In Search of a Bigger Pocket

“This is of course the ultimate temptation of Christianity!  To say that Christ has locked all the doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of the saved—while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is truly serious, and worthy of being taken seriously.”
—-Thomas Merton

None of us, I suppose, have very big pockets.  There is a limit, then, to what we can carry along.  And the things we choose can’t take up much room.  Preference is given to the concise, the economical, the sturdy.  The bulky, fragile, fussy and complicated need not apply.  Small, smooth stones are in.  Mysteries are out.  Certainties are easy to pocket.  Ambiguities take up way too much space.  Little wonder that Christianity has fallen captive to the stony economy of certitude.  It’s easier that way — all those clear and circumscribing answers that delimit wonder and truncate questions.

But why, then — if the Evangelists of scripture are to be believed — would Jesus make such heavy use of metaphor and parable that defy dogmatic reduction in service to prodding curiosity; lengthy chewing as opposed to easy swallowing?  Why did Jesus work so hard to push the envelope rather than licking the adhesive to seal it closed?

David Wilcox, one of my favorite singer/songwriters, has a new song that confesses, “everything I know, I think.”  Which is to acknowledge the tentativeness that tempers all of our supposed “knowing.”  We conclude, we go out on a limb, we stake our claim…but at the bottom it’s finally supposition.  It’s a best guess…at best.

If we were to take seriously the biblical definition of faith —  “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” — couldn’t we have the humility to acknowledge the imperfection, or at least the incompleteness, of those very hopes and convictions?   Given our incapacity for bona fide certitude, can’t we give ourselves and each other permission to protect the space for mystery?  As simplifying as it might be, it is ultimately dispiriting to think I might have something — anything — so large and ultimate and salvific boxed, contained and “figured out.”  Stand beneath a starlit sky and dare to say, “I get it.”  Watch the waves at the beach roll in undulating fury and claim to comprehend it.  Stand on a mountaintop and gaze at the vista and pretend to take it all in.  Gaze into eyes of any human being, be it spouse, sibling or total stranger from across town or across the globe, and claim anything more than marvelous but finally unfathomable inscrutability.  I’ll call you seriously deluded.  I’m grateful for the gift of what I need to know, but dare not presume it to be all there is to know. Such is the ultimate hubris.  Surely it’s all larger and more amazing and mysterious than can fit in my head…or soul.

And so I’ve scissored off the bottoms of my pockets.  If it can be contained there, it’s too small.  I treasure what I’ve learned — or at least what I think I understand and have come to believe — but I treasure in equal measure the breathtaking profundity and life creating immensity too large for me to fathom.  Give me the messy complexity of ambiguity and possibility; the the joy of that much-maligned “mystery.”  Give me wonder, what David James Duncan defines as “unknowing experienced as pleasure." Give me the “mystery of the freedom of divine mercy” that is surely deeper and rounder than my capacity to understand it.

Give me, in other words, a God who is big enough to take seriously, rather than one tidy enough — two-dimensionally transparent enough — to fit in the palm of my hand, or oily enough to fuel my prejudice...

...That I might sidestep the “intolerable flippancy of the saved.”  Give me, to beg it another way, bigger pockets.

May we all be so fortunate, so capacious,

and so blessed.

Now That the Light is On

“The question from agnosticism Is, ‘Who turned on the lights?’ The question from faith is, ‘Whatever for?’”——-Annie Dillard

A despairing cynic might answer that second question, “not so much.”  Insert here the now familiar axiomatic summation of fatalism, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

I might indulge a bowlful of cynicism from time to time, but it’s poured from a box of disappointment rather than despair.  The truth is I’m daily animated by the conviction that the question is endlessly provocative and stirringly promising even if we never arrive at a completely satisfying answer.   It represents the existential hunger that keeps us searching for the next nourishing morsel of insight.

“Whatever for,” indeed.

