Blessed Britney and the Quest for What Matters

The news reports this morning that Britney Spears has shaved her head, has been adding tattoos, and may or may not have entered rehab. Presumably, the rehab is related to substance abuse, and if she has a problem in that area I hope she gets the help she needs. But my hunch is that a surplus of hair, a poverty of skin art, and an indulgence in alcohol are the least of her problems.

A disclaimer: I am not a Britney fan. Neither her music, her marriage history, her wardrobe (or lack thereof) nor her self and social contortions in search of publicity are of particular interest to me. I have not developed a taste for her "art."

But I find myself grieving on her behalf. What began as a fetching, energetic, if not all that original step into the entertainment arena has evolved, over the years, into cartoonish parody. Fair Britney has careened from one silly and melodramatic absurdity to the next in what seems -- at least to this admittedly disinterested observer -- like a tragic grasp at significance. And who, after all, doesn't want to matter?

I haven't shaved my head and I've never really understood tattoos; I've certainly never made it into "People" magazine, but in my own subtler way I suppose I've done my share of clawing for attention. Trying to matter. Begging to be noticed. And my suspicion is that such attempts look no better on me than they do on Britney.

In my better moments, I recognize how unnecessary are the graspings. Significance, after all, is the grace of the gospel. As far as God is concerned, we don't have to gyrate in a spotlight and recklessly careen from one camera to the next. We have already been noticed. And we already matter. It has to do with that whole "image of God" idea, and the voice that we, too, might hear if we interrupted our preening and prancing and paused long enough to hear it: a voice saying "you, too, are my child, in whom I am well pleased."

Maybe, in other words, it is our idea of fame and significance -- of the opinion that truly matters -- that needs the time in rehab.

In the meantime, I'm going to go comb my hair while I still have it. I'll be bald soon enough.

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Rail Retreat -- The Final Chapter

Happiness is two kinds of ice cream
Finding your skate key; telling the time
And happiness is learning to whistle
And tying your shoe for the very first time.
Happiness is playing the drum
In your own school band
And happiness is walking hand in hand
And Happiness is five different crayons
Knowing a secret and climbing a tree
Happiness is finding a nickel
Catching a firefly; setting it free
And happiness is being alone every now and then
And happiness is coming home again…
(from You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, Music, Lyrics and Book by: Clark Gesner)

Being alone…and coming home again – although more than happiness, it is pure joy. Especially now, after a week of the former and over 5000 miles to both enforce and punctuate it, it is the latter that is happiness and joy. The sight of home in my imagination, and before long just around that final, evocative turn. The welcoming touch of one whose parting embrace animated the quiet and kept me company in that strange, ephemeral way.

So what do I bring home with me? Some tasks gratefully accomplished – books read, words written, services imagined, a sermon series well underway. Indeed it would be hard to justify this trip without such things in my pocket.

And there are the people – Ron, the stoically efficient attendant between LA and Portland, and Darryl, the effective and jovial one along the final leg who went to work with Amtrak as a summer job – 24 years ago; the retired FBI agent/business owner/theology student and his wife from Detroit visiting grandkids throughout California, and their adult daughter – roughly my age – traveling with them who along with her husband is building a stone, wood-fired pizza oven in their back yard; the two brothers and their wives who rode the Coast Starlight together just so they could spend time and visit; the train marketer is riding across the country to evaluate and assess how Amtrak is doing; the Metropolitan Lounge attendant in Portland who was born and raised in Marshalltown, Iowa, graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Piano and a teaching certificate, and taught music appreciation in an elementary school in Minneapolis before hooking up with Amtrak; the Goth young man riding in coach in all black, a flaming yellow goatee and a shaved head with a tattoo just behind his ear that looks like it was done by his little brother; the three “U-Per” women who each retired from careers in different places and settled in the same community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula because of a love of skiing, met and now share an annual ski trip together to somewhere – like Montana; the many waiters, conductors, and other employees who combined to afford me an extraordinary experience.

And, of course, there is the land which has blessed me with rich passage – the rustic red deserts of Colorado and New Mexico, the coastal magnificence of California, the rivers and forests and mountains and plains of the American northwest; frozen lakes and persistent streams; snow-covered evergreens and crystalline brush; the warmth of Albuquerque, New Mexico and the pure icy chill of Shelby, Montana; herds of antelope galloping in eastern Montana and bald eagles soaring and feeding along the river east of Red Wing, Minnesota. Yes, almost indescribably so, the land. “Come now and look upon the works of the Lord, what awesome things he has done on earth” (Psalm 46:9).

