like the bird

The Thrust

2009-08-25T14:31:00.001-05:00

McGrath Pond

2009-07-26T07:29:00.002-05:00

Roland and Esther are gone for the week. They generously offered their house to us. It is right on the water of McGrath/McGraw Pond. This morning, Margot and I went out to the dock. The water was still, and the fog blocked our view of the opposite shore. Some fishermen trawled past, and far off, someone was trying to water ski. Margot is learning about ripples and how they travel toward us. I tried to read some Eliot, but it didn't go very well, because Margot was busy making drinks out of pond water and pine needles.
Roland and Esther's place is only about 5 minutes from Joan's house where we've been staying. We arrived last night after a long day of burning all the whatnot from the trees Ty and I cut down last weekend. Cleveland came up from Boston to help us with all that, and we had a fine, hot, smoky time. He's just come up stairs to join Margot and me, and he has admitted that he's sore - poor city feller.
Anyway, it's good to be here, taking a week off from work at the house. Perhaps I'll have a bit more time to write about what's been going on. Perhaps not. There are so many books to read and poems to write, after all.
Tomorrow I have an interview at Trinity Catholic School for a position as their 6, 7, and 8 grade religion teacher. We'll see how that goes. I've no experience and no teaching certificate, but given the need for a renewal in Catholic education and a more robust catechesis, maybe I'll have a shot. I'll post updates on that as I have them.

2009-07-22T09:01:00.002-05:00

2009-07-22T08:45:00.002-05:00

New Photos from Maine

2009-07-15T12:17:00.002-05:00

What follows is nothing less than an onslaught of cuteness. Margot gets short shrift - but just by a little. We're trying to take as many photos of Eloise as we can, not wanting to leave her in the dust just because she's so quiet, good-natured, and, well, not the first born. Eloise's photo count is painfully shy of the bjillions my mother took of Margot. But we're trying, for the record. And as you'll see below, I'm glad we did. With daughters like this, who needs anything else? Except baseball, maybe. And a little PBR.

2009-07-15T12:12:00.000-05:00

2009-07-15T12:10:00.000-05:00

2009-07-15T12:02:00.000-05:00

2009-07-15T11:59:00.000-05:00

2009-07-14T17:41:00.000-05:00

2009-07-14T17:02:00.001-05:00

2009-07-14T16:59:00.000-05:00

Slogging

2009-07-04T10:09:00.002-05:00

We have been in Maine for 2 weeks. Three of our days here have been partly to mostly sunny. This, after we'd spent so much time bragging on the climate of Maine as compared to the dismal heat and humidity of Kentucky and parts farther south. It has been wet, wet, wet. And we're all feeling a little down about it. Things have become so aquatic that, yesterday, as Derek and I were chopping and hauling wood, and the sun came out, we both stared up into the sky, curious about what that bright, hot, white thing was shining through the clouds.
There's been so much rain and cloud up here that I've even begun to talk about the weather with folks. And weather-talk, socially, is the big no-no of my generation - a sure sign that a person has nothing much else to say, that the conversation has been, is and is going, nowhere.
But the rain has not stopped us. There's a lot of work to do up here. On top of the review writing and my lame attempts to continue studying though I'm out of school, we've got quite a list of house projects. For those of you interested in such things, here's a decently representative list:

1. Finish the sub-floor in the basement.
2. Finish hanging sheet rock in the basement.
3. Find suitable flooring and install it on top of the sub-floor in the basement.
4. Paint two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen/dining area, the shutters, and the trim on the shed.
5. Disappear the big, messy flowerbed in the front.
6. Fill in the gaping absence left by the demise of the pool in the backyard.
7. Cut down another messy pine tree.
8. Plant a flower garden outside Jo's kitchen window.
9. Re-roof the whole place.
10. Fix the gutters.

That should be enough to keep us busy for the summer. We're really happy to be filling in the gap here for Joan. She can't get to all this by herself. And anyway, when we finally own our own home, we'll have some experience and a few extra tools for the job.
(Ryan, I have already used some of the tools you gave me. And that impactor drill makes hanging the sheet rock easy as pie).
As life would have it, we continue to be surrounded by great people - just fewer now that we've left that gaggle in Wilmore.
Ty left his family behind to come up and help fell a tree.
Derek has been tremendously willing and helpful around the place. And he works for free! What a bum.
The Cleve told me he'd drive up for a work weekend whenever we need it.
And soon, the re-roofing of the place will be an entire-family affair.
But there's a lot of sorrow involved in seeing the house in this shape - especially for Hannah. It's where she grew up, after all. And there's nothing clearer, more poignant, more startling than thinking about the last 5 years and seeing a big hole in the back yard, the shingles crinkling up on the roof, the floor and walls all ripped up in the basement. Nothing can undo what has happened. The pool is gone. The flood happened. The roof is old. The family has changed. But this is no reason for despair. We work forward in hope, move that way with a great deal of improvisation, and trust that the repairs we are able to make will suffice to make life seem normal again.

In Sidney

2009-06-26T14:10:00.003-05:00

After a long and rather painful goodbye to all of our friends in Wilmore, we moved to Sidney. This is roughly the route we took, for those of you who are interested (Grant). The only variations we made were amendments to the speed limit (the 24' truck we rented did a solid 40 mph through the mountains) and an overnight stay at Cleveland's folks' house in quaint Telford, PA.
The girls are doing fine. Every night, Margot asks for the story of daddy and Nathan and the little green car and the big truck, which is an abbreviated and not altogether truthful account of how I rented the Budget truck, loaded up our stuff, and drove out to Maine with the Cleve in tow.
We are very thankful for the opportunity to live with Joan (Hannah's mom) for a while. We will be trying to accomplish various maintenance projects around the house while I continue my vague and tenuous web job. The global economy is, of course, not helping our chances of further employment. But the Maine economy, especially, has been rather dismal for some time now. I get the sense that, if you don't have scads of money and can afford a house with a view of the Atlantic, then you don't live the life landlubbers associate with Maine and all other points Northeast.
Regardless, we'll make a go of it. And that will be hard without the Brookses, the Caldwells, the DeLattes, the Harolds, the Harshmans, the Hersheys, the Logans, the Mostroms, the Raborns, Jake the Snake, the Strebecks, Dickweed, St. Luke's parish, and of course, Emily and Grant. Neither Hannah nor I want to go through that part of it all, but the transition has already been made so much easier because of the family that has received us and the joy we're both feeling to be near Derek and Cleveland again, Hilary, Brooks, Jasmine, and any of Hannah's other friends who will climb out of the woodwork of her long previous life here.
This entry is taking on the tone of a speech in which I'm trying to thank all the people who have gotten me here. But in a very real way, the three years we spent in seminary were a communal effort, and Hannah and I have both shuddered at the thought of where we could have ended up had we not moved to Wilmore. Our hearts were restless toward the end of our stay in Rochester back in 2006, and we did not know much about anything. But we did know what St. Augustine knows so well: that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. Because we have finally gotten it through our thick skulls that this is the purpose of life, it is right and well to give thanks for all the people who have helped along the way.
More later, if they continue to offer the www this far north.

2009-02-04T17:23:00.002-06:00

2009-02-04T17:13:00.000-06:00

2009-01-16T19:34:00.000-06:00

2009-01-12T11:47:00.001-06:00

2009-01-03T17:03:00.005-06:00

Late Afternoon

2009-01-01T14:28:00.004-06:00

Hannah, Margot, Eloise, and Joan are all asleep. I'm working, but taking a break to write this and stare at Eloise a bit more. She's nestled down into the boppy on my lap, and I'm trying to peck lightly on the keyboard.
I told Alan yesterday that she didn't quite feel like my own yet. My sense of fatherhood is all wrapped up in Margot and being her dad, and now, with Eloise, I'm forced to revise this sense. I suppose there are a lot of areas, moments, opinions, processes, etc. in life that require some sort of fracture when something new comes along. But as we see in the Blessed Trinity, love is not something that requires fracture. My sense of fatherhood has not been shattered by the arrival of Eloise any more than the Father's love was altered by the sendings of the Son and the Spirit. Margot's sense of daughterhood, for that matter, is not truly fractured either, though she surely feels it to be so these days - in her way, that is. It is not fractured anymore than the Word's deity was fractured by his assuming humanity.
Instead, my sense of fatherhood, my love for my daughters, is simply enlarged, extended, spread out. Being a human endowed with often unruly passions, the spreading can be painful. No one knows this feeling better than Margot right now. But she will soon discover that what she thought was impossibly difficult has become the very possibility of unimaginable blessing. What she thought was reserved for Hannah and me has been unfurled to welcome Eloise.
The only analogy I can draw here is to childbirth. It is true. We are witnessing repeated and repeating births of love as everything is the same and new at every strange moment of the day. At one point, during the delivery, I think Hannah said, "I can't do this," and then she went ahead and did it anyway. I wish I could tell Margot this in a way she could understand. But then again, I feel privileged to be the person Margot runs to when she's feeling especially threatened by or jealous of Eloise. I've held her more in the past two days than I have in the last two months, it seems. And really, what else is my holding her and trying to understand than my saying to her, "Yes. Yes. There is room for both of you, and there always will be."

Eloise Theresa

2009-01-01T09:57:00.003-06:00

Sorry it took us so long to post her name. We just wanted to have a good look at her to make sure the name sticks. It does.
First night was a bit tiring, but good all in all. I got to sleep with her in the chair next to the bed. She sucked on my pinkie finger all night. This morning, my finger was so soft and pruny and sweet-smelling, like Eloise.
Right now, Em and Grant are here. They've been a big help in encouraging Margot throughout all this. Last night, when they arrived, Em came right upstairs to where I was bathing Margot. Then JD came up. Then Grant. Margot finally felt special after a day's worth of feeling left out. This has been the hardest part - Margot simply isn't herself. But I can tell she's trying.
Before she went to bed last night, she held Eloise for the first time. She kissed her on the head and made sure she was covered. It was sweet. But when she gave Eloise back to me, she said, "Dad, she's just terrible." I disagree, but didn't make it a matter of controversy.

Daughter

2008-12-31T11:35:00.004-06:00

Born 6:25 am on December 31st.
9 lbs. 4 oz.
20.5 in.
Everyone is doing fine. Labor began around 11 pm on the 30th and continued on regularly and with good progression until the hard pushing started going on 6 o'clock. Margot was able to attend the actual birth, which was a shocking way to wake up, but good nevertheless. She was so brave and curious.
Hannah seemed like a professional birther, and she just charged through everything with her typical resolve. Hell hath no fury like a woman who is overdue. She was so strong.
Joan was able to go downstairs and rest for most of the laboring, but she was there for the finale, and was as concerned and encouraging as a mother ought to be.
For my part, I remained almost completely silent, as I was at Margot's birth - completely taken by surprise over and over again.
We had the privilege of two midwives attending, so we were in good hands. I didn't feel a moment of anxiety, save the normal business of seeing my wife go far, far away from me while remaining all the while next to me.
As we were making our way to the bed after the birth, snow began to fall - a wimpy Kentucky snowfall, but snow just the same - a sort of confetti.

