My Better Half

A week or so ago Christy (my wife, aka my better half) was working the night shift at the school where she works.  In this case, "the night shift" involved fielding parent questions and manually ringing the school bells all in support of Back To School Night. Steve the principal came in and we all chatted a bit.

In the middle of our gab fest, a family that had recently returned from a trip to South America came in with a present for Steve.  The present was the stylized crucifix pictured above.  We were all pretty taken by it.  For my part, I loved the image but I just couldn't think quite why.  In the course of our back and forth, someone said, "You should write about this."  I remember thinking at that moment, "That's a great idea but what do I say besides, 'Hey look! This is REALLY COOL!'" 

Out loud I said something like, "I like it but I just don't know quite why."  I think it was Christy (although I'll give Steve credit if he argues the point) that said something about it being an invitation to put yourself in the sculpture.  That wasn't exactly what was said but what it morphed into when I'd thought about it a little bit.

It is true of course that this is what we're invited into, both the suffering and the triumph of it.  There's systematic theology about the cross ad nauseum.  The best thing about systematic theology is of course way it evaporates into smoke in presence of the fire of life.  In the moment you say "OUCH" in response to what you're facing and suffering, you stop entertaining yourself with logical structures and rules and start instead looking for relationship and help from the one who spoke you into existence.  "Help dad.  I'm hurt.  I'm scared."  In that moment, systematic theology burns away like the old flash paper bookies and other miscreants used to keep their records on.  When the police would come in, they'd just touch it with a cigarette and POOF...all evidence of bad behavior was gone.

Of course, this is also true with human relationships.  We complete each other to the point that we are eventually after time in relationship to be found in each other.  I've quoted John Donne here before but his "...no man is an island unto himself..." comes immediately to mind as does "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."  In the bible, this idea is found in an amazing verse, Eph 4:16, quoted here in King James to roughly match Donne above: 

"¹⁶From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love."

At Back to School Night a family came in with a gift that moved everyone there.  We all discussed what the gift was and meant, coming at once to consensus while at the same time forming our own, unique ideas on the subject.  In the time since, I've gotten to write it all down so we can all remember it and share it with others.  And now they too can appreciate the piece as well as a bit of the moment of discovery.

We really all do share each others lives.  It's not at all something we do merely if we choose to.  It's what we are, and what happens regardless of contrary intent.  Consider that even the sudden absence of someone creates anything from pain, to longing, to relief to all of these and more at once.  

And all of this is what is carried at once in the action and message of the cross.  Jesus doesn't aspire to being a consistent logic lesson.  He wants to share our lives.  He wants to complete us even as he uses each of us to complete each other.  Jesus has made himself completely vulnerable to us both at the time of the cross and I would also submit, in all the time since.  He asks for that back.  He asks us to join him on the cross and his invitation to us is in the perfect present tense; it is and will be constantly asked and constantly answered.  We don't just answer once and move on.  We must answer with the direction and course of our lives. 

"I refuse that order..."

The run up the 10th anniversary of 9/11 has been what such things have become in the last few years, a finite series of events being chewed over by an apparently infinite number of media personalities, TV shows, web casts, radio shows and probably a dozen other things I'm leaving out.  I'm not sad or upset that we remember.  I am however tired of the noise. 

As a nation, we seem to be developing a knack for monuments.  The Vietnam memorial, with it's large dark presence reflecting those who look upon through the names of those that died in the conflict is astonishing.  As we look into the darkness of that memory, we see ourselves distorted through the names of those who gave us the right and ability to ponder what it meant and what it means.

The new monument at Ground Zero is of similar character.  This monument is an excavated area surrounded by black stone with the names of the deceased upon it.  Water flows over the stone into the excavated area to create a waterfall.  Thus, this artificially created void presents us with the void created in each of us by the loss of 3000 souls.  The water flows over it all just as life washes over us and carries us along. 

I only want to make sure that one brief thing does not get lost in the TV, the radio, the speeches of politicians or even in the very fine monument. I want to re-tell the story of Pat Brown.

Pat was a fireman that died in the North Tower on 9/11.  Just a few minutes before the North Tower collapsed, Pat's chief ordered him out of the building.  Pat, from transcripts gleaned from several witnesses spoke this into his radio in response:  "I refuse that order. I have too many burned people. I'm not leaving."  Pat and his men as well as those people died that day.  



I think this will strike some people as futile, silly or maybe even negligent considering his men followed him to their respective deaths.  I would strongly challenge that however.  Pat sacrificed himself and his men in order to give comfort and even hope to the dying.  As long as he was there, the injured on that floor could hold on to the hope that there would be something else.  And I will even offer as pure conjecture, the idea that Pat would not have offered his life had he not understood the value of his presence to those in need.  Indeed, why else would he have stayed?