For a certain strain of Christianity the Shorter Westminster Catechism answers the question, What is the chief end of man” with the conviction, “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”  I’ll go out on a limb here and speculate that it’s the chief end of woman as well.  It’s a good biblical answer, but I’m not sure how much further down the road that gets us.  What, after all, does this “glorification” look like every morning as I shake off the sleep, open my door and step through with an urge to justify my inhalations?

We continually try out options.
Self-actualization.
Rigid compliance to religious rules.
Piety.
Profit.
Indulgence.
“Growth.”
“America First.”
And countless others, each with its own allure.

But reading the list reminds me of a Q & A session some of us had in college with a well-known preacher.  “What do you think of ‘speaking in tongues,’” one of us asked.  After a moment’s thought he responded, “it’s sort of like spiritual masturbation.  You get all worked up, you feel real good, but then you’ve got nothing to show for it.”

Culturally speaking, we have elevated the enjoyment of "nothing enduring to show for it" into an art form.  It's our own little take on collective “motivational masturbation."

Even then, I suppose, there can be some value in our perennial trials and errors.  I think it was Parker Palmer from whom I heard the story of a desperate hiker lost in the woods who came upon another traveling in the opposite direction.  “Please, sir, do you know the way out of these woods.”
“No,” he replied.  “But I can steer you away from a hundred others that only lead farther in.”

If we are paying attention at all — and keeping track — we are developing an extensive and useful inventory of existential dead ends.  Surely we can do better, which is why we keep trying.

I can’t help but believe that the path we keep assiduously avoiding actually holds the greatest promise.  It isn’t the path of bumper stickers, self-congratulatory billboards or hats, but rather the one of wonder-filled appreciation and discovery.  Nature daily, seasonally, annually teaches her students the essential value of mutually beneficial relationships. It’s not merely an oddity that some trees are tall while others are short; it’s essential.  It’s more than interesting that there are so many varieties of apple trees.  If the trees are ever to bear fruit a community of the same species is useless.  A different variety is necessary.  Every part of nature has a irreplaceable part to play — a unique gift to give.  This isn’t gushy fluff talk.  This is the way the system works, and  why, when pieces are taken away, it doesn’t.  I don't quite understand why taking this path along with the rest of creation looks so scary, but I'm increasingly convinced we had better get over our fear.  We are, quite pragmatically and literally, each other's life blood.

Perhaps that is part of the reason the lights were turned on:  to enable us all to better see the gifts we bring to each other -- us Christians and Muslims and Jews and other variously believing and unbelieving; us men and women, old and young; us Americans and Iraqis, Russians, Mexicans, Koreans and more; the "us" that is all of us -- gifts the exchange on which...

... our very lives depend.

Perhaps A Different Kind of Independence Day Crown

"The huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion.  That evil should appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice is absolutely bewildering for one coming from the world of ethical concepts that we have received.  For the Christian who lives by the Bible, it is the very confirmation of the abysmal wickedness of evil."                     ----Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian -- an academic; a Lutheran.  It's not the likeliest description of one predisposed to public activism -- at least in our usual stereotype.  We more likely picture classrooms and libraries and lofty lectures and papers.  Certainly there are and have always been noisy exceptions, but I suspect that Bonhoeffer would not have included himself among them.  He was a pastor, a prolific writer on the spiritual life; he was a musician and wrote fiction and poetry.

But the spine anchoring all those other descriptions was his faithfulness.  His most famous book, after all, is titled, The Cost of Discipleship.

Bonhoeffer read the prophetic calls for a different relationship with each other and God -- one that finds treasure in the diverse uniqueness of every part of creation, and welcomes the stranger along with the outcast; one that embraces and enfleshes the divine purpose in love -- and took them to heart.  He watched and took as exemplary Jesus' way in the world, internalizing his teachings about the least, the lost and the last; and was convicted by Jesus' willingness to lose himself on behalf of those he loved.