PS:
We're working on the name.

Excessive Anticipation Drives Expecting Mother to NASCAR Fandom

2008-12-28T13:22:00.002-06:00

Anticipation

2008-12-28T13:16:00.004-06:00

The New Bed

2008-12-28T12:46:00.007-06:00

The new bed is almost finished. With the help of our good friend, Ryan, we were able to make a new bassinet for our stubborn daughter. The fabric portion was Hannah's doing, and she continues to best herself with every new project.
Like a good teacher, Ryan gradually gave me more responsibility so that, by the end, I was working on the frame by myself, and with sharp tools too. A few more coats of tung oil, and it will be ready for a sleeping baby, should she ever decide to arrive.

Last Year's Man

2008-12-26T13:05:00.004-06:00

I always want to listen to this song.

"Last Year's Man"
-Leonard Cohen

The rain falls down on last years man,
That's a Jew's harp on the table,
That's a crayon in his hand.
And the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rolled
Far past the stems of thumbtacks
That still throw shadows on the wood.
And the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
On the works of last years man.

I met a lady, she was playing with her soldiers in the dark
Oh one by one she had to tell them
That her name was Joan of Arc.
I was in that army, yes I stayed a little while;
I want to thank you, Joan of Arc,
For treating me so well.

And though I wear a uniform I was not born to fight;
All these wounded boys you lie beside,
Goodnight, my friends, goodnight.

I came upon a wedding that old families had contrived;
Bethlehem the bridegroom,
Babylon the bride.
Great Babylon was naked, oh she stood there trembling for me,
And Bethlehem inflamed us both
Like the shy one at some orgy.
And when we fell together all our flesh was like a veil
That I had to draw aside to see
The serpent eat its tail.

Some women wait for Jesus, and some women wait for Cain
So I hang upon my altar
And I hoist my axe again.
And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began
When Jesus was the honeymoon
And Cain was just the man.
And we read from pleasant bibles that are bound in blood and skin
That the wilderness is gathering
All its children back again.

The rain falls down on last years man,
An hour has gone by
And he has not moved his hand.
But everything will happen if he only gives the word;
The lovers will rise up
And the mountains touch the ground.
But the skylight is like skin for a drum Ill never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
On the works of last years man.

Keeping Vigil

2008-12-25T11:50:00.006-06:00

Last night, Hannah and I went to Christmas Vigil at St. Luke's. The choir was singing beautifully as we entered and found our seats. When we sat down, Hannah leaned over and said that she'd been feeling some different types of contractions - not the boring old Braxton Hicks type - but a type that could take her breath away a little. We both smiled, and I know I became more intent on what we've been doing for these last few weeks: waiting. I felt all jittery in my seat, but I kept still as Fr. George, in a springwater voice, began a litany proclaiming the timeliness of God's coming this midnight. As we began the celebration, every once in a while, Hannah would inhale suddenly, and I think we were both wondering if this would be it - the beginning of daughter's birth, right here in the middle of Mass. My mind was planning the entire thing: the hasty exit, the quick drive home, the call to the midwife, the call to Emily and Grant to come down as soon as possible, the longest and darkest night of laboring, the early morning birth with a sleepy Margot assisting. But it didn't happen.
Yesterday morning, we called Fr. Bush and asked him about a blessing for childbirth he'd told us about this fall. He said he would be glad to bless Hannah this coming Sunday, on the feast of the Holy Family. It would be fitting. Feeling a little bold, I asked him if there were any way to do it at the midnight Mass, as Hannah is due any time now. He was happy to oblige us, and so we spent the day looking forward to a quiet blessing after the Mass had ended. But on our entrance into the church last night, Father caught us and told us he'd like to bless us after his homily, right in the middle of everything, in front of everybody. I think we both felt privileged, but a little nervous too, as it's not easy to stand up in front of a few hundred people while they're celebrating the sheer goodness of a gift-giving God.
We went forward after the homily and Father read the story of Hannah and Samuel, lifted his hands, prayed for us, and then roused the people into applause for us and our new daughter. There, in the candlelight and dying incense, next to the Christ child in the manger, as everyone looked on, I felt like a giant phony, underdressed in my stupid hoodie and jeans, staring at the floor, tugging at my beard, trying to support Hannah and pay attention to Father's words while my knees went weak with realizing that the puny and flickering story of my life was being drawn up into something great and shining and for all the world to see.
After Mass, we went home and fell asleep, both wondering if baby would be working to get out come dawn. By the time Margot woke up this morning and called to the top of the stairs, the contractions were all gone, and now we're back to waiting, though now it's somehow easier.

The Business of Being Born

2008-12-19T08:06:00.002-06:00

As some of you may know, being of sound mind and of dear friends persuaded, Hannah and I have decided to have our second daughter at home. Last night, we watched The Business of Being Born with Joan (Hannah's mom). Maybe it was to steel our resolve, or maybe just to confirm what we already believe to be true about medical practices in this country, but either way, we were shocked by some of the information. We laughed, we cried, but Hannah's water did not break. And afterward, I think we had plenty of good things to talk about. This, for me, is the equation of a good film, so I'm recommending it to any expecting families, but also to anyone concerned with the treatment of women by the medical establishment. It's worth the hour and twenty minutes.

That said...

Our midwife expects daughter to be born some time after Christmas. We had an appointment yesterday, and everything is ship shape, so now we wait. Our bedroom upstairs is filled
with all of our supplies, and we just got the birthing pool yesterday, so now we feel as ready as we'll ever be.

Happy Advent to all. Right now, it's easy to be expectant. I hope I learn something.
Stay well.

Summer Paraphrase

2008-11-30T20:11:00.001-06:00

This summer, the baby grew in Hannah's belly, Margot became a dancer, and I got some creep in me.

Advent

2008-11-30T19:48:00.008-06:00

It seems appropriate to rehab this blog on the first Sunday of Advent. As we look for the One who was and is and is to come, we are also looking forward to the birth of our second daughter.
Margot has named her Curious - and for good reason. Margot is very curious about all things baby. Will Curious poop on the floor? Will she breastfeed with a spoon? Will her favorite color be purple? Will she wear pajamas? Who knows? The mind reels.

I haven't posted since May, evidently. Who knows if I'll be able to live up to any sort of promise as far as this blog goes, but we are hoping to update it as the delivery date nears, as we go through all that (hopefully at home!), and as our daughter arrives. I'd give the job to Margot, but she only likes the letter 'K' and she doesn't know how to attach photos.

Repeat Quiz

2008-05-14T21:38:00.001-05:00

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

Roman Catholic

96%

Neo orthodox

86%

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

82%

Emergent/Postmodern

43%

Reformed Evangelical

36%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

29%

Classical Liberal

21%

Modern Liberal

18%

Fundamentalist

D. Stephen Long Quote

2008-04-24T20:30:00.002-05:00

On Ethics vs. Moral Theology:

"Ethics is primarily constituted by duty, obligation, disinterestedness, and nonpreferential loves that assume universality and accessibility. It focuses on methods and procedures for insuring equal access that take us away from desires for the local and particular in favor of an abstract universal. Moral theology assumes we must first love and adore the everyday, particular focal things before we can be moral. They orient our lives, and that requires preferential and particular loves. If I do not love my children more than all other children in the world, I will not know how to love my neighbor and her children. If I do not know how to love my spouse forsaking all others, then I will not know how to be a good neighbor to the spouses of others. If I do not know how to love God first, I will not know how to love at all. And if I do not know how to love Jesus and his church with the particularity of the people he called into it [...], I will not know how to love God."

Hauerwas Quote

2007-10-10T01:02:00.000-05:00

On the relation between the Church and the modern nation-state:

"I would like Christians to recapture the posture of the peasant. The peasant does not seek to become the master but rather she wants to know how to survive under the power of the master. The peasant, of course, has certain advantages since, as Hegel clearly saw, the peasant must understand the master better than the master can understand herself or himself. The problem with Christian justifications of democracy is not that alleged democratic social orders may not have some advantages, but that the Christian fascination with democracy as 'our' form of government has rendered us defenseless when, for example, the state goes to war." - from Dispatches from the Front

Ordering Desire pt. 2

2007-09-18T19:34:00.000-05:00

Since posting a little while ago on Long's (read: the Christian tradition's) ordering of desire, I've had some time to think about what a few people offered for comments. In addition to this, I've had time to become completely uninterested in my own blog, and so I haven't posted anything.
But in response, specifically to Marcia's revision of Long's list, I've wanted to write something about Evangelical ecclesiology, or lack thereof. I don't know when I planned on doing this, but my good friend, Alan, has summed up anything I might have wanted to say, and he's done so with his typical generosity and gentle provocation. Below I've pasted the comment he left in response to the post and the other readers' comments. I think he does a wonderful job of asking the right questions.
I agree with Alan here, or the implicit position behind his questions. I want to know what Chad and Marcia have to say to this as well, not because they need to account for their positions any more than the next person does, but because I think they've touched on a fundamental dissonance between some very large sectors of the body.
My main disagreement came with Marcia's conceiving of the church as some sort of ambiguous community of which she could be a part, or not, as though it were a PTA committee, a Rotary Club, or the Better Business Bureau. As Alan's comment will show, this places the church in a position of being made sense of, rather than in a position to make sense of, in relation to other "communities." But then this would not be the church, would it? It would be a civil organization, a loose federation of volunteer candy-stripers, rather than a cosmic body instituted by Christ himself.
On the other hand, I can understand where Marcia is coming from. It is not as if the church trounces over the other commitments of our lives, and her list rightly guards against such an idea. However, I would emphasize here that, rather than trouncing or trumping or undoing in any fashion, the church is the place and process by which we make sense of these other commitments, and where we learn to cherish them enough to guard against their demise or diminution. If I'm understanding Marcia correctly, I think she has touched on a very important point here.
Anyhow, here's Alan's comment:

"This is Alan. I'd like to challenge Chad and Marcia to define what they understand the church to be in its nature. If the Church is to be subsumed into the idea of community, then it would suggest one believes that human community defines what the church is, rather than the church defining for the world what the nature of community really is.
The buzzword community I believe can be used to abstract or divide human interaction from God and the practice of sacraments.
Plus, if you divide God from Church (with Family as the interval), then you have reduced the Christian life to a private practice that can be mediated through a variety of generic social institutions. But if your list goes like Jason's (Long's) does then the family becomes part of the Church (God's Family) and thus is capable of redemption and transformation."

