Archive for the Life Category
Roald Dahl’s father and younger sister died when he was young. The schoolmasters in the UK under which he received his tutelage were not immune from corporal punishment with the use of a cane. Perhaps this is where we learn of Dahl’s unique association of parents and their world with something distasteful, cruel and evil juxtaposed with the child’s world of innocence, imagination, and escapism. He began writing following his decorated service as a Royal Air-Force pilot in WWII.
Dahl gives paints images in words of two worlds that give us a sense that as we get older we get corrupted by modern life and lose that childhood innocence and playfulness that is the source of human hope. Dahl gives us characterizations of the seven deadly sins and eight deadly thoughts in the Christian tradition frequently as we can see in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It is clear that selfishness and cruelty among children finds its source in the parents that raise them to be successful and popular adults. Here, we learn that this is not what being a kid is all about. His book The BFG gives a different spin on this role confusion by pitting a friendly giant who befriends a child against the wicked and cruel giants with whom he is affiliated.
What we learn is that childhood is not something limited to children and that the cruel and evil behaviors of adults can be transferred to their children who are not aware of the difference. the message is not so much “Don’t be like them” as much as “See how they are? Do be like that.” But rather than belabor us with such transparent lessons, Dahl makes the distinction between good and evil behavior clear.
He does this with a characteristic darkness and an almost gleeful exploration of cruelty that is loaded with off-beat dark humor and irony. Take the grandparents in George’s Marvelous Medicine. After reading what punishment she would give George in the form of what he would eat, I could never look at earwigs the same way, and still do not. I am always taken back to the indelible impression and fantastic wit that Dahl left on me with such visceral and salient pictures of a reality that was distant, but somehow close to home.
I read these books too many time to enumerate as a child. I will have each of them on tap for my kids as well. They have a different kind of imaginative framework that took me perhaps from the often cruel surrounds of my own childhood, to a place with George, or James, or Charlie that reminded me that with my own imagination, I could make the world what I wanted it to be in spite of reality. More than C.S. Lewis, Dahl taught me what good and bad behavior was all about and how if we are not careful, our very human nature as children with hope and promise in the world can be crushed by the whims and jaded values of modernity.
Am I right. Or left?
This post is part of a blogging summit called by John Hobbins @ Ancient Hebrew Poetry.
Roger Mugs came up with this little nugget*. It is like an opportunity to give, as the say in the black church, testimony (emphatically as appropriate unlike us white folk). Nick Ditty @ Rightly Dividing tagged me to participate. And so here I go!
The rule:
In an effort to keep it simple, short, and easy to follow, I’d like to challenge you to quote one verse (not one chapter). And then say what the Lord has been teaching you in one sentence (not one paragraph). Then tag 5 peeps (you know the drill).
The Verse
Mark 12:29-31: Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’
The Lesson
God has continually been teaching me that Christians are often the worst exemplars of this commandment.
The Tag
I think I am going to tag a few of my Presbyterian brothers and sisters as I think this thought-experiment offers a nice resource to ground people in what is important in the midst of the General Assembly meeting in San Jose, CA (live-blogged here). Adam is also live-blogging it at Pomomusings also linked below.
* I can’t stand using the word “meme” since it gives the concept too much press. I prefer the term “autobiographical widget™” which I coined here.
The person who put this together not only got the best part of this disturbingly visceral post-apocalyptic film right, but got the heart and soul of Mogwai right as well.
A friend of mine once said that if he was in a plane that was going down, this song would be his soundtrack. If you dig bands like This Will Destroy You, Explosions in the Sky, Isis, Mono, etc. you need to listen to Mogwai who is the real original band in this newish “post-rock” genre.
When my wife and I started dating, we heard many metaphors and illustrations about relationships. One was of “iron sharpening iron”. Relationships are often painful and you will have problems and numerous issues in your relationship to sort out and “work through”. The reward is a stronger relationship with your partner. In fact, without such work, we were told, the relationship will only be weaker in times of trial and crisis.
Since 1995, when we began dating, we never believed this and thought it was, frankly, a load of crap when people told us that we had to make our relationship work and that our relationship should be work. It was as though not feeling the burden of work, feeling the need to make our relationship work, or that it was work or some effort that we had to expend beyond the day-to-day was a sign of weakness. Strange we thought, that what we understood to be a rare strength in our relationship - never feeling that it was work or that we had “things” to work out - was often perceived as a weakness or a sign of being unhealthy or dishonest with each other.
