, who built into his larger vision of Middle-Earth the idea that death was a gift to the world of men. Rather than to live on and on in "endless serial living" as the elves did, humans got to escape that circle to the "straight road" of something beyond. It's a helpful vision for me, one that suggests a possibility for death tied to the garden of Eden, where God ensured that humans wouldn't eat of the tree of life and live forever in a miserable world. Death is an out into something beyond.
Still, this doesn't account for the pain of death too soon. One of my professors along the way recounted the story of a wise Chinese sage, who, when asked for a profound teaching by one of his disciples, said, "Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies." That is, when the progression of life and death goes as it should, it's a beautiful thing--perhaps as good as can be hoped for on this side of the veil.
What do we do with do with the trauma of Job, though, with the disruption of that line of orderly succession by horrific tragedy? It's hard for me to say that the Angel of Death was there at the accident, soothing the survivor to sleep and coaxing him into the lane of oncoming traffic, or propelling the motorcyclist full bore through the stop sign.
But perhaps my faith is simply weak. I heard the survivor's philosophy second hand in a conversation at church. Another man in that conversation, whose younger brother died at a crash at an intersection, talked about the odds of that accident ever occurring, how just a second or two difference would have meant the collision never would've happened. It smacks of destiny, and therefore, to Christians, of pre-destiny.
It's only recently that I've come to appreciate the Calvinist bent toward God's sovereignty. At the end of the day, to confess--despite the horrors of the world--that God is in control is an amazing statement of faith, and it's no doubt all one may have left. However, it seems to me that many in the Calvinist tradition are so bent toward God's sovereignty that they ignore the malignant forces that, by nature of the freedom built into the universe we live in, play an authentic and not simply benign role in the world.
This is the second reason I find the survivor's explanation of the event problematic: it fails to consider that there may be forces that are simply trying to destroy something, to ruin his life and the lives of others. To acknowledge God's sovereignty may be to circumvent the lack of faith that evil forces may be trying to engender--or it may simply tell the wrong story altogether, attributing good and evil to a God who is only the source of good.
As I said, this was one of the recent events to challenge my vision of reality. God was there at that crossroads, at the spot where car meets car. But so, I would say, was another force. And this, then, adds up to my revision of reality: the world we live in is much more mythical than we tend to think, much more the place of conflict between supernatural beings that result in conflicts that can only be told in mythic stories--stories like that of Job where ideas, forces, and beings seen and unseen come into conflict in a way that only stories can capture.
My gut tells me that Don Delillo is also right: self-consciousness about our worldview is no longer enough. It doesn't work for those people who are not by nature self-conscious or analytical, who don't want to reflect on how they reflect. Rather, we must return to stories that move people, that allow them to understand how they are actors in a world where forces bigger than themselves are at work.
And so this entry is call for storytellers and mythmakers. There are a thousand ways that the Story can get taken captive: by the mountain of the present and scientific reality and dualism and Manicheanism and reductionism and even by a God who's controlling in a way that he may not be. But to understand the Story of scripture as an over-arching story that continues into our world is a place to start. And to tell that story in a way that makes sense of our actions--both the daily repetitions and life-changing traumatic events--is a way to makes sense of life in a world that continues to be a mysterious intersection of good and evil, of the physical and the spiritual, of the human and divine.
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