And so it was that he "left the classroom," so to speak.  Unlike most of us -- myself included -- who mutter among our friends or mouth off on Facebook from time to time and call it enough, Bonhoeffer got to the end of his rope with the "huge masquerade of evil" that had "thrown all ethical concepts into confusion"  and confronted that evil with his life.  Joining a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, in whom he came to believe that masquerade of evil had become embodied, Bonhoeffer was eventually imprisoned when the plot failed, housed in a concentration camp, and ultimately brought quite literally to the end of his rope; executed by hanging at the ripe old age of 39.

I quite frankly don't know what to do with Bonhoeffer's example.  I won't backseat drive his choices.  I wasn't there; I wasn't in the thick of it.  It was, indeed, a despicable, dehumanizing time.  It's impossible to condone assassination, but then I suspect he, under other circumstances, wouldn't either.  And yet there he was, choosing what I have to imagine seemed to him to be a lesser evil to overcome one still greater.

And then I wonder what his counsel would be today when it feels, for all the world, like the "huge masquerade of evil" has thrown everything, not merely ethical concepts, into even greater confusion?  What would he say, and more importantly, what would he do?

At the very least he would speak the truth as the gospel had trained him to see it.  Since he did so in his own moment I have no doubt that he would caution, indeed chastise, those in ours who elevate patriotism over discipleship -- or dare to conflate the two.  He would condemn those would build walls in protection of their own at the expense of those who have nothing left to protect.  He would scoff at our collective celebration of flash and fizz; our contentment with facade; our capitulation to empty and paternalistic promises.  He would recoil at the deification of "economic forces" and tribal allegiances and would weep at the trivialization and contamination of our "life together."

If, as he once said, "The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children," ours would almost certainly earn a failing grade.  We eat garbage.  We talk trash.  This once-noble experiment in governance and culture on different and better terms is bequeathing our children a fetid inheritance.

As our calendar inexorably shoves us toward July 4 and tempts us with the usual self-congratulatory celebrations, maybe we could choose a different course.  Instead of telling ourselves how wonderful we are -- "the greatest nation in the world" -- perhaps we could prayerfully reflect upon the kind of nobility to which those founders aspired, reaching back behind the mere words of the documents to the aspirational soul to which they hoped to give voice.  This year, maybe lamentation should take the place of celebration -- the candles of penitent confession rather than the fireworks of proud assertion.

Whatever else, I'm sure Bonhoeffer would insist that it's worth the effort.  Surely we have not been so corrupted that we can no longer recognize the corruption; the decay.

This week my dentist affixed a crown to repair a broken tooth.  It wasn't as easy as snapping over the fracture a hardened and durable cover.  A week or so before, some drilling was required to remove the resulting decay; a mold was taken so as fashion the desired replacement and a temporary "fix" was put in place with the admonishment to be careful what and where I chew.  The "meantime," after all, is fragile.  And then this week the more permanent fix.  That, too, involved air on exposed nerves, a little more drilling and wincing and tapping and capping.  The process was tedious and laborious and hardly free of pain.  But it was worth it. 


 Maybe that's the kind of work that could begin this 4th of July:  naming the cracks, drilling the decay, remolding nobler intent, and submitting to the nerves and the need to heal.

It's just a thought.

Runnin’ On...Full

Growing up, I knew all of Jackson Browne’s songs.  I don’t mean that I was simply acquainted with his catalogue or knew all the lyrics.  I mean I KNEW them.  I bought (OK, my Mother bought for me) all the printed music folios for each of his albums, and I learned to play them.

Every song.

I had to.  I had to be ready.

Normal kids fantasize about going to the moon or running off with the circus, or becoming President (thought these days those three sound redundant).  I, meanwhile, fantasized about filling in for Jackson Browne.  What if something happened to him in the rough and shuffle of touring?  What if he tripped over a speaker cable and broke a finger in the fall?  What if the piano lid unexpectedly fell on his hands?  What if the bus door closed too quickly and caught his fingers as he entered?  He could still sing just fine, but he couldn’t possibly handle the piano or his guitar.  The cry would go out near and far, “Does anybody know how to play these songs?”

Shyly, but confidently, I would raise my hand and step forward.  I was perpetually ready.  The concert could go on as planned.