As a result many thought that “we would not last”. I was going to be a good cookie-cutter evangelical pastor and my wife had recently joined a sorority. The pure and the impure cannot stand together is what some thought. The effortlessness that we felt in our relationship when we were together, unbound by the expectations of others was a sign that something had to be wrong with us and that we would not last. In fact, the only friction we have ever experienced is the undue pressure that people placed on us because we were not matching the picture of a successful relationship that so many of our friends and family assumed was a sign of goodness or God’s blessing. Our relationship was not work even if getting people to understand our relationship was.
Today we mark 10 years since we conveyed our wedding vows to each other. It was a day when I sat with my best man and the minister in the “upper room” and heard them discuss how difficult this was since both had been through messy divorces, my best man after he had agreed to be my best man. I have not spoken to either of them very much since that day. Unconsciously perhaps. But then and there became a lasting wax seal on just how awful it was for the miserable to be around a relationship that somehow would work, without any real “work” in the sense of relationships that had been marketed to us, and had been assumed was a sign of truth.
- When we were dating we told people that it was not work for us.
- They told us, “Wait until you get engaged.”
- When we were engaged we told people it was still not work for us.
- They told us, “Wait until you get married.”
- When we were married a year we told people it was even less work than before because we were somehow validated and free to build our lives together.
- They told us, “Wait until you have been married for three years and the honeymoon is over.”
- We had our actual honeymoon at the beginning of our second year. We got tattoos at the beginning of our fifth year symbolizing how wrong everyone had been and what we understood our identities to be at the time. We watch many of our nay-saying friends and acquaintances go through divorces. They were the ones living the Cinderella fantasy - work hard on your relationship and that pumpkin will turn into a chariot. And sadly their work failed. Yet we continued not to work and only grew closer. We would rather carry that damn pumpkin to the top of a five story building and watch it smash to bits than wait for it to turn into a chariot.
- Then they told us, “Wait until you have kids.”
- We now have two. Raising kids is hard work. But our relationship is still not hard work. It is not work at all.
We essentially raised my wife’s youngest brother through the better part of his teenage years, have had to deal with 9/11 and our respective anxiety issues, three master’s degrees, multiple moves, two house purchases, diseases, surgeries, and family issues galore (mine mostly). Yet through all of it, and we think we have had it pretty easy, we have never “worked” on our relationship.
So I am waiting for the next stage where our relationship will be hard work and “reality” finally kicks into gear and we can have a real relationship like everyone else who works hard at it.
Nahhh. I’d rather stay in this state of blissful ignorance of what the world expects of us for at least another decade or two…
Untitled (Ode to Meat)
I love meat,
I love meat,
I hope my meat will flap.
I love meat,
I love meat,
I hope my meat will sleep all night long.
I love meat,
I love meat,
I hope my meat will do new stuff.
I love meat,
I love meat,
I hope my meat will use the sweeper.
I love meat,
I love meat,
I hope my meat will crawl like a spider.
<snap>
<snap>
How ironic would it be if he became a vegetarian… Or a vegan.
I have begun to participate as a “select blogger” for The Ooze which has started sending me books, often review copies before the books hit the stores. So I will be periodically writing reviews of these books. Thanks to the good folks at The Ooze!
My Beautiful Idol is an autobiographical tale in which Pete Gall takes us through his rather flawed, or at least self-delusional journey from advertizing whiz, to “poor fat white guy” in the inner city, to the unresolved questions of the misdirected journey of a failed “hero for Christ”. The metaphor for Pete is a collector crab. This is a shellfish that, like other crabs, lives off of the dregs and excrement of the glorious creatures’ that grace the currents above. But it also has one talent: “The collector crab, or decorator crab, as it’s also called, attaches to his shell bits of what it finds on the sea floor…(T)he idea is to protect itself by becoming invisible to its natural enemy, the squid” (p. 18).
Pete starts off in a cab in Chicago talking about his profession with the cabbie, revealing that the entire job of advertising is to sell people back their beliefs and translate those beliefs into needs that people can no longer do without. It is the grand feedback loop of plucking people of their whims and even latent desires and packaging them into something that dazzles and amuses long enough to make desire conform to the shape of an object that will earn a company profit.
Pete wants more than this in his life. He wants a deeper connection with people and with God that goes beyond the normative structures of the church or the casual relationships he encounters along the way. So he leaves everything behind to pursue this depth. Whether it is working with people down on their luck at an organization called Turnaround, the mentally challenged, or with convicts at a housewares startup business, we learn that Pete himself is the embodiment of all those with whom he finds himself in the role of the minister. You see, Pete does not just grab those things of his environment to conceal or protect him, he holds onto an idealistic image of God and what his relationship with God should be rather than what it actually is.