Its been a while since I posted, so I don't know if Marcia or Chad will be reading any time soon, but maybe this challenge will provide openings for more conversation.

2007-08-29T19:40:00.000-05:00

Ordering Desire

2007-08-17T08:44:00.000-05:00

I've been reading D. Stephen Long's book, The Goodness of God, and have been challenged to name the ordering of my priorities/desires/allegiances. Long suggests that the first three ought to be understood in light of orthodoxy and tradition, and that they are to be:
1) Church
2) Family
3) Neighborhood
I'd like to think this is true of me, but I'm a bit of a homebody, and so neighborliness does not come naturally to me. I'd just as soon live around nobody. I fantasize all the time about a house out in the country, and that doesn't necessarily preclude neighborliness, but it doesn't exactly promote it either.
And after these three, I don't really know what I'd list, but I haven't posted in a while, and Mary K. is itching for something to read on this here blog, so I thought I'd put it out there and see if anyone else has anything to say about allegiances and what goes where as we live with and for others.

What's Up, Bro?

2007-07-22T14:49:00.000-05:00

2 Old Posts

2007-07-07T20:46:00.000-05:00

A while back, I posted a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that read, "The arc of the universe bends toward justice." And some time after that, I posted a link to a myspace page that I, for some reason, found humorous. The latter post was in poor taste, and what's more, the myspace page belonged to a friend of my wife's family. Well, as with the arc of the universe, I was found out, even after having deleted the tasteless post. This evening, in a sort of cosmic retribution, the page's author's husband emailed me and called me out on my deleted post. I don't know how he ever found it, but he certainly served me mine, and I'm writing this to apologize, publicly, though it will do nothing to repair the embarrassment, annoyance, and hurt feelings I've caused. And it sure is saying something that I wouldn't type this until I'd been found out. I've got a lot of growing up to do.
So, Meredith and Jon, this post is for you and your justifiable indignation at my lame sense of humor. I'm sorry. Thank you for reminding me of what it means to live with people.

Happy Independence Day

2007-07-03T22:45:00.000-05:00

Wilmore usually puts on a good parade for the 4th, complete with free candy and a lawnmower brigade. Afterward, the town provides cheap hamburgers and hot dogs, and Ale 8, the best ginger ale in the world.
After the parade, we're going to have some friends over to grill out and drink more Ale 8. After dark, RJ Corman, the local millionaire, is going to put on a fireworks display for Jessamine County.
All in all, I'm looking forward to the celebration. Should be fun.

Happy Birthday, America!

America, America

2007-07-02T13:36:00.000-05:00

During the prayer this past Sunday morning, the leader spent a decent amount of time thanking God for our political and religious freedoms here in America, said a few words in request of protection for the American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, as almost an afterthought – though the prayer was written, which makes it doubly disturbing – thanked God for our “eternal freedom in Christ.” I looked up at her and knew instantly that she wasn’t thinking about what she doing, but I wouldn’t let it rest. I took it and ran…
I’m sure these sorts of prayers are going to be offered all over America this week, by any number of Christians, of all types. That is to say, this will be a week of inverted priorities, convoluted allegiances, and travestied worship all across this crazy land.
Let’s be clear though: it is not wrong or perverse to thank God for freedom. This is not about giving thanks to God for freedom as such. Rather, this is a question about our words and the ways we use them.
Bizarrely, perhaps fortuitously, the text for the sermon this morning, after the prayer, was from James 3. We were reminded of the tongue’s unique and decisive role in human relationships, and the pastor further reminded us that our words communicate to the world who we are and whose we are. The pastor listed our words along with sex, money, and power as the most influential and decisive elements of human culture. And he had a word to say about the strange physics of speech, in light of James’s metaphors of the rudder, the bit, and the spark – how the seemingly insignificant can exercise a disproportionate agency – and I began to think back to the early prayer.
Most of the thanksgiving was devoted to American independence and freedom, in contrast to the rest of the world, and the fellow believers worshiping elsewhere, perhaps without the protection of any sort of rights. This fed rather naturally into praying for American troops, busy doing God knows what, protecting this freedom from someone. And then, as I mentioned before, the brief word of thanks for redemption, of course hyper-conceived of as freedom this week of weeks. But taking the pastor’s directions, I began to think about the words, the time allotted them, the emphasis placed on them. When is it appropriate to place political and religious freedom before the work of Christ? When is it appropriate to use such a phrase as “in addition” when speaking of redemption? Indeed, when is it appropriate to make tertiary our participation in the rhythms and rhymes of God’s grace in the universe?
I would say never, and especially not on July 4th.
I’m reminded of something Hauerwas wrote about 9/11, and I will edit it here for the 4th: The world was not changed on the 4th of July 1776. It was changed at a Passover celebration in 33 AD. I think, this week, I want to try my best to remember this.
Such inverted priorities, it seems to me, are an index of just how repressed we actually are, and such gentle, attractive, and comfortable repression must be examined. A country, an ideology, or a set of allegiances that can cause believers to not think twice about such prayers of thanksgiving ought to inspire suspicion. To the extent that we are unaware of such ideologization, we are disoriented from our true nature as members of the only lasting and true community, the church. So long as we sing hymns to America in the sanctuaries of our Lord, we are beholden to the possibility of a false god who would ask us to court nationalism and flirt with an illusion of a freedom that does not exist.
The only antidote so such dilution is a full participation in the life of God in the church, and a bold naming of these other gods who seek our submission: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Rome, France, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, America, etc. After a list of such transients though, I recognize the need to admit that I do like America. It’s a beautiful country filled with beautiful people, and we do enjoy abundance after abundance, freedom after freedom, or more appropriately, right after right. But when such a loose confederation, given over to the vicissitudes of history, asks me to sing to it, to put my hand over my heart for it, to go and die for it if I feel the inclination, I have to pull back.
I start to think of the smoke in the air after the fireworks, the hollowed wrappers and tubes of trash scuttling across the lawns after the picnics, the flags taken down, folded up, and closeted until Labor Day. I think of camouflaged bodies piled on the ground, like stacks of so many twenty-dollar bills. The limp, tattooed carcasses of lethally injected inmates. The wasted wrappings of fetal tissue in dumpsters. I think too of bums and CEOs holding hands and skipping off into the sunset, singing, “God Bless America,” and getting the lyrics all jumbled with “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
I start to think of all this and know that it is right and good to pray for it, to name what is good and draw out into the light what is evil. I start to think of the 4th and I learn my own thanksgiving:
For redemption and the chance to live in the terrifying shadow of God’s everlasting wing.
For the safety of the people fighting everywhere.
For America too – for the freedom to even write this and mean it.
And to say that this place is not my first allegiance, not even my second, third, or fourth, but that it is where I live, and a part of who I am, all the same.

Balthasar Quote

2007-06-23T21:23:00.000-05:00

In a roundabout way, I'm heading toward Balthasar, as quickly as I can, without neglecting my school reading. Today, I read this quote in an article called, "The Way of Beauty," by David Clayton, and thought I'd share. I can't wait to read Balthasar for real, whenever that day comes...

"We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love."

True Grit

2007-06-20T16:28:00.000-05:00

This afternoon, we took Margot to the health department in Nicholasville. She tolerated her last set of immunizations until she's four.
Right now she's tooling around between the bedrooms, purse around her neck, as though nothing happened at all. She's tough as nails, and this is how I know:
Ten minutes ago, when I went in to get her up from her nap, she was standing in the corner of her crib, like she always does, waiting for us. On the floor, beneath the animals and blankets she'd thrown out, were two Band-aids. She'd sat in her crib and ripped them from her thighs, and she doesn't yet know about ripping them off quickly.
Evidently, she's stronger than I am.
I wince like a complete nunce at the mention of pain.

Tom's Shoes

2007-06-07T16:13:00.000-05:00

I just read about Tom's Shoes, and I think it's a brilliant idea for a company. If you're in the market for a new pair of kix, they go for a fixed rate: $38. Not too shabby - about the price of a pair of Chucks, last time I checked. Don't judge by this one here though. Tom has all sorts, for you more conservative shoe wearers. Point is, you're getting a good-looking shoe and doing something good for someone else.

Expanse

2007-06-05T21:52:00.000-05:00

My daydreams happen in the same spaces.

Suspended in the middle of the Pacific, surrounded by nothing but dark water, with a face the color of bone, pocked by the last pellets of air from my lungs. Nothing swims by, and I neither sink nor rise, but hold, insensible.

Standing in the middle of the desert,
among the chollas and saguaros, and from here I can see the cloud mesas, and the land beneath them, swimming in the hallucination of heat and distance. I can't hear the silver hum of the sheen, and no birds guide me home.

Straying on the plain alone, wading, in a way, through the thriving grass, and no matter where I turn, the great flat stretches away and away,
its wind waves skirting the hummocks and low spots. When I look ahead, I see nothing but sky above a blade of horizon.

Set loose from the earth, my most ridiculous fantasy, unstuck, like Billy Pilgrim, but not in time. In space. Adrift farther and farther, and wayfaring blankly with one hand stretched toward the waning planet.

I mentioned these spaces to Hannah this evening, after we watched a satellite pass over our back yard. I asked her why I always return to the same spaces in my writing, and in my daydreaming. The ocean, the desert, the prairie, and, embarrasingly, the solar system. I'm as attracted as anyone to the forest, the mountain, the river, and the city, but I don't think, imagine, dream, create, or fear in these terms, and I wonder what effect such expansive spaces have had on the ways I relate to others, the ideas I have, the beliefs I accept, etc.

I developed a fear of water on the Oregon coast. I spent my early years in air conditioned Phoenix, smack in the middle of the desert. I spent my adolescent years in South Dakota, on the edge of a great plain that starts a mile from my parents' house and does not stop until the Black Hills. And I have been terrified of space since I spent the night on a trampoline, counting shooting stars and talking religion, believe it or not, in Nick Cook's back yard when I was 12.
I have no bright ideas about these scapes, but I think they may be important, so I thought I'd ask if anyone else continually returns to the same places to do some thinking, or some imagining, or some fearing.

Boys

2007-06-04T08:28:00.000-05:00

As it happens, we know two young boys who are struggling through a number of health/birth complications right now. I've posted about our nephew, Conley, before, but if you're interested in an update, you can go here. And our neighbors, Ryan and Amberly, have been going through some rough times with their new boy, Athan. Go here for those updates. If you pray, pray, and if you don't, then wish these guys luck and think about them while you're doing whatever it is you do.