Understand, I didn’t want anything very bad to happen to him.  Certainly nothing permanent.  After all, I idolized him.  I merely wanted to help out.  And I needed to be ready.

OK, so it was a self-serving fantasy.  But, then, who ever has selfless fantasies?  Regardless, and alas, I was never needed.  Abilene never seemed to make it onto his tour schedule.  

The closest he came was Fort Worth in my freshman year of college.  It was his “Runnin’ On Empty” tour and I wasn’t about to miss it.  How I had the money for it I haven’t a clue.  But I even took a date — a dear friend from high school then attending Baylor University.  Clear evidence of adolescent insanity, I borrowed a fraternity brother’s car, drove the 90 miles south to Waco, picked her up, drove back to Fort Worth for the concert, and then back to Waco to take her back to her dorm, before getting back into the car to head back to Fort Worth where I no doubt fell into bed...exhausted but still humming.  And smiling.  

I’ve seen him a dozen times since — with a band and more lately solo acoustic.  It doesn’t matter to me.  As long as I get to hear him.  He typically honors requests shouted out from the audience.  Somehow always asks for “Rosie” and he always smirks and replies, “Oh, so you are THAT kind of crowd,” before playing the song.  Everybody laughs.

He’s still going strong, writing and recording, though I’m guessing, given the vagaries of broadcast media, his new stuff doesn’t get as much radio time as his old.  The latter certainly shows up in the rotations of “oldies” stations, but that necessarily precludes the current material.  That’s alright by me; I don’t much listen to the radio anyway.

And so it is that tonight Lori and I will once again take our seats in his audience — “the best darn seats,” to borrow a line from Bill Murray, “in our price range.”  And I’ll be smiling; no longer fantasizing, but simply relishing the joy of being there, listening.  Runnin’ On Full.

I’m trusting that he’s healthy. I’m long since out of practice, although I can still bang out a pretty good “Doctor My Eyes” and “The Pretender.”  

Besides, at our age, neither Jackson nor I need anybody wishing us ill.  We need all the positive energy we can get, if we are to keep runnin' at all.

I Guess We’ll Have to Stay

“Here’s how we are going to do this,” he said matter-of-factly over the phone.  

 After living my entire life in one part of Texas or another I had accepted the call of a congregation in Des Moines, Iowa.  I didn't know the first thing about Des Moines.  Its neighborhoods were foreign lands to me; its style and norms were unknown.  But I had to find a place to live.  I had spent the better part of two weekends “house hunting” in the company of Jerry Aldrich, a longtime member of the church and even longer-time realtor, and had finally identified a potential residential candidate.  

But in the course of assembling my financials to make an offer and apply for a mortgage it became absurdly clear to Jerry that I was ill-prepared for securing a mortgage.  Having lived in church-owned parsonages up to that point, I had no equity.  My credit rating, while not altogether bad, was flaccid enough to invite any bank’s rejection.  And as for assets, there weren’t any.  As for consumer debt, there was too much. To most eyes — including my own — this all added up to a hopeless dead end.  But not to Jerry.

I have no idea how many phone calls he made, or what sales pitch he employed — all without my knowledge—but in a matter of days the phone rang.  “Here’s how we are going to do this,” he said from a thousand miles away.  He gave me the name and address of a then-faceless couple in the church and said that I would be making my monthly payments to them.  I didn’t understand the technicalities until much later, but in essence Jerry had arranged for that couple to buy the house outright and then sell it to me — at the current mortgage rate — on contract.  

And that was that.

Until about 20 years later when I once again found myself over my head with a very different real estate challenge.  His life had changed considerably in the ensuing years, as had mine; in fact it was in the process of changing, still.  