All those things, and of course, more. But mostly I return home with an awe-filled gratitude to a God who fashioned it with words I can’t even imagine, and to a church and a wife who offered their blessing on my longing to roll through it.

Happiness, indeed. Amen.

Rail Retreat, Chapter 5 -- Evening

Beyond the mountains of western Montana, the plains opened expansively. Wide, ranging, seemingly infinite. I was caught by the wire – hundreds and hundreds of miles of it – twisted wire and barbed wire nailed to fence posts within which the cattle and horses roamed, but only so far; electrical wire strung across pole after pole after desolate pole. I noticed the same thing earlier in the trip as the train rolled across the southern plains, and I tried to remember the stories about the range wars when the frontier was being conquered. Battles were fought, tempers were flared, lives were lost over the idea of fencing off the open range.

Few, I’m guessing, fought the later efforts to string more wire. Craving the prospect of power, people no doubt clamored for it. And though it looks so odd to me – poll after powerline poll – I can hardly feel smug. Here I am tucked warmly away in my rolling bedroom with an octopus extension chord to which is attached an iPod, a cell phone charger, a camera charger, and a laptop. Hardly primitive; hardly “roughing it.” My letters, had I been such a candle-lighted pioneer, would have been the first to make their way to the “powers that be,” begging for electrification.

Rolling now across far eastern Montana, the sun is fading. The landscape has surprised me. After miles and miles of flat, open range, the land is now filled with plateaus – hills that the wind, or perhaps God’s own hand, sliced off horizontally. Against one side of the slopes – the easterly side – snow has accumulated. To be sure, there is a general dusting of snow all around – in the ground cover of the plains approaching the rise, and around the plateaus as well – but the accumulation is on the one side. I noticed a similar phenomenon this morning in the mountain forests, when it was the southeasterly face of the evergreens that collected the snow.

It has caused me to remember my favorite views of running rivers, where stones interrupt the flow of the stream and cause, at one and the same time, both a rise and a diversion. The stones, no matter their size, have simultaneously caught and redistributed the river.

And perhaps that is most of what life is: standing in the way of life as it passes or blows its way through – wisdom, experience, love, grace – and offering ourselves as a catchment.

Rail Retreat, Chapter 5 -- Morning

Breathtakingly beautiful. In fact, with each incremental rise of the sun into the morning the sweeping scenes passing outside the window have become more hypnotic. Montana since the earliest graying of dawn.

The Empire Builder pulled out of Portland exactly on time, but through the night fell behind. Again, the hour or so tardiness is hard to begrudge; on time we would have driven through these mountain forests in the dark. Snow-covered fields occasionally interrupt the woods, an orphaned farm implement up to its axels in drift. Deeper now into the mountains, wildlife tracks are evident ascending the slopes, but I can’t imagine how they managed the steep grade. As we pulled into Whitefish – a ski area at which many departed the train – I found myself thinking this vertical ocean of God-flocked evergreens “out-Vermonted Vermont”, before deciding such an idea blasphemous.

Now east of Whitefish, in the midst of the Glacier Park expanse, the train has snaked alongside a snow-banked river with the mountains towering up beside. I’ve tried a few desperate but feckless pictures; the results can’t begin to capture the grandeur. A few buildings peak out from between the trees and beneath the 3 or 4 feet of snow frosting the roofs. Here and there in an open space, horses dot the snowy landscape. Crossing over a high trestle, the valley below opens into such an emotionally beautiful vista that tears well and a lump rises in my throat.

No music – no jazz, no train songs; just the centering drone of the train and the occasional laughing banter of car steward Darryl. Work – the books, the sermons, the thinking – are hopelessly overpowered by the compulsion to simply sit, absorb, marvel, float, as it were, along the river, and give thanks. What is happening through the windows is sermon enough.

Rail Retreat -- Intermission revisited

As one of God's little humors, after my rather petulent observations about Portland's urban collision with my train-indulged hermitage of sorts, I boarded the Empire Builder at the city's Union Station to find a full house. The train is teeming with people -- with the room immediately behind mine packed with four quite active pre-pubescent girls, and the rooms forward of mine filled with the four parents; two families traveling together and armed with animated chatter. So much for the silent sanctity of the rails!



