I Don't Know Why...

I don't know how or why, but when I was finishing up with kindergarten I somehow had the idea that I was done with school forever.  I'd been great at spelling, pretty good at math and who really cared if I couldn't color inside the lines?  (No seriously, I really couldn't.)  It might been have the emphasis on getting out of school by classmates and teachers, my own wishful thinking, the lack of older brothers and sisters but regardless the reason, when the final bell sounded I thought I was done forever.

We wore caps and gowns to our graduation.  As a parent and grandparent I can say that I'm sure it was nauseatingly cute.  However, it was sometime later that day when the celebration was still going on when I got the awful news.  "You mean I have to do this again?? ...You're kidding, right?" 

It turned out nobody was kidding.  I pinned my mom down for a complete and accurate explanation.  I was good enough at math that when she explained the details to me (I really wanted to make sure we got it right this time), I knew the correct answer.  I think she said, "You will have to be in school infinity plus forever," at least that's what it sounded like.  That made the summer suddenly seem very very important. 

I suppose I didn't get it from the beginning because I started with an assumption that seemed to make sense and never bothered to question it.

It's easy when we look back on a trial, accomplishment or passage to see the context in came from and what it led to.  Often though, in the time before resolution or accomplishment, we imagine a finish line we're going to lean through, break the ribbon and be done.  Maybe there will be awards or something but certainly no one is going to tell us we have to do that again. 

There's one finish line of course that is similar to the others but has an important distinctive or two that separate it from the rest.  And that would be the finish line at the end of our lives.  Now admittedly, that one's a little different.  Clearly it was designed to be opaque; run through the ribbon and you're gone. 

Still though, despite or maybe because of the opacity we have thoughts, dreams and even faith and hope as to what's on the other side of that finish line.  I think this is true even for those that claim unbelief in an afterlife of any kind.  They need to assert that nothing really exists.  To those people, nothingness is good.  It is a relief.  It could be a bit of a surprise though.  Even if you're a rabid materialist, I don't see anywhere in the universe where something ever becomes truly nothing.

My wife and I have known another younger couple at a distance for a number of years.  They are just a little older than our own children.  They have two small children of their own.  Last week, the mom in this family found out she has an advanced and aggressive form of cancer. 

I have been given more than my fair share of grace as regards understanding the finishing line we all must cross.  I'll write about that some time but not tonight.  Tonight I will only mention the line itself and the inevitability of crossing it.  And though I think I see the reasons of our "school year" here, I can't tell you why there's a mom who's afraid for her life right now and likely more afraid for the hearts of her family. 

It's not really coming across in this writing but I'm more broken by this single event than anything I can remember.  I can't really say why.  I don't know.  But I do know this, knowing the reasons things are as they are is important but never, ever sufficient.  Knowing the rules, the doctrine and forms are fine until the wave washes over you; in that moment you will lose your footing and have to swim for your life.  As our former military son has said, "All plans are perfect until the first contact with the enemy."

This must be lived out, by all of us, certainly by Amy and Josh and their boys and by those who know them and even at some level, those who do not.  I do not know the path this will take.  However, I do know this, while some sort of finish line of either one type or another must be crossed, both life and love go on to infinity plus forever. 

We must negotiate the intervening space to the finish as best we can.  We must accept help from those who offer it and give help when and where we can.  We must also look to the one who made the race and the contestants.  He is our best teacher and our only hope and none of us are as yet across the line.
 

Tombstones and Tattoos

A few years ago I'd toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo.  I was looking for something that would be meaningful.  I wanted to go with meaningful because it seemed that something as permanent as death and taxes should have some sort of depth beyond a heart with "Baby Doll" scrawled across the top of it.  I finally hit on the Latin phrase "Esse quam Videri" on a sash across a Celtic cross.  The translation is usually given as "To be rather than to appear."  (I favor my personal translation, "essence trumps appearance" but I suppose 10,000 translators can only be partly wrong.)

As I was working through the decision process of what tattoo I'd get, it occurred to me at some point that I should have a value of some kind informing my decision.  I decided that the value would be that anything that I would be willing to make a permanent part of my body should be something that I'd be happy to have on my tombstone.

A few years ago, I went back to Kansas on a journey to become acquainted with my father's family.  In the tiny town of Morrill, my last surviving uncle introduced me to a great many McKims.  Sadly, most of these were dead by the time I got around to making their acquaintance.  My great grandfather had had 14 children and my grandfather had had 9.  They both lived in the same town.  McKim's own a lot of real estate in Kansas.  Most of it is owned six feet at a time.