Sunday Morning

2007-06-03T15:54:00.000-05:00

This morning, Margot and I attended Wilmore Free Methodist for the first time. Hannah is at work today, so she wasn't able to go with us, which is always disappointing. Hopefully that'll be changing soon.
Anyhow, WFM was very enjoyable, and not a little familiar, being a lot more like the Wesleyan services of my youth rather than the UM services I've been attending of late.
This isn't going to be a long blog, but something the pastor said this morning gave me pause. He was preaching on the evil readily apparent in the world, and the Christian response to that evil, and was basically distilling Niebuhr's Christ/Culture forms down into three different modes: Evading, Pervading, and/or Invading. And in typical fashion, he recommended the third, over against the evaders, who would run from the evil in the world, and the pervaders, who would try to take over and control the world. The pastor, citing Christ's cross, advocated an invasive strategy, whereby the Christian, and the Christian community, would invade the world with love and healing, and would overcome evil with good, rather than be overcome with that evil.
He did not come out directly and say that he thinks the world is evil, and his message was more nuanced than I'm allowing for here, but I was curious about the image of Christ, and so the church, as invader. To me, it smacks of a division between the natural and the supernatural, between the world, as it is, and some world, as we imagine it could be. In this schema, the division is only transcended by a radically inbreaking Christ, who comes all of a sudden, overcomes the world and transforms it. And I think I've been well tutored in this idea of a Christ, but I've got some questions.
If we can take anything from the first chapters of Genesis, I think it is that the created order is good and endowed with God's glory. The Fall may mar this, distort it, pervert it, or what have you, but God does not withdraw the goodness of the world, and neither does God withdraw human goodness. Rather, we are left to our devices, curved in as they are on the self. We are not abandoned to perdition.
Furthermore - from what did we fall? Some other-worldly sphere of ethereal perfection? No. The story takes place in a garden, in all of its organic beauty and asymmetry. I think we can take from the early stories an idea that life here is normal, good, creative, and fulfilling. After the Fall, life is simply less good, less creative, and less fulfilling, and characterized by toil toward these ends.
As a response to this state of affairs, God does not send some ravaging general or anomalous silver-surfing destroyer to set things aright. Rather, God sends a baby, borne into the world, raised by a family, and accustomed to toil and relationships. God sends Christ into reality, with all the subtle gradations Margot is going through right now. To speak of Christ as an invader doesn't seem to account for this very biological, organic, and even mundane advent.
And what's more, to speak of invasion as a method of overcoming seems to indicate that the invaded must be arrested, overthrown, and replaced, when Christ seems to be more interested in fulfilling, revealing, and saving.
What I mean is, Christ reveals reality - things as they are meant to be and actually are here, and so it is inappropriate to speak of an invasion, as though there were some other reality in which God exists, and then this reality, which is simply miry shit. The idea of invasion, and the separation it implies, denigrates God's creation, which is a product and testimony of God's infinite goodness, and not a cumbersome aberration to be sloughed off when we all reach the pie in the sky.
To be clear, the pastor this morning was not intending to suggest that the world is simply a cold, dark place to be struggled through, and he was borrowing the evasion/pervasion/invasion scheme from some other author. I just got to thinking about it, and thought I'd post it to see if anyone else is thinking about it too.

Wallace Stevens Poem

2007-05-29T21:10:00.000-05:00

Alan and I read this poem this evening, and were both struck by Stevens' command of the language, and by the hopelessness of the poem. What an odd feeling - to love something so despairing. I'd come across this poem during my time with Dr. Challakere at UST, and it hit me in a certain way then, but now it is different - maybe because I understand it a little better, though it's still rather a challenging piece for me. I hope you like it...

The Plain Sense of Things

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things.  It is as if
We had come to the end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined.  The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

2007-05-17T08:18:00.000-05:00

These Days

2007-05-14T18:28:00.000-05:00

"Life is a pig sty."
- Morrissey

"The arc of the universe bends toward justice."
- MLK, Jr.

Stephen Dunn Poem

2007-05-06T18:07:00.000-05:00

"At the Smithville Methodist Church"

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the "Jesus Saves" button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren't
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.

O.K., we said. One week. But when she came home
singing "Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so," it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus

doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead,

that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story
nearly as good.
On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats
in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah

and one in which they had to jump up and down
for Jesus.
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what's comic, what's serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child
"Evolution loves you." The story stinks
of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.

New Wilco Album

2007-05-06T07:50:00.000-05:00

You can go here and stream the entire new Wilco album, Sky Blue Sky. I've listened, and I think it's pretty great.
To be honest, I was nervous at first. I'd heard them play a song called, "Is that the Thanks I Get?" and I didn't like it at all for some reason, and I wondered whether or not the new material would be like that song. As it turns out, the new material is great, somehow comforting, and heartfelt. Tweedy's vocals are almost soulful, and the songs move back and forth effortlessly between intense and subdues moments. There's even a slight return to their folksier roots, which is, depending on who you are, a welcome development. I'd been wondering what they could do after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, which seem to go together, the latter being a sort of logical extension of the former. It seemed to me that they couldn't/shouldn't/wouldn't push that sound any further, for fear of beating it to death. But that assumption sort of left me in a vacuum, not knowing what could come next. I should have done better by Wilco by suspending my expectations rather than by descending into cynicism, but I think they'll forgive me. Hell, I've bought enough of their tickets.
Anyway, go to the site, stream the album, buy it on May 15th if you want to, and use it as a tool for enjoying the hot, hot summer.

Conley Monroe

2007-04-30T15:49:00.000-05:00

Hannah's sister, Bethany, went in for a c-section this morning. Somehow, it doesn't seem right to call this a birth, because she was only 25 weeks along, and Conley only weighs 1.5 pounds. In fact, when Beth called, I think she said, "They're going to take him out now," and so she too didn't seem to be thinking of the naturalness and beauty of what was about to happen, but rather the fear and uncertainty. On the way home from work this afternoon, I was thinking about this, and it doesn't seem right to call this a pregnancy either. This was a trial, and I'm thankful that Conley is alive, and that this is over for Beth and her family.
All that to say, if you're a person who prays, then maybe say a prayer for Conley. And if you're not a person who prays, then maybe think about him for a little while and wish him good luck in the days ahead.

Quote of the Week

2007-04-27T17:01:00.000-05:00

Read the following quote on a provocative blog entry:
"[P]hilosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says that being asked to die for a modern state is 'like being asked to die for the telephone company.'"

Sky Bus

2007-04-25T11:49:00.000-05:00

Go here and learn how to travel cheap-ass cheaply.
It's completely legit, but the planes are made of wood, and, as Grant has discovered, they run on hampsters and snake-oil, which is a plus or a minus, depending on who you are.
But seriously, this bodes well for those of us with wanderlust and no money. On the company's opening day - yesterday - they sold 48,000 tickets, which isn't too shabby.

Common Ground

2007-04-23T08:46:00.000-05:00

I heard this report on NPR this morning on the bus. I'd give more detail, but the report speaks for itself, and so you'll have to read/listen for yourself, but then again, you may already know about it all.
Perhaps, for once, people of pro- and anti-abortion can agree on a way to speak together against something so outrageous and heinous as state-mandated abortions.
Of course, the inevitable differences will emerge. The pro-abortion voice will speak in terms of human rights violations in relation to the state's treatment of the mother/parents. The anti-abortion voice will speak in broader terms of human rights violations against the mother/parents and the child.
But despite the fuzzy terms of the debate over fetal viability, and the differences between the two positions in the American debate, in the case of China, we're dealing with 7-9 month-old infants, wrapped in garbage sacks and tossed in waste bins - late, late, late term abortions.

Fatherhood

2007-04-22T17:04:00.000-05:00

I just read this excerpt from Frank Pittman:

"Most boys nowadays are growing up with fathers who spend little, if any, time with them. Ironically, when the boy most needs to practice being a man, his father is off somewhere playing at being a boy...Instead of real-life fathers, boys grow up with myths of fathers, while mothers, whatever their significance out there in teh world, reign supreme at home in the life of the boy. If fathers have run out on mothers, in any of the many ways men use to escape women, then boys can't imageine that their masculinity is sufficient until they too run away from women and join the world of men...Fathers have the authority to let boys relax the requirements of the masculine model. If our fathers accept us, then that declares us masculine enough to join the company of men. In effect, boys then have their diplomas in masculinity and can go on to develop other skills...A boy may spend his entire life seeking that acceptance, and with it a reprieve from masculine striving. If boys can't get acceptance from their fathers, then they are dependent on the company of other men to overwhelm the fathers' rejecting voices or the echoing sound of paternal silence."

From "Beyond the B.S. and the Drum-Beating: Staggering Through Life as a Man," Psychology Today 25, no. 1 (1992).

Practicality

2007-04-22T05:44:00.000-05:00

Hannah and I are fed up with our jobs - she is moreso than I am, but we're still both looking for a change. Understandably, she doesn't want to work every weekend just so we can pay the bills, and understandably, I don't want to drive a bunch of middle/high schoolers to and from a place they hate.
The other night, we were talking about the future, and I mentioned that sometimes I wish I'd been more practically minded, and had chosen a more advantageous major in college than English and writing, which led to further study in un-practical fields, including theology.
But this morning it struck me what an awful thing it is to say theology is un-practical. I think, deep down, that it is the most practical. It is super-practical, if I believe that learning more about God is more important than learning about anything else, or doing anything else, or becoming anything else, or making more than $xx,xxx/year. It is super-practical because it can do nothing less than transform me into someone I ought to be, someone I should've been becoming all along.
Perhaps I don't have to go to school to do this - lots of people study God, and our response to God, on their own - and they are transformed. And maybe circumstances will call for me to drop out, or put things on hold for a while. I was just surprised at what I said the other night - how I'd (un)consciously bought into some other shallow scheme of practicality that has nothing to do with the richness of reality.

Relevance

2007-04-21T15:22:00.000-05:00

My friend, Ryan, and I were talking about a worn-out buzzword in the church right now: "relevant." There's even a magazine by that name. I was reminded of this passage from Stringfellow:
"From my own vantage point and experience [...] the Christian faith is not about some god who is an abstract presence somewhere else, but about the living presence of God here and now, in this world, in exactly this world, as men [sic] know it and touch it and smell it and live and work in it. That is why, incidentally, all the well-meant talk of 'making the gospel relevant' to the life of the world is false and vulgar. It secretly assumes that God is a stranger among us, who has to be introduced to us and to our anxieties and triumphs and issues and efforts. The meaning of Jesus Christ is that the Word of God is addressed to men, to all men, in the very events and relationships, any and every one of them, which constitute our existence in this world. That is the theology of the Incarnation."

Kierkegaard on Friendship and Love

2007-04-15T06:52:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning, while Margot was sleeping, I read some selections of Kierkegaard's Works of Love, in which he deals with friendship and love between people. I think he writes beautifully here, and I thought you might enjoy them, whoever you are...