There is some instructive justice to the circumstance. I have been reflecting on my earlier observations with some humility and regret. While retreats -- whether of the railroad or the more conventional varieties -- are certainly useful, surely it is lamentable if the spiritual life and inner quietude are only possible at a distance from active and energetic life in the very midst of whatever is more common -- an urban cacaphony or a rural spread. To curse the very hum of human animation seems contrary to the transformative premise of the Gospel. If the Spirit is only accessible apart from everyday life then we are most to be pitied!



And so chastened, I reengage my rolling environs -- giggling girls and chatty neighbors and all. They are the world I am in. And wasn't part of my intent to listen, to attend, to know?



Sleep well.

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Rail Retreat -- Intermission

System jolt! The layover in Portland has afforded the chance to have a luxuriantly spacious night's sleep, true, and the variation from train menus has indeed been delightful. Moreover, for exercise I walked the 10-or-so blocks to the sacred mountain: Powells Bookstore -- a multi-storied city block of books.

That said, this urban interlude has been a jolt back to reality -- the steady, almost narcotic drone of the train replaced with the cacophony of traffic; honking horns, car doors, squealing brakes; boom boxes thumping out from passing windows; wisps of marijuana seeping out of a parked beat-up pickup, inside of which is a haggard looking woman stupored against the glass; dodging bicyclists, and people. It seems like a suffocating mass of people. I know that sounds strange -- that the confinement of a train could seem less congested than open air in the city -- but there you have it. The hotel was filled with name tag-dangling conventioneers in town for something. The coffee shop where I'm spending an otherwise tasty party of the afternoon, called Stumptown Coffee and Pastries ("one of the best in the country," I'm told), is packed with people and and a throbbing soundtrack of "music" I would not have picked (and wouldn't be included in my otherwise "broad and somewhat disturbing musical collection").

One serendipity -- while sitting in the coffee shop typing away, a woman named Stephanie, a reporter for a local television station, along with her cameraman interviewed me briefly about online personality inventories and IQ tests. She said I caught her attention because of the laptop I was using and its obvious connection with the story she is working on. I, of course, was disappointed; I was certain it was because of some self-apparent sagacity and erudition. Supposedly I'll be able to watch the story online by next Wednesday at www.KGW.com. Can't wait.

Truth be told, neither can I wait to be back on the train. This is what I escaped! I'll be back to urban life soon enough. Meanwhile, the coffee is quite good.

I checked for an update about the train's timeliness, but learned nothing new. It will come, on its own time.

Rail Retreat, Chapter 4 -- Evening

Green forest-covered mountains stockaded the view around us. I hadn’t even noticed that we had progressed into territory completely blanketed with snow. In the far ground, an immense mountain face, etched with white, vertically ribboned pathways interrupting the trees. Betraying my frame of reference, I called attention to the strips and concluded, “ski area.”
“More likely,” corrected another passenger, “logging strips.”
Sure enough, throughout the afternoon, the Cascades and their log-wounds drew closer and more revealing. Surely business, those strips, not pleasure. Force moreso than grace.
For all my lament, I can’t really indict. I live in a house that depends on its lumber. I work in a building that, while more concrete than wood, employs more than a little bit of both. In our worship we sit, after all, on wooden pews. I can’t very well treasure my shelter and my livelihood while begrudging the loggers their own.
But still, the mountains wear their scars, and the clearcut paths, from our distance, look like streaks of tears.
Late in the afternoon, enjoying the Parlor car for its views, the tracks took us along the edge of a forest on thee left, the Willamette River flowing scenically on the right. Its beauty, however, was only visible for a moment. As we slowed to a stop – as if to afford us a prayerful moment to drink the magnificence in, a Union Pacific freight train pulled alongside us on a heretofore unnoticed neighboring track, blocking our view of anything but a long and seemingly endless series of box cars in need of paint – made perceptually even longer by the knowledge of what lay beyond on the other side.
“There’s something wrong,” I mused to a passenger sitting nearby, when a freight train occupies the track with a view, while the passenger train gets stuck over here.”
It didn’t take long, I’m relieved to say, before I remembered that this isn’t an amusement park ride, and that the freight companies own the rails. We passengers hardly have priority, and are privileged to catch any glimpse that pops into view between the freight. If anybody has a right to the view, those engineers, workers and what I have to assume to be an occasional hobo, do.