I had been claimed by the cockamamie conviction that I needed to learn how to grow food.  As the idea fleshed itself out it was obvious that the townhome in which we were living offered very few agricultural options.  Some friends had pointed out a property they thought might interest us.  And it did — at least it interested me.  Lori was the rational one who readily comprehended the lunacy of us purchasing it.  It was too big, too far, too fraught with managerial complications, and too expensive.  Nonetheless, we visited several times with the listing agent, but when it all reached the point of put up or shut up we thought we should have our own agent.  In stepped Jerry.  And when our meager offer was summarily and conclusively rejected by the sellers, Jerry waited a few compassionate seconds (to honor my disappointment and Lori’s relief) and said, “I know of some other properties that might better suit you.”

And indeed he did.  After internalizing our various criteria — our “must haves” and then our “want to haves” — Jerry methodically went to work.  Over the subsequent few weeks we placed our necks in Jerry’s yoke and visited several possibilities, ultimately settling on this one that has happily and gratefully been our home for nearly seven years.  

Throughout the process of purchase, and in the cracks and crevices of life in the subsequent years, we talked through the ups and downs of church life, world affairs, family life, cancer, ballroom dancing and soil composition.  He even gifted me several of his geology books from college.  

When I visited him last month I had to wait for him to complete the final frames of a Wii bowling tournament he was enjoying with neighbors down the hall in the care center.  Once back in his room he pointed to the calendar and noted the date by which time he was supposed to be dead:  the last day of the month.  He wasn’t morose about it.  Indeed, he was concerned that he was, thus far, too healthy to make that date.  With true business pragmatism — like he had exhibited to me for the previous 25 years — he lamented how much this heightened level of care was costing him, and how he hated the thought that those expenses would spill into a new month.

When I prepared to take my leave I asked him if he wanted me to have a prayer. After responding in the affirmative, Jerry went on to coach me as to the prayer’s needed content.  “Ask Him to move this process along.  Tell Him I’m not having any fun down here.”

Jerry missed his deadline by 18 days, a fact that no doubt rankled him.  But albeit late, he ultimately got his wish.  He always told me that he intended to beat this cancer, and at last he has succeeded.  

Whatever else his passing means, and along with my sadness and multiple layers of gratitude, I’m guessing it means that we, too, are finally home.  I don’t know how we would ever move without him.

Needing to Tinker Again With the Engine

We were push mower people throughout my childhood years, but there was one aberrant interlude when a riding mower graced our shed.  Throughout the circuits of our lawn I fantasized the turf as the asphalt of the Indianapolis Speedway.  Or at least a go-cart track.  It was, indeed, a fantasy because in reality the mower was a study in slowness.  It could go even slower if throttled down, but its top speed would lose to a casual walk. 

When the mower passed out of lawn service my Dad agreed that my brother and I could “tinker” with it.  I charitably include myself in that permission knowing full well that I am not a tinkerer — neither then nor now.  My brother, on the other hand, is another story.  Whether by exploration, hearsay, or the kind of knowledge gleaned from the quivering harmonics of the universe to which I have always been deaf, he somehow discovered and subsequently manipulated a fascinating element of that riding mower’s Briggs and Stratton engine called a “governor”.  The governor’s assigned function on the engine was to limit speed.  The engine, in other words, had all kinds of power.  It was simply being restrained by this simple mechanical device, quite probably to keep adolescent boys from racing around the neighborhood — which, having liberated the horsepower from the Governor, we promptly proceeded to do.

I was thinking about that old mower in recent days while lamenting with some friends what we described as “the coursening” of our culture.  If once upon a time there were generally accepted mores about decency and decorum — common courtesy, if you will, among acquaintances and strangers alike — those days seem to be gone.  We’ve become a profane citizenry of grunters and scoffers and name callers who mock and belittle, castigate and denigrate, always in all-caps or disregarding volume.  What once was known as courteous respect is now derided as mere “political correctness.”  We’ve become…course — rough, sharp and prickly — hellbent on, or indifferent to, inflicting as many social abrasions as possible.

Somehow we’ve lost our governor.