Does the dance cease because one dancer has gone away? In a certain sense. But if the other still remains standing in the posture which expresses a turning towards the one who is not seen, and if you know nothing about the past, then you will say, "Now the dance will begin just as soon as the other comes, the one who is expected."

----

And so the breaking-point between the two is reached. It was a misunderstanding; yet one of them broke the relationship. But the lover says, "I abide" - therefore there still is no break. Imagine a compound word which lacks the last word; there is only the first word and the hyphen (for the one who breaks the relationship still cannot take the hyphen with him; the lover naturally keeps the hyphen on his side); imagine, then, the first word and the hyphen of a compound word and now imagine that you know absolutely nothing more about how it hangs together - what will you say? You will say that the word is not complete, that it lacks something. It is the same with the lover. That the relationship has reached the breaking-point cannot be seen directly; it can be known only from the angle of the past. But the lover wills not to know the past, for he abides; and to abide is in the direction of the future. Consequently the lover expresses that the relationship which another considers broken is a relationship which has not yet been completed...What a difference there is between a fragment and an unfinished sentence! In order to call soemthing a fragment, one must know that nothing more is to come. If one does not know this, he says that the sentence is not yet completed...But suppose now that it is three years since that they last spoke together. See, here it comes again. That it was three years ago one can know only in the sense of the past; but the lover, who daily renews himself by the eternal and abides, over him the past has no power at all. If you saw two persons sitting silent together and you knew nothing more, would you thereby conclude that it was three years since they spoke together? Can any one determine how long a silence must have been in order to say now, there is no more conversation; and if one can determine this, in a particular instance one can nevertheless know only from the angle of the past whether this is so, for the time must indeed be past. But the lover, who abides, continually emancipates himself from his knowledge of the past; he knows no past; he waits only for the future.

So it Goes

2007-04-12T10:59:00.000-05:00

Listen, Kurt Vonnegut became un-stuck in time yesterday, Wednesday, April 11th, 2007. (Other things have happened on April 11th though: Joel Grey, Ethel Kennedy, Oleg Cassini, Dean Acheson, and Louise Lasser were born, and Napoleon was exiled to Elba in 1814, and the Germans "occupied" Belgrade in 1941, and General MacArthur was relieved of his command in Korea in 1951, and Apollo 13 launched to the moon in 1970, and America stopped kicking the snot out of the Iraqis with an official cease fire back in 1991).
His curly hair and his gun barrel eyes, his smoking mouth and his warm heart, his churning guts and his drooping prick, his crooked knees and his swollen feet all stopped working, and now there's a hole in the world where he used to be - a Twain-shaped hole, a Voltaire-shaped hole - a hole from which sprang Ecclesiastes and Pudd'nhead Wilson and Slaughterhouse Five, and a few other things, but not many.
I don't know what else to say about it. Do you?
I heard the news from NPR this morning, and at the end of Morning Edition, they quoted his last book, Man Without a Country, in which he says, at one point, "If I die, God forbid, let my epitaph be..." It's not so important here what he wanted his epitaph to be. What is important is the first part of that quip. It sums up Vonnegut's writing, to me: hopeful, cynical, sneering, witty, quick, sharp, skeptical, unsure, and, in the end, I think, somewhat prayerful.

I first read Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Breakfast of Champions in high school, and I've since returned to Vonnegut again and again for a strange red and blue pill: laughter and heartache. Back then, I bought the three-in-one hard-backed volume from the discount rack at Barnes & Noble, after reading an interview with Eddie Vedder, in which he recommended a few books. The dust jacket portrayed a rain-coated man, standing in front of a blue, cloud-scudded sky, with his bowler hat in hand and an umbrella hanging from his forearm. The man's head, however, is a featureless space, filled with dark skies and rain. I suppose that's how one feels after reading Vonnegut - absurdly prepared for something that is not immediately visible or apparent, but that is all too real anyhow.
He had a way of announcing the coming and passing of storms that too many people let go unnoticed, or ignored, or repressed. His head seemed filled with these storms: wars and rumors of wars, scientific "progress," de-humanizing institutions, and your run-of-the-mill interpersonal bullshit. And in the end, it was his head that got to him - a fall and a brain injury and a rapid decline. So it goes.
In college, I wrote a poem for him called, "Kersplat! goes the prophet," and I got on the internet and found his mailing address and mailed it to him. He never wrote back. He may never have read it. No matter - it wasn't any good anyway.

All this to say, I guess: 84 years of blood and air and piss and vinegar and cigarettes, out the window.
And a damned shame, too.

2007-04-07T16:06:00.000-05:00

"In the midst of that night, in my darkness, I saw the awesome sight of Christ opening the heavens for me. And he bent down to me and showed himself to me with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the thrice holy light - a single light in three, and a threefold light in one, for they are altogether light, and the three are but one light. And he illumined my soul more radiantly than the sun. And he lit up my mind, which had until then been in darkness. Never before had my mind seen such things. I was blind, you should know it, and I saw nothing. That was why this strange wonder was so astonishing to me, when Christ, as it were, opened the eye of my mind, when he gave me sight, as it were, and it was him that I saw."
- St. Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns of Divine Love, 11.

Response to Joe Rife

2007-03-31T10:33:00.000-05:00

What follows is sort of my response to a comment Joe Rife left on the blog a few posts back, wondering about how people our age (mid/late-twenties) like to talk about the church and the poor and justice and whatnot, but how it all seems like a lot of huff and puff and never any action. I agree with him, and it's a convicting thing to hear, every time I hear it. Our faithful words are all fine and good, our theologies are all very interesting, our ecclesiologies are fascinating, but they don't amount to a hill of beans without good works. Let me be clear on that. I agree. The belief/action binary is a false one, and it is the unique struggle of the faithful to live in its collapse.

But this also got me thinking about my own deeds, my own work, and so, my own writing. For my ethics course, I've been reading a bit of Miroslav Volf's thinking on work, its relation to the nature of life, and its impact on how we understand ourselves. In addition, for Church History, I'm writing a paper on William Stringfellow, and here's a guy who lived precisely in the collapse of orthodoxy/orthopraxy, word/deed, evangelism/social action, etc./etc. And so I've been thinking even a bit more about my own deeds, my work, my writing.

And then I remembered this poem by Amiri Baraka, "Black Art." The poetics he develops in the poem is pretty useful to this discussion, I think. Here is a poem that does something. (Whether we agree with what the poem does, or not, is sort of beside the point, right now. I know this poem will be offensive to most people, but try not to let that color [no pun intended] your reading too much). After re-reading "Black Art" a number of times, I realized that Baraka may mean that a poem isn't a poem until it changes things, until it revolutionizes. The form/content binary is collapsed in order to texturize the poetic into more than artistic expression. Rather, the poem becomes a location in which, and out of which, action takes place. If the poem can "strip" and 'crack' people, then it is beyond expression - it is a mysterious event - a complex of the author, the speaker, the reader: out of which comes a doer of the word, an actor/action that was not possible before the poem, and is infinitely possible afterward. This then is the descent of language into the physical. The word is made flesh. This is the idea given body, time, history, future, blood, guts, and breath. This is poesis, creation/creative act. Baraka is concretizing need, hope, feeling, sentiment, loyalty, fear, and hatred. The poem then is more than a tool or a form, it is a way of life, a way of forming and understanding reality. If this is true for Baraka and his poetry, specifically, can it be true of others and writing in general? What I mean is: if Baraka can write a gun, can I write a loving hand? If poems are "bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons," is my writing bullshit unless it is bread, wine, a word of love, and a word of grace? And if my writing is these things, then am I really just talking about them, or am I doing something?

I don't want to get away from responsibility, duty, and the inevitable connection to others. I'm not calling for sitting in a lonely garret, scribbling the hours away. But I do wonder whether or not our words, my words can effect change. Baraka would say yes, and he would not even claim the power of the Spirit. And, of course, I think we can think of Someone else who would say that a/the Word has power, does have power, when it is spoken/written out of love.

My friend, Alan, found a book on reading theologically - doing away with lenses of suspicion and trading them in for lenses of love and trust. Is there a theology of writing? Is there a way to write theologically? A way to write - content, but form as well? Not just form/content, but the both of them collapsed in on one another for good? I'm not sure. If God can do it in Christ, maybe we can do it in poems, but that sounds a little cocksure to me. Maybe we can just try.

Here's Baraka's poem. Get ready:

"Black Art"

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, wd they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing. We want live
words of the hip world live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking
Whores! we want "poems that kill."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff
poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite
politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . .tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh
. . .rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . Setting fire and death to
whities ass. Look at the Liberal
Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat
& puke himself into eternity . . . rrrrrrrr
There's a negroleader pinned to
a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting
in hot flame Another negroleader
on the steps of the white house one
kneeling between the sheriff's thighs
negotiating coolly for his people.
Aggh . . . stumbles across the room . . .
Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked
to the world! Another bad poem cracking
steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth
Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets
Clean out the world for virtue and love,
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly. Let Black people understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world

We want a black poem. And a
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD

Andrew's Address

2007-03-31T06:47:00.000-05:00

Since Andrew's location is a matter of public record, I guess, I don't really have a problem posting his address here. Most prisons have websites, I think, and you can look up inmates and check their status and everything, so that's that.
For anyone else thinking about Andrew, I think he would like to hear from people - if you knew him, or even if you didn't. He's a thoughtful person, and his letters demonstrate as much.
He has recently moved to a new facility, so maybe letters from people would help that transition along.

Here's his address:

Andrew White #0985847
Lanesboro Correctional Institution
PO Box 280
Polkton, NC 28135

The Prisoner

2007-03-26T09:10:00.000-05:00

Common Ties accepted my essay on my cousin, Andrew. If you'd like to read it, click here.

Always Crashing in the Same Car

2007-03-22T04:47:00.000-05:00

It's early, and I've just returned from taking Paige to the airport. On the way back, in the dark, on the narrow roads, I began fantasizing, as I often do, about head-on collision, which is never the nightmare it ought to be, in my mind. Instead, I think of it in terms of the catastrophy that will inspire a change in my life - a death, a new birth, a starting over. To those who've been in real crashes, this, I'm sure, is offensive. But to someone who has not, the scenario is attractive, and my response is basically narcissistic: no more fussing about with what I don't want to do (I'll be in the hospital), and plenty of attention from loved ones - hell, maybe I'll be handicapped forever after, and never have to work again. It's sick to think this way. And it's grossly unrealistic, but that's the nature of a fantasy at 5:30 in the morning. I was only mildly shocked that I'd begun thinking this way - mildly because I've had fantasies of this brand before: self-indulgent, brash, illogical.
But then I started wondering about what basic need I might have in order to inspire this kind of thought:
the obvious desire to start over, evident again and again within the entries on this blog;
the displacement of the knowledge of my need for forgiveness into the irresponsible language of "accident" and "collision," as though I had no actual need of rebirth, regeneration, as though this sort of thing - forgiveness - might just happen to me, apart from me;
the attractiveness of that event that changes things definitively, finally, ultimately;
the, perhaps American, fascination with disaster and catastrophe, finally come to my doorstep, right here, right now.
And I thought of the story of the Great Flood in Genesis, how that may serve as a definition of the need for catastrophe and rebirth, but how it is also woefully inadequate, when I consider what it points to: namely, the Gospel.