The poet Kenneth Rexroth has this epitaph on his tombstone:  "As the full moon rises / The swan sings in sleep / On the lake of the mind." What's interesting here is that a statement marking the finality of death could be so open ended.  There's probably enough images there to turn the whole thing into a drawing...and then a tattoo. 

A good epitaph makes you curious about the life that produced it and makes you just a bit sorry you can't ask that person what those few words mean.  I had the chance to meet Rexroth a couple years before he died.  I turned it down because I'm not good at being a fan.  I am one but I'm no good at it. 

I never got a tattoo.  I never came up with an objection to getting one.  At some point I just stopped considering it at all.

Thinking about the similarities between tombstones and tattoos, I realized at some point that there are differences as well.  The big one is that life goes on after a tattoo.  Why permanently mark something that's designed to change?

Our lives are meant for something.  In almost no matter what state we find ourselves, a huge component of any human state isn't state at all.  It's change.  Imagining that things will stay the same or even go on in the same way they always have is as inaccurate as it is inappropriate.

I don't know what if anything will eventually mark my final resting place...which is an odd choice of words because I don't think it's really final and I don't believe I'll be resting, at least in the sense of being inactive. No, life goes on and passes anything that could ever be written on a tombstone.

In the end, I think there isn't an end at all, either to our current state or to our presumed final one.  In the end, tombstones and tattoos are memorials to an illusionary permanence that never existed in any form. At core, they are at one level anyway, monuments to a faulty perspective on the nature of life.  In the end, there is no end.

I still might get a tombstone.  I think I'd say something like, "This is my Hallmark card to you.  I've gone on and you will too."  Nah, don't worry.  I won't really do that.  My tombstone might just wind up having exactly the same kind of permanence as my tattoo...You never know though, in the end I might go for something like "Love you.  See you soon."  Why not?  I always have.

The British are Coming, the British are Coming

My approach to current events and things political is about the same as everyone else's, with perhaps a few extra syllables thrown in here and there.  I intentionally avoid political wandering, mainly because there's already plenty of language and gas thrown in that direction.  Too many voices on a hill all too quickly become a discordant and even cacophonous choir.

Even so, the recent rioting in Great Britain has surprised and startled me.  As a result, I've found myself casting about for reasonable explanations.

Our family has been to England only once, in 1999.  We spent about two and a half weeks there, with about five days in England and London with the rest being spent in Scotland.  In London, we rode the underground multiple times a day, both during the commute as well as off hours.  In addition, we rode buses and walked for miles.  I do not claim to be an authority on all things British.  However, in all our time there I saw nothing that would have tipped me to the idea that the events of the recent weeks were even a remote possibility.

It's possible that things have changed drastically there since our visit but it's more likely I think that things were already changing then.  The change was just not yet particularly obvious.  Even so, given a dozen years of  "progress" I doubt that walking around downtown London would be much different now than it was then.  After all, the British invented the concept of keeping up appearances.

I've read a number of articles by various commentators regarding the riots.  Most of them were not particularly satisfying.  Especially annoying were the sermons that this was somehow a political consequence of the British class system and related inequities in the economy.  Of course, that would be the same class system that at one point ruled a good part of the world, fought and was victorious in two world wars, opposed the spread of Marxist tyranny and eventually released nearly all of their colonial conquests...and that's just the last couple of hundred years.  Since the class system was in place for all of that time and one can assume that there have been poor people in Britain for all of that time plus forever, I think that's a bunch of, I'll use a good British word here, poppycock. 

Similarly, the related idea being floated that the underlying cause of the riots is that "there's no hope" is so intellectually and socially vacuous as to be insulting.  I've lived half a century now and it's all too easy to see someone trying to turn a circumstance into a lever used to advance them toward the object or policy of their desire. 

I've seen a couple people hint at what I've come to suspect myself is the underlying cause. I think the answer to the question of what's happened in Britain is this:  A large percentage of British parents have gone missing in action.  The easiest evidence of this is to be found in the surveillance videos available on the web.  Whatever the situation was the day these riots began, they've been carried forward by British youth, apparently regardless of gender.  I've found a good many other evidences of this phenomenon as well but this is the easiest to site briefly. 

Through a truly terrible combination of narcissism and social policy, it seems that Britain has managed to undermine a substantial portion of their society and family structure.  It's not looking good for the coming generation of their decision makers.

Things are still a bit different here.  Despite T.V. and the predominantly progressive coasts, there's a large number of Americans who still believe that it's inappropriate to hate ourselves for being Americans, that believe we sometimes have to make our kids do hard things they don't like, and that would rather work to get ahead rather than not work and live off of others.  

I hope we have more than a dozen years but its hard to say.  As Britain is demonstrating, a landslide begins with a few dislodged pebbles.