What of his men?  The answer there is I think that they were following Pat on a mission.  They'd all seen the hilltop and determined it was both attainable and infinitely valuable.  I cannot think of another reason why they would have stayed.  

What we all too often miss in the idea of hope is that hope is not at all dependent on a cheery outcome or a "happily ever after."  Hope is instead completely dependent on God and the human soul.  But for these two, hope would not exist.  It is a gift to us from our Father and is an important part of the way resemble Him and when carried through love, it is the best we have to offer others. 


When Pat Brown refused to leave, he acknowledged that the hope he carried in his person that he could in turn offer to others, was more important than his life.  I believe he was right in this.  

God bless you Pat.  The hope, care and love your sacrifice gave to the dying is the greatest monument any such event can ever produce...and it is more than enough.


John 15:13 -
There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

People of the Bubble

The morning TV shows are an archetype in a lot of ways of all TV.  That is, they're fast moving, shiny, noisy and pretty nearly completely vacuous.  I'm willing to stand corrected as to "completely" by those who like "educational" TV, as long as it's not the ironically named Learning Channel - which used to carry John and Kate Plus Eight. 

This morning, my wife and I were watching a couple different morning shows using the commercial avoidance mechanism (aka. the remote control).  Sprinkled in with the cooking, burps of news and a weepy feature or two, were the daily shots of the hosts out on the street with "The People."  Most days, some of the People of the Street hold up signs.  From time to time they get to meet Mr. Microphone in order to talk about what their sign means, say where they're from and "meet" Matt Lauer et al.  In the middle of this, my wife asked a question about the hosts. "I wonder what bubble those people live in?"

That is an excellent question. She comes up with excellent questions all the time.  It's one of my favorite things about her...except maybe when the questions are about me but that's a different blog entry.

I was thinking about it while I was watching all the noise ("watching the noise," huh, guess I wasn't paying much attention).  The thought crawled into my brain that they live in the same kind of bubble we all do.  If there's a difference, I think it's that there's more shiny and reflective stuff on the inside of their bubbles than for People of the Street.  There might even be a ratio or proportion that says that the more people you have looking at you, the harder it is to see out of your own bubble. 

Still though, all bubbles are shiny enough on the inside.  So much so that sometimes their reflection makes it hard to see other people.  Bubbles seem to reflect back sound as well so that way too often, we hear ourselves quite clearly and others only through the muffling of both their bubbles as well as our own.

The great thing about this kind of a bubble is that when it is ignored consistently, it goes away.  Ignoring your bubble is difficult because it's shiny and distracting and can even be protective. 

At another point this morning, my wife muted the Bubble People and read to me from a book she's reading.  The book is "A Testament of Devotion" by Thomas Kelly.  It was published in 1941.  At that time of course, the world minus the United States had gone to war and we were soon to follow.  Even with 24/7 media constantly feeding our paranoia and countless rumors of medical, social and political anger and angst, I believe 1941 was a more fundamentally frightening time than the present.  Curiously, our ancestors of that time did not seem to exhibit the quaking fears and self loathing that we tend toward today.  Maybe this was because they didn't have nearly as many tools to help them shiny up the inside of their bubbles.  They were after all, only slowly emerging from The Great Depression.  They were in many cases, too busy staying alive to worry much about their bubbles.

Partially no doubt in response to the times though, Kelly was writing on the good, even extreme good that's to be found in suffering.  His thoughts are beautiful and complex and do not reduce well.  However, I did hear something in them to do with bubbles.

It seems that there is something that can encourage us and even compel us to ignore our own bubbles, even when those bubbles have hardened into something more like prison bars or maybe chains.  In fact, that "something" might even be the only thing strong enough to readjust our focus outside ourselves, such that we can truly and clearly see and hear others, and even see and hear God, who spoke us.  Of course, this often happens only when our reflections become such a horror we can no longer bear them.  And that I believe is both the core as well as the extreme value of suffering.

The work of suffering over time erodes the walls of our bubbles, until they grow so thin they pop and are completely gone.  Suffering compels us to listen carefully to the voice of  the God that spoke us.  And it also forces us to look into the eyes, listen carefully and receive help from those who would offer us from themselves. 

If this doesn't sound crazy or maybe even sounds like something good that's a little too scary to want for yourself because you might get what you ask for, that's absolutely fine.  We weren't made to want suffering.  Kelly's point in part is that suffering comes of it's own accord.  His point also is that it is not to be feared and that it can even be embraced and thereby eventually redeemed...along with everything else Jesus and his brothers and sisters embrace.  We are however moved toward completion of our best possible selves not by avoiding suffering but by traveling through it...and that we cannot do successfully by ourselves.  The world is such that suffering will arrive for each of us at one time or another.  The Good News is that the possibility life is eternal and redemption of both us and our suffering is infinitely available.

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.