Here's a question: Do others fantasize about always crashing in the same car? And do they feel the need, during or after the fantasy, for a fresh start?
Perhaps it's a useful way of ignoring the need for forgiveness and redemption. I couch it all in terms of hospital visits, physical rehabilitation, recovery, disability, etc. so that I never have to feel directly the fact that I am in need, constantly, of Someone to come and say a word of love to me. I am not simply in the way, in the wrong/right place at the wrong/right time. Rather, I am always already in a state of need and, to the extent that this is true, I am on the edge of disaster, poised, ready to barrel headlong into the hell of my own desire.
But there is one story I have learned to repeat to myself, and it unravels the thread of the Great Flood, and it fills the cracks in the fantasy of head-on collision, and it gently, lovingly, surprisingly reminds me that Someone has already come, and that there is no longer any need for imagining myself on a road, alone, at night, waiting for the worst to happen because it's the only solution I can imagine.

Growing Up Wesleyan

2007-03-10T11:23:00.000-06:00

I grew up in a segment of the church that lacks a strong social action impulse, or, at least, does not reinforce or teach social action in the way it reinforces and teaches evangelism. This is not to say the Wesleyan Church does not provide aid for those in need, but it is to say that the aid provided (a minimal amount compared to some) comes across as secondary to the evangelism provided. Now, I know there are all sorts of historical reasons for looking at social action and evangelism in this stratified way. I also know that it's not necessarily always deliberately stratified. And what's more - I know that a lot of people are interested in placing the two on equal footing for a more holistic approach to relating to others in love.
For those of you interested in this last idea, I thought I'd post some Scripture verses provided by my Ethics professor, Dr. Pohl. As she notes, you wouldn't normally group all these verses together and try to form some comprehensive statement, but the verses do highlight a major theme in Scripture.
For some of you, this will all be rehearsal, but for me, growing up as and where I did, this was news, which is a shame. When I look back at how I was, especially in high school, I can remember feeling that, at church at least, I was considered something of a "liberal" or someone a little more out to the left than others. I became a vegetarian. I was interested in Buddhism and Gandhi. I had a bumpersticker that said "NO NUKES," etc. All the usual high school inactive activist occupations. I even raised money for Amnesty International and passed out orange "FREE TIBET" ribbons in a project for my ecology class. It was all sort of cliche. But one thing sticks out as somewhat painful to me: in a vague and implicit way, I was coerced into viewing my opinions, beliefs, and activities, when it came to social issues, as an extension of something other than my belief in a God who would come as Christ. The wedge between the evangelical call for right belief and the liberal call for social justice was driven straight into my mind, and I was taught no apparatus for merging the unique claims of Christianity with the universal truths of suffering and responsibility. Instead, an Airforce officer at my church chuckled at my bumpersticker; I was warned by those closest to me that "too much" compassion could become wobbly, inclusive, relativist morals and definitions; and I heard nothing, Sunday in and Sunday out, about the suffering, the poor, the oppressed, the orphan, the widow, or the stranger. Instead, I was taught to abstain from sex before marriage in the hopes that I too could go, someday, some way, to far off places where people did not know about Jesus, and tell them that they too should abstain from sex before marriage.
Going to university at one of our denomination's schools did not change this indoctrinating (read: de- or un-doctrinating). My faith became inert, frustrated, stunted, as I felt increasingly alien to the version of Christianity and church in which I'd been raised. Mom, Dad, this is not your fault. The raising of a young Christian requires not only two parents, but an entire body of believers, and the bodies in which I've been raised have happened to be affluent, white, and middle-to-upper class. In other words, bodies that may have bought into the illusion that they have much to lose and little or nothing to gain through social action*.
I suppose that's why I'm posting this - because it's important to me to realize that there are gaps in my theology and in my thought, and they are gaps I cannot explain. When I got to the end of the selection, after reading verses I've been around my entire life, I felt uninformed, distant from the texts, disoriented even...this was not the Bible I read in high school, and these were not the parts of the stories I was told in Sunday School.
Read some or all of these if you have time. They make a difference, somehow.

Genesis 1 – 3

Exodus 20:1 –23:13**
Leviticus 19:1-18,33-34; 24:17 – 25:55
Numbers 35:9-28
Deuteronomy 1:16-17; 10:12-22; 15:1-11; 23:19-20; 24:10-22

1 Samuel 2:1-10
Nehemiah 5:1-19

Job 22 – 24; 29; 31
Psalms 37; 72; 82; 146
Proverbs 16; 31:8-9

Isaiah 1; 55 – 59
Jeremiah 12; 22:1-17
Amos 3 – 5

Matthew 5 – 7; 20:1-16; 23:23-24; 25:31-46
Luke 10:25-37; 14:1-24; 15:11-32; 19:1-10

Acts 2:41-47; 4:32-37
Romans 12
1 Corinthians 6:12-20; 13
2 Corinthians 8 – 9
Galatians 3:26-29
Philippians 1:27 – 2:18; 4:8-9
2 Timothy 3:16
James 2:1-13; 5:1-6
1 Peter 1:13-16
1 John 4:7-21

*You'd think they'd all be left of the left politically in order to assure themselves that someone is taking care of those who can't care for themselves. But no, they are mostly right of the right politically, not wanting any government interference, and of course no taxes, but hoping that the same government will step into the gap left by their abdication.
**Since posting the Decalogue here and there is a hot-button issue right now, I think this passage is interesting in light of what Dr. Pohl and Dr. Gutenson have said about it - namely, that God asks the people first to remember what God has done for them in the past, and then to form a community in light of what God has done. A community based on trust of God and each other, indeed, one based on love of God and each other, where honesty, truthfulness, and compassion form ties that bind together rather than a bunch of isolated rules we can bandy about as though they were merely sentences from nowhere. Incidentally, I don't think we should post the Ten Commandments. It seems inappropriate to me to cut them from their situatedness and paste them on placards where anyone can read them anyway he or she wants to, willy nilly. Instead, we ought to affirm them right where they are, in the long story of the formation of a community that is supposed to form its existence around the themes in the passages above.

William Stringfellow Quote

2007-03-04T09:42:00.000-06:00

From My People is the Enemy by William Stringfellow (sorry about some of the outdated language, but I think he's dead on here):

"Conventional charity, whether governmental or voluntary, like all aspirations of men to discern and do what is good, can cope only partially, impersonally, temporarily, superficially, piecemeal, with the issues which assail the poor. It is impotent against the fundamental reality represented in each of those issues, that is, the threat of death, not only eventually, but on every side in every single moment. The awful vulnerability of the poor is, in fact, the common vulnerability of every man to the presence and power of death in the world. And from the power of death, no man may deliver his brother, nor may a man deliver himself.
Yet it is exactly to the giving over of all men and all of creation and all of history to the power of death, to which the Christian faith is addressed. Christians confess that the whole burden of human existence in all of its variety is death, and insist that the stark, relentless activity of death in all the works of men - even the works which men imagine to be good - must be confronted, not ignored. Indeed, Christians see that death is the substance and outcome of the estrangement of men from God, and within that, of the separations among men and of the hostility between men and the rest of creation.
To become and to be a Christian is not at all an escape from the world as it is, nor is it a wistful longing for a 'better' world, nor a commitment to generous charity, nor fondness for 'moral and spiritual values' (whatever that may mean), nor self-serving positive thoughts, nor persuasion to splendid abstractions about God. It is, instead, the knowledge that there is no pain or privation, no humiliation or disaster, no scourge or distress or destitution or hunger, no striving or temptation, no wile or sickness or suffering or poverty which God has not known and borne for men in Jesus Christ. He has borne death itself on behalf of men, and in that event He has broken death itself on behalf of men, and in that event He has broken the power of death once and for all.
That is the event which Christians confess and celebrate and witness in their daily work and worship for the sake of all men.
To become and to be a Christian is, therefore, to have the extraordinary freedom to share the burdens of the daily, common, ambiguous, transient, perishing existence of men, even to the point of actually taking the place of another man, whether he be powerful or weak, in health or in sickness, clothed or naked, educated or illiterate, secure or persecuted, complacent or despondent, proud or forgotten, housed or homeless, fed or hungry, at liberty or in prison, young or old, white or Negro, rich or poor.
For a Christian to be poor and to work among the poor is not conventional charity, but a use of the freedom for which Christ has set men free."

Unacceptable Jokes

2007-03-04T05:56:00.000-06:00

Just so you know, Hannah and I have decided that the following "jokes" or one-liners or whatever they might be are not the guaranteed laughs they once were, and it'd be great if you and every one else would stop using them:

1. The "memo" joke: "Hey, Bill, didn't you get the memo? Etc." Boring because it's most often tied to a group of people who all happen to wear denim shirts to the office on the same day, a group that, incidentally, excludes Bill.
2. The "invention" joke: "Well, Bill, it's this new invention called an xyz, you might have heard of it." Pathetic - especially when people use it for the telephone.
3. The "possession" joke: "Hey, Bill, Michael Jackson called, and he wants his xyz back." If every quirky person wants his/her quirky possession back from an unquirky person's misappropriation, then the joke never worked in the first place.

Shape up. Get some new jokes. Be funnier. People will like you more.

Lenten Reflection: 2/26/2007

2007-02-26T15:46:00.000-06:00

All day long, from the silence, I watch the silent. They pass, but their steps, their voices, their many gestures are soundless, and we live like this, all day, them and me, as though we were passing each other in the night, deep below the ocean's surface. We live like this all the time - moving about without audience, unobserved and unobserving. It is a silence of sense - I see not, speak not, hear not, do not, want not, know not, when it comes to others - and they, when it comes to me.
But today, as though I'd said a special prayer in the morning, I saw them all, and I see them all, and I hear the dying birds in their throats, threatening song.
Indeed, I hear them and see them and they sound like my heart, moved to love - almost - beating the cadence of God's mind.