The Worst Word in the History of the World

I feel sorry for John Calvin.  He wrote a bunch of pretty good stuff that people still read regularly.  Interestingly, the more people read it, the less they seem to understand it or at least to get the point of what he was saying.

This post isn't about Calvin, although it could be.

In fact, most of the stuff Calvin wrote about gets morphed into a thing called doctrine.  Doctrine is a set of instructions that you can memorize and you don't have to really think about much.  You just have to be able to read them and do what they say, like a recipe.  Sometimes, the recipe says you should feel something and then doctrine tells you how to go about feeling it.  If you're married, that's probably how you met your spouse, right...by following the recipe?  Well, maybe not.

This post isn't about doctrine, although it could be.

A guy named Arminius said that Calvin was almost right but that there was a bit more to his recipe, a couple things Calvin left out.  He tried to add a little bit about how people and God actually related to each other.  His temerity in messing with Calvin's recipe damn near got him killed.  This is interesting because when he was in court arguing for his life, he said at least three times that he liked, yea verily, LOVED everything Calvin said.  He just thought there was a bit more.  Eventually the court decided that he really hadn't said anything that wrong.  It's interesting though that they felt the need to put him on trial.

This post isn't about Arminius, although it could be.

I think in heaven, John and Jacobus (Arminius) sit together on a bench and offer apologies to everyone who wanders over their way.  I don't think they need to be sorry really, but when something you've written gets so completely warped by so many other people, I think you're likely to wish you'd chosen a few different words here and there or maybe even kept silent entirely.  

I wish this post was about silence, but it's not.

The above diatribe is actually about the causes and effects of a particular word.  This post is about a word that is sometimes spoken, sometimes necessarily implied but always present when people disagree.  That word might be the most horrible word ever spoken by man.  I've used it in both spoken and unspoken forms way too many times in my life.  This is the word:  Therefore.

"Therefore" is a word that delivers finality and ending.  For example, "We've done everything we can possibly do.  Therefore, it's time to give up." More positively, "Well it looks like he's getting better.  Therefore, we don't have to do anything." Virtually all social and intellectual context can apply this word.

This word is a two syllable invitation to an ending. I do think this word has some of the same problems associated with that Calvin and Arminius encountered.  Namely, the word itself is fine, it just gets folded, spindled and even mutilated into things it was never intended to be.

"Therefore" is a wonderful word in engineering and fair to midlin' in science.  In engineering, you can say things like, "I started the engine.  Therefore it ran."  In this case, there's an implicit but absolutely necessary link between an action and a result.  For example, it wouldn't make sense to say, "I started the engine.  Therefore it started laying eggs."  Note that the only reason this doesn't make sense is because we all understand that laying eggs is not something an engine does.

In science "therefore" can still be OK, as in a test of gravity:  "I dropped the pencil.  Therefore it fell."  That's pretty good...unless you're orbiting in space and then it's just flat wrong.  And that example points to the very definite and completely ignored boundary of "therefore."  This is the boundary:  "Therefore" can only live out it's intended purpose in a clearly and completely defined context.  That is, "therefore" can only add its intended value if it's applied in a completely understood and defined context.

People and relationships aren't anything like engines or even gravity.  They aren't well defined or at least their definition isn't always clear.  If  their definition ever is clear, then this salient fact applies:  Whatever we understand about a person now will change over time and we won't necessarily get a memo that things have changed.  It's even true that our state changes and that in turn can change the way we look at others.  Change, change, change...all relationships change. That simple fact severely limits the correct use of the word therefore.

Calvin and Arminius were in conversation about their relationship with God.  By being in conversation, albeit indirectly, they were in relationship.  (If you're bored right now, as a distraction you can note the implicit and I think appropriate use of "therefore" in the preceding sentence.)  For the 400 or so intervening years between their lives and ours, there's been no conclusion to this conversation.  That makes me want to say, huh...which I think is a humbler, more universal and all around better word than "therefore."

"Therefore" is way too much like an ending and even death for us to use it like we do.  When we use it about each other either individually or as groups, we too often slam a door in ourselves that shouldn't even be closed. 

Honestly, I don't care overmuch about the writings of Calvin, Arminius and their differences and similarities.  I find them more interesting as historical figures than I do as thinkers or even spiritual mentors.  As they sit on the imaginary bench I built for them, I doubt they care much about their writings either.  I would imagine though that they care more about open doors than they used to. 

As for me, I am slowly and sometimes painfully learning to keep doors open.  Maybe they'll eventually make room on the bench for me and we can make up jokes.  "Did you hear the one about the Calvinist and the Arminiust that went into the bar together?"  I'll probably have to explain to them that in addition to it's other faults, "therefore" makes a lousy punch line.