What we learn with Pete is that all of those tactics he would use to convince people that they need something that they really do not have imploded on his very sense of self in a feedback loop that does everything but rest in God even though he tries so hard to find that rest. But the rest he seeks is on his own terms and rooted in the stuff of not only his environments, but in his very image of who God is, and the person he believes he should be before God. Clinging so desperately to the idol of this version of Pete and this version of God, leads Pete into despair - over and over again.
So what’s Pete’s problem? I share his wife’s sentiment who “said, ‘You know, you were kind of a butt’” (p. 9). Pete frustrates me because he is so irreducibly wrapped in his own self-created and self-delusional tension of masochistic victimization and the audacity of self-importance. I want to slap Pete around a bit, tell him to get over himself, and stop creating the idol that is this ideation of Pete Gall. He has constructed this image of himself and has convinced himself that this is who he ought to be. As he tells us, the reason why he left Five Points Christian Church was, “because it was too hard being there, too unimportant, too low-profile, and playing the role of outsider was wearing thin. It made me a poor fit for the simple work the church needed me to do” (p. 172). And that’s the rub.
The tale somewhat concludes with an interesting dialogue that can perhaps be better summed up with a line from Kierkegaard at the opening of The Sickness Unto Death which in large part gives us a framework for why Pete is often so miserable in this fraction of his life:
The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.
Pete can’t find St. Augustine’s “rest in God” because the only source he truly has to rest in is this image - this idol - of himself. This is like “Diary of a Seducer”, only Pete seduces himself. He is not Hamlet pondering his existential crisis in the eclipse of his father’s legacy. He is not the prodigal son who wishes his father dead in order to carouse only to come back. True his father offers a moment similar to the father in this parable in Luke. But Pete is really none of these. His character is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman who said, “The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.” Pete and Willy suffer from the same problem - they want to be well-liked and they want the world to find favor with them. For Pete, God is one more part of that world. For Willy Loman there was no resurrection and no great legacy. But it seems that from Pete’s point of view now, that killing off this idol of himself is the only way that he can truly rest in the grace of God.
These stories are not ones that I tend to read looking to find someone like me in them. But stories of failures and loves lost remind us at how fragile we are and how culpable before God we are of committing the same transgressions that killed Christ. And this is something we do over and over again. What Pete shows us is how we take this one step further by deluding ourselves into believing that we do not behave or believe this way. And sometimes we can only see that we all do these things by resonating with the travail of someone else. Then we have a choice to be hypocrites, or penitents. Our tendency is to be the former. The purpose of our created existence is to be the latter. And that is why you should read Pete’s book.
No doubt more than just a bad morning, but a life-changing incident. Here is the scene from my driveway looking west this morning.
It has been a long time since my last Lyme Log post and a lot of that has been because there have been no spikes of much of anything other than a consistent yuck.
Since January, I have had a sore, tenderness that feels like a mild case of strep throat right around my lymph node in my neck on the left side. It never goes away. I have finished another round of doxycycline and am still taking levaquin. If strep was in my system it would have been rooted out a long time ago.
My rib area right around my spleen still aches once in a while which is no fun either.
With a compromised immune system, I am wondering if these two things are related to it. They are somewhat new symptoms, especially the throat, but the spleen and lymph nodes are crucial for immunity.
Here is another new one: when I wake up or get on my feet after being off of them for a while, they hurt. It’s like a cramp after you hit the gym hard after having been out for a long time. You know how you feel when you wake up - your muscles tightened up like a drum. Well, that’s my feet every morning or every time I walks away from my desk.
The fact that I pulled my back out a couple of weeks ago does not help much at all, but that’s probably unrelated.
I mowed half the lawn today; my wife did not want me to mow any of it. I took a two hour nap and I am dizzy and tired anyway. Before the tick bite, I would spend a Saturday mowing the lawn, then digging out trees, maybe vacuuming or doing a few loads of laundry as well and feel tired, but that “good tired” after you just accomplished something. Now I am just tired, pretty much always and usually after 2 pm which I call my “wall”.
I had about 15 vials of blood taken about two weeks ago for my doctor visit on May 5. Then we can see where I am. But this truly is a funky, hermetic, slippery, sneaky little disease that is a little bit different than the flu or something where you pop a few anti-biotics and are fine in two weeks. Comparing the two is like comparing the armies of Grenada and the U.S.
People always ask me if I am feeling better. It’s hard to tell them that some days I feel almost OK and others I feel like sleeping for a week.