The woman filling in the crossword, the Sudoku.
The family crossing the street, teaching the son to look both ways.
The yawning man, en route to the office.
The children, everywhere, the children on buses, particles within larger particles, ricocheting home.
Through glass and cotton and leather, through metal and vinyl and air, through leaves and sunlight and denim, I feel a desire to descend to them, grab their faces, kiss their lips, and breathe into them the very animating breath of God.
I feel self-righteous.
I imagine their faces when they discover my thoughts.
I feel shame.
I read their thoughts when they hear these words.
I feel like Walt Whitman.
Who am I to descend? Am I not continually ascending to the face of my wife, to the growing body of my daughter? Do I not climb upward into the arms of my friends, into the shadow of my savior's ever-loving wing?
Who am I to descend? No one - only a man, inexperienced in love, new to the ways of God, silent as a bird in winter, resting completely in silence.
Well, silence of mind, anyway. Outside, the diesel engine, Margot's cries, the coming spring, and the children, again, everywhere. But inside, the lenten silence, the aperture through which I see, though dimly, Golgotha. And here, from the poverty of my spirit, I look again to all these others, and say, "Hello."
I want to love them, but I do not.

Perhaps this is the beginning of holiness.

Fat Tuesday

2007-02-20T20:46:00.000-06:00

I should have known, by the way the day began, that I'd end up writing about it. On the bus this morning, one student called me a dumb-ass and two others lit up in the back seats, for the second trip in a row, taking advantage of my inability to get in a huff about the rules and the ways in which these bored and boring kids flout them. I wrote them up, again, and went about my business.
In ethics class, I spent another exhausting dose of time listening to others wallow around in misunderstaning the professor, assuming too much, and simply not listening.
Then there was a bright point. The apostolic preacher, the pastor to the papal court and to the pope himself, came to ATS to speak in chapel. Father Raniero Cantalamessa spoke to us, touched beautifully on ecumenism, and reminded us about free grace. Afterward, Hannah and I went to get Margot out of the under-staffed nursery and found her sitting in the middle of a large room full of screaming kids, content in the center of a hula-hoop, playing with a toy phone.
Things were looking up. Church History II was interesting, as always - today: Zwingli, Simons, Anabaptists.
But then I had to go drive again, and before I left, Hannah showed me the bill for the semester, and we discovered I'd been charged $560 for student insurance I didn't request, and don't need. (Turns out, you have to waive the insurance each and every semester. A first year student, I didn't know this. We're past the drop-add period, the website I found says "No Refunds," and no one is answering in the student accounts office).
So I went to the bus - the job I needed for insurance coverage - the job I no longer need, I guess, if I can just shell out a few thousand extra in loans for living expenses. Hell, why not pay for everything with loans. I'm 20-something and American, after all. Somebody is out there just waiting to fund my life.
The elementary students were high as kites on whatever sugary foods the cafeteria is supplying these days, and any number of cans of Mountain Dew their parents keep sending in their brown bags. And I'm sure I've got a few students whose Ritalin has worn off by the time they get on to ride.
For the entirety of both routes, elementary and middle/high school, I was stewing over my future $560, spread out over the life of the loan, somewhere in the distance.
Another tiny stone tied to the rope round my neck, click-clacking against another tiny stone: prospective employers requiring 2+ years of experience, and not in bus driving or steaming lattes, click-clacking against another tiny stone: the self-induced pressure I feel whenever I'm in class in this program of theological studies - a foreign field, with a new language and a different history than anything I've ever heard or seen before, click-clacking against another tiny stone: the question of whether or not to leave Wilmore, Kentucky, the entire region, and where to go to, and whether or not that will entail switching schools, or what, exactly, click-clacking against the thought that these preoccupations are taking me away from being the husband and father I know I can be, click-clacking against the guilt I feel over my frustration at these gentle sufferings, what with Lent almost upon me, and the daily news of the world, suffering not so gently out there.
And I got in my car, after parking the bus, and drove to the library - always a sanctuary - picked out three DVDs: Flags of Our Fathers, The Devil Wears Prada, and The Fog of War, and drove home. But when I sat down on the couch, Hannah sat down next to me and took up a piece of knitting, and I couldn't hold it in anymore. I had swelled for the last two hours, the last two months, really, and I began to cry. In the car I'd prayed to sweat blood, or bullets, or anything unnatural to prove to myself and to God that I'm in earnest here. To prove that I'm out of control, and I know it. But it didn't happen. Nothing happened. And I cried on the couch.
I saw that girl's face when she called me a dumb-ass for no reason, without knowing me, without seeing that I do not wish her ill will, and, indeed, that I do not wish her anything - that my life would go on without her, as smoothly as you please. I remembered when she called me a dumb motherfucker for missing a stop when I was still a substitute, and I thought of what her home must be like, and of what her thoughts may be, when she actually thinks. And her face went away.
I saw those God damned 560 dollar bills spinning through one of those counters the dealers use, fanning briefly like the wing of the ugliest bird you'd ever want to see.
I saw the stack of poems on my desk, unfinished, scratched out in the cold, before I put the bus into drive.
But I also saw a flock of doves flying from Father Cantalamessa's mouth, out the unopened windows, and into the newly spring air. And I just kept crying. I let it all out, slowly, like a fat man shedding weight over time and with much effort: my crap resume, the aloof postures of my professors, the endless lists of job openings in fields of which I know nothing, the platitudes that pass for prayers before class, the anniversary of Andrew's crime, the beauty of my daughter, her approaching first birthday, the green beer we will drink, the friends and family who will descend on our box of a townhouse, my wife's hands whirring through the air with yarn. I felt lighter. I stopped crying. I wanted a drink.
Friends came over and brought jambalaya, maque choux, white chili, bread pudding, and king cake. We ate and talked more about Father Cantalamessa, about times for Ash Wednesday services tomorrow, and about what to give up for Lent.

Alien Corpse

2007-02-12T18:19:00.000-06:00

For the real deal in music critique: go here, or else.

Saturday Afternoon

2007-02-03T14:10:00.000-06:00

Maybe it's the rejection letter from Sun magazine. Maybe it's that Hannah is at work this weekend, and I'm at home, waiting for Emily and Grant to arrive. Maybe it's that the semester begins on Tuesday, and I'm gearing down to handle another few months of reading and writing. Maybe it's just my personality, but today I feel like I'm being worked on.

I think I've been operating under the assumption that, sooner or later, life is going to begin happening for me, and I'll probably end up famous and wealthy, able to help lots of people with my unlimited financial and cultural resources. This may trace back to the early rock'n'roll stories I was attracted to: the small bands making good, etc.
But I keep coming back to something I saw in Derrida. He said that Americans always feel as though they've a camera following them around all day, interested in their every move. And I think I've begun looking for that camera, or at least the reasons why I believe that camera is there - that infinite potential, that American dream, that personal manifest destiny I was tacitly taught to believe to be the true nature of life in the U.S. if I simply want it bad enough. I don't know if the feelings of today, the exhaustion from thinking about the future, the anxiety from wondering about the possibility of failure, the hope from considering that maybe I do indeed have potential to do something "great" - I don't know if these feelings are symptomatic of being a twentysomething - they probably are - but they're here, and they keep cropping up throughout the weeks.
Does anyone else feel that way? As though something is just around the corner, and it's going to be good? And does anyone else counter that feeling with the thought that we've been taught to think that, and to accept the possibility of it, no matter what the data shows? Let me know if you do, because I'm getting tired of all this, and I'm just sure one of you has the answer to my life's questions.
Or maybe I already have the answer.
As I said, I've been home alone with Margot today, and I've been talking to her about some of this stuff. She responds wisely, "Bwah bwah, blah. UUUhuuuuuuUUh." (Sorry, I feel like that's a pretty typical dad joke, but she does look me right in the eye when she says "it"). Anyway, I walked around the living room with her in my arms, getting her ready for her nap, and I told her this:
"If the only point to my life, when it's all said and done, is that I take care of you, make sure you're healthy, educated, safe and secure, somewhat prepared for the future, and loved, then that's alright by me."
Now, I'm not trying to write a Hallmark post, and I don't want anyone to make any sort of assumptions about the kind of father I am, but I do think it's significant that I'm asking very real questions about the future, even trying to phrase them in prayers, and then picking up my daughter and finding myself speaking the possible answer right out into the living room, as though it were nothing. Is it so terribly complicated or mysterious that I could be alive in order to care for those around me? I don't think it is, but then again, I've been raised beneath an alternate rubric to the American dream: Love the LORD your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. In this light, I'm an idolater, worshiping myself, masturbating my destiny into existence/oblivion by focusing on what I want, what I need, what I must accomplish in order to feel satisfied and productive. I'm a Protestant, after all, and if I can't feel productive, then what's the point? And anyway, that American dream is seductive, potentially lucrative, etc. But I keep thinking of Pound's line: "An old bitch gone in the teeth," and I think maybe that's the way I feel about the dream that someday, someway, I'm going to be able to have as much as I want, for as long as I want, for no other reason than my own desire. In the end, I think these are the motives that have been driving me, the assumptions that have been informing some of my decisions, and that's scary.
Perhaps my greatest productivity right now is in stacking Legos with Margot, and not in piddling out poem after poem for no one, or a very few. Perhaps my greatest satisfaction ought to lie in submitting myself to the majesty of her little body, the beauty of her racing mind, and not in how much I can get done in a day, how intelligent I can prove myself to be, or how balanced and aware I can appear to be. My life is going to be short, is already short, and why would I set out to fill it with the boredom of myself? Why not fill it with the beautiful variations of others, the unending textures of relationship? I do not want to come to the end, look back, and see only the flat span of my own interests. I want to look back and see undulation, meander, and the torn-down hindrances of letting in others.