In an earlier time the religious community served that function, but not anymore.  Churches are routinely and cynically — and in large measure correctly — viewed as mere shills for one political party or another.  Elected representatives once contributed to that role — actually governing; demonstrating diplomacy and respectfulness in the milieu of diverse opinions— but that arena has become the most course and mean-spirited of all; “statesmanship”, alas, as elusive as unicorns; political “rising stars” from both parties routinely grounded by revelations of despicable behaviors that contradict their glossy public personae.  This, as the nation’s chief executive — who has replaced the White House organic garden with a mud wrestling pit (thus far, at least, only metaphorically) — elevates repulsiveness and repugnance to patriotic duty; who according to his own braggadocio grabs, fondles, despises, manipulates and bullies.  Meanwhile, true journalists have largely been replaced by talk show hosts and commentators whose ratings require ever more strident theatrics.  And have you seen the things we say to each other on social media?

But who is to tell us anything different?  What we need is a governor — the cultural equivalent of the level-headed spouse who can catch our eye or speak our name or touch our elbow in just that discreet way that ineffably communicates that we are perilously close to encroaching on the borderlands of decency.  Or to change the imagery, perhaps we need some new Galileo-like visionary who can help us rediscover some awareness of a “true north” of which we have completely lost touch.

I’m pretty much out of ideas, so I think I’ll call my brother.  He’s the tinkerer.  Once upon a time he figured out how to disarm the engine’s governor to give us a little more speed.  It was fun for awhile, but now I’m thinking it hasn’t gotten us very far.  It’s not that all this mess is in any way his fault — after all, we weren't trying to corrupt the world.  We were just kids hoping for a little more wind in our short cut hair.  But maybe it's time we slowed back down.  So I’m thinking that maybe with a little time and encouragement and methodical tinkering surely he can figure out how to activate it again.

The governor.

On Reclaiming the Tender, Respectful Care of Words

"Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me."

"I love words," I clumsily blurted out some way into my first date with the brilliant and beautiful woman who, even after this curious admission, would go on to become my wife.  I no longer recall what prompted the comment, and to this day I have no insight into why I thought this information was important to share.  "They are like paints," I recall continuing, "with which you can paint whole worlds."

And though all these years later I still feel sheepish about that courtship conversation, I stand by both parts of my comment.  I do love words, and they are, indeed, beautifully and evocatively potent.  Which is why even at an early age I somehow sensed the absurd falsehood of that familiar childhood chant.  Words can hurt a lot -- even moreso than sticks and stones -- because they are not simply beautiful; they are powerful, and touch or bruise not simply the skin, but the heart.

People who read religious texts have encountered this notion before.  In the very first words of Hebrew scripture God, the Prime Mover, creates a world...with words.  Out of nothing, something.  In the same way that a candle flame overwhelms a dark room, the divinely spoken word transformed the silence.  I wonder if it felt, to God, like work or like fun?  Like construction, or like art?  All we know is that God stuck with it, talking and speaking us and all into being.  Only blasphemous fools assert that God, alone, has that power -- that only the words passing through God's lips amount to anything of consequence. 

We act as if that were true.  Increasingly I have come to lament the tawdry state of vocabulary in our culture.  We spew and strew words cheaply, as if they were so much water through a fire hose.  We tweet them, we text them, we shout and mutter and disregard them.  Marketers cleverly co-opt and trivialize them; politicians gratuitously bend and capitalize on them, all to the end that we scarcely know what words mean any longer -- if, as we cynically wonder, they mean anything at all. 

But though we dismissively convince ourselves that we have beaten words into submission, making of them whatever we choose at any given time, Eugene Peterson -- that wise and careful intellectual poet of the soul -- has a warning:

"We cannot be too careful about the words we use.  
We start out using them, and they end up using us."

I hope and suspect I'll spend the rest of my life pondering what he means by that, and the myriad ways my words are using me.  But at the very least, his insight prompts me to form them in my mind and mouth more cautiously, more reverently, more circumspectly.

They are powerful things, after all -- beautiful, yes, and as precious as gold.

But powerful, above all. 

So let us be careful with them; for whether or not we could ever break them, they can surely break us.