Rock and Roll

2007-02-02T05:42:00.000-06:00

Things have been stacking up: our jobs are not ideal, I'm waiting for the semester to start, we want to move to Cincinnati, we've a friend who feels her own mind is turning against her and the suffering is hard to watch, we're missing our families, I haven't seen Derek or Micah or Shrontz in like months, and I feel as though my drive to write is drying up, though I continue to try to persevere. And on top of this, we're having difficulty finding a church in which we feel we fit. The Rock/La Roca UM church is a wonderful community, but it's so far away, we don't really have the opportunity to be a part of anything but Sunday morning worship, and what, with Hannah's weekend work schedule and all...it's taking time to figure out how to go to church.
We're kind of blue right now.
But during this time, I've sort of rediscovered something I'd maybe forgotten about rock'n'roll: that it's for people just like us, in situations just like this, when things aren't so much depressing or dark as they are frustrating and suffocating.
I first learned this in 8th grade, fresh off of my family's move from Phoenix to Sioux Falls. The move was not ideal for me, at the time, and I turned very quickly to music to help me through. My friend, Al, gave me Counting Crows' August and Everything After before I left Phoenix, and I played the hell out of that album. I can still see the drab suburbs in autumn every time I listen to it.
My "girlfriend" (the move wasn't all bad) bought me U2's Rattle and Hum for my birthday that year, and through it I formed a connection to my friends in Phoenix, who were U2 fans before I was, and who let me in on the secret that I probably should become one.
Somewhere along the line, I'd bought Tom Petty's Wildflowers at Target, and I felt like a scumbag rebel Wesleyan when I listened to "You Don't Know How it Feels." It was completely amazing. My friend, Evan, had smoked pot in Phoenix, and I had a social contact buzz from his experiences, and from "getting it" when Petty sang, "Let's get to the point, let's roll another joint," though it'd be a long time before I'd try rolling anything myself.
At Edison Middle School [read, Hell], some imbecile traded me a copy of Pearl Jam's Vs. for a can of Mountain Dew, and I'd crank that when no one was home, stand in the middle of my basement bedroom with my hockey stick turned upside down, and sing it at the top of my lungs, following Eddie Vedder's vocal posturings as closely as possible.
Also that year, I saved up money from helping my parents with their paper route, and I bought my first CD player. The first CD I bought was Bob Dylan's 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration at Madison Square Garden. I'd wanted to know more about Bob Dylan, and the concert featured Vedder and Mike McCready, and it was a double disc, so it made sense to me, in a musically and fiscally responsible sort of way. I'd been impressed by Adam Duritz's melancholy lyrics, and Vedder's not-yet clichéd angst, but I'd never heard a thing like Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." That was the next level. There was no going back. I talked to my friend, Dave, about it, and he said, "They all [other bands] want to be Bob Dylan, and Counting Crows are the only ones who admit it."
From there, I began to live beneath an avalanche of music. I bought Vitalogy, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Ten, Nevermind, and I think I got Led Zeppelin's I that year. I wasn't chic, by any means. I wasn't hip - I still wore my basketball shoes with my tattered jeans, and it took a while to get rid of my University of Michigan Starter jacket, the pullover kind with the front pouch pocket. You know what I'm talking about. But right then, during that entire eighth grade year, I was a picture of a rock'n'roll fan - frustrated, unsure, suffocating, a bit angry, awkward, a bit nerdy. I stopped listening to the radio, became uninterested in hits, and wanted to know whole albums. And now I just remembered that great conversation between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous. At one point, Hoffman's Lester Bangs says something like: The only true currency in the world is what is shared between two people who are truly uncool. I'm no Lester Bangs, and I never went on tour with any band, but I suspected that the people singing those songs on those albums were about as uncool as I felt, and I discovered some connection to the awkward, frustrated guys on the other side of those records, and the connection was a line that dragged me through my stupid eighth grade year.

Well, lately, I've been listening to some early Bruce Springsteen. Ty bought me Born to Run for Christmas, and Alex bought me Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle for my birthday. Who is more frustrated than the Boss in the mid-70's? His masculinity is at a crisis, all his friends are about to die, the girls are driving him wild, the man is getting him way, way down, and he just can't seem to stop driving really, really fast.
Hannah and I have been working our way through the Beatles' Anthology as well, and those early shows in Hamburg, all the uppers and blues rock - all that youth and black leather - the fainting girls, the strippers, the quickening momentum of rock'n'roll...it's enough to make me want to say something like, "I believe in rock'n'roll," though I won't. That's Bono's job.
But speaking of Bono, mother bought me U2 By U2 for my birthday, and I've been enjoying it. The Edge has that geek-chic way of speaking about the science of rock'n'roll as though it were something you could devote your entire life to, and I sort of believe him.

The point, I suppose, is this: I feel as though I'm in a second eighth grade: frustrated, unsure of myself and who I am becoming as a father and a Christian, desperate to move on, but unable right now, stuck in a basement room in my mind, screaming into a hockeystick at the frustrated, awkward kids on my bus, and I've felt a renewed interest in the significance of rock'n'roll in my life. I hesitate to use "rock'n'roll" over and over again, but it's most accurate - this isn't just an attraction to music in general, though that certainly exists for me. Rather, it's the more specific attraction to that giant middle finger in rock, the restriction of tight jeans, the toughness of leather, the hardness of cigarette smoke, the wheel and the road, the beat not tapped but pounded. Bob Seger walks into a diner and is laughed at for his long hair. Iggy Pop wants to be your dog. Lou Reed feels just like Jesus’ son. Bob Dylan is bleeding. Neil Young is a lonely boy out on the weekend. The Boss is on fire. Alec Ounsworth is a hick with an awkward voice. Paul Banks is a pervert. Ian Curtis sings from a Nazi brothel.
Things stack up. Rock’n’roll puts a beat to it and makes it bearable.

Happy Birthday to Me

2007-01-17T09:54:00.000-06:00

I turn 26 today, and for a present, I blew $1,040 on car insurance and KY vehicle registration.

Call me if you want me to send you a bill for some crap you don't want. I'll think of something.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

But on a lighter note, Hannah got me one of these, for which I'm very thankful:

New Poem

2007-01-09T11:34:00.000-06:00

Boy
For my grandfather, Sam


Lenny!
Get your black ass 
 up here.

From the maple tree
I hear this,
 his mouth spitting

the scat of dark birds
flying from his tongue,
 profanities unperched,

freed by failure: the horse
loose in the paddock,
 scamping round 

the manure pile, dust
roiling and the chore
 boy nowhere in sight.

Lenny’s
body is not black,
 what I’ve seen of it,

under his Detroit shirt,
shit smeared jeans,
 sheen of sweat.

Lenny is brown,
for sure, I think, and Sam,
 blind in one eye.

(From working in the dirt with
a knife that sprung back at him,
 as though it meant to).

Sam, a convert from old
habits, former patterns, useless
 speech from a tongue

stuck in the mud, and Lenny,
a kid from Lapeer, needing
 summer cash, black

ass,
evidently
 nowhere in sight.

In the paddock, arms spread,
Sam corners the horse, bobbing
 toward her like a buzzard.

Lenny!
Goddammit!
 Where the hell…

Up the walk, Lenny,
full grain pails in hand,
 unaware, in time

to see Sam grab the lead shank,
the horse lift into the air, and the two
 freeze in tension.

Pulling against one another, Sam
pitifully down, the horse, all power now,
 up. It is beautiful. 

It is a perfect shape to me,
framed with maple leaves,
 mythic,
 frightful,
 pathetic.

None of these, but maybe sad,
seeing a man calling out to one
 he loathes, for help.

New Poem

2007-01-09T11:31:00.000-06:00

Local sex
For Padmaja Challakere


Cassie Potraz put
 her tongue in my ear.
I begged her: Stick it all the way through.
 She didn’t hear me.

Somewhere a bell rang,
 her perfect breast left my arm.
I begged her: Stay here until I’m through.
 We became late for class.

Black letter
 after black letter,
perfect white page
 on top of perfect white page,

all bodies touching,
 buttock and thigh
over deserts opened by my
 eyes,

all bodies touching,
 length and hair
in skin stretching shadow
 over muscle and blood.

I turned the spine,
 showing her your name,
William Carlos Williams.
 When I said it, I sounded like wind

over prairie,
 curling at the hummocks,
across the plain again,
 always sounding out

the words I would use for
 tongue, breast, cotton, spring,
light falling through the high school
 library windows.

From the gut

2007-01-07T21:22:00.000-06:00

Hannah and Margot are in Maine, visiting family, and I miss them very much. My mother sent me this photo this weekend. Maybe you miss someone too, and this will help you the way it helped me. I don't even remember how to smile like this anymore, which is a shame, but the fact leaves me hopeful for what Margot will have to teach me, even after a short trip to Maine.

Quote of the Day

2007-01-05T09:58:00.000-06:00

From Baxter Orr's blog, "Fancy Angst Machine":

"2007 is like turning 17. No one really gives a shit."

U2

2007-01-02T09:44:00.000-06:00

If you haven't seen the new U2 video, maybe you should click here.
No matter what your opinion of the band, or their songwriting, I think the video encapsulates perfectly what music can do for and to people. And as a sort of bonus, for those who are interested, I think there's a suitably idealistic gospel message, soaked in a naivete we've come to expect from Bono, but also a naivete that easily becomes, in light of the gospel message, faith and hope.

4/5

2007-01-02T09:35:00.000-06:00

The following four bands, I think, are accomplishing similar tasks with their sounds, but in different ways, and with varying degrees of success - in my opinion. I'm looking for a fifth band to round out the list, and I'm curious about anyone's opinion on the order, from least successful to most:

4. Snow Patrol
3. Coldplay
2. Elbow
1. Doves

To me, these bands have mastered that chiming, triumphant pop sound, and anyone could end up, anytime, at any one of their concerts, with his or her hands waving in the air, feeling similarly triumphant and at least okay with life.
Anyway, your thoughts, if you want...

100th Post

2006-12-30T09:11:00.001-06:00

You Have to Lose

2006-12-29T20:12:00.000-06:00

"You have to lose. You have to learn how to die-ie-ie, if you wanna wanna be alive."
- From "War on War," lyrics by Jeff Tweedy

I've been on break from school and from work at the bus garage for the past two weeks, and I've gotten the taste again for that jobless lifestyle I enjoyed in Rochester. But on January 2nd, I have to go back to driving for Jessamine County Schools, and I'm not looking forward to it. In fact, today, walking in circles with Margot, I was thinking about how much I don't like my job, and how much I enjoy being home, with enough time to read, write, and play with my family. And now that my unbounded free time is coming to an end, I feel like complaining about yet another dead-end job, and yet another semester of school.
But Hannah has been reminding me of why I took the bus job in the first place: 4 hours of work per day, and so plenty of time for school work, and more importantly, family time. See - in these early months of Margot's life, Hannah and I feel it's very important for her to see us both, to know us both, and to spend as little time as possible wondering where we are. The bus job has afforded me the time and the money to make a life like this - and the life is not for me, but for my wife and my daughter - my two best friends.
And now I'm thinking - when I complain about that job, I'm really saying that I'd rather be doing something purely for myself, fulfilling to me, engaging to my mind. But who else would that benefit? It is not my New Year's resolution to stop complaining, but it is my decision to appreciate this crap job for what it is: a way into a better life for Margot, and putting her first comes both naturally and unnaturally.
I've never had to put someone else's needs before my own. Hannah can take care of herself, and I can care for myself, and we can simply choose to care for each other. But Margot needs us to care for her. (Oddly enough, the evidence for the importance of parental love and care is nowhere more evident than in the behavior of all the latch key kids on my bus). This need inspires me to be paternal in the way that I was evidently meant to be. But on the other hand, I can still feel my own desires creeping up, my own frustrations at not being able to do what I want to do all the time. In this sense, Tweedy is right - I have to lose this part of myself (one more thing in a long list of things I need to lose) in order to be the parent I ought to be. And insofar as I have to lose parts of myself, I have to die for Margot, if I want to be the person she needs. And if I believe that the death of the self is the beginning of the discovery of the true self, the logic of personhood (and I do), then in order to be alive, true to my self-hood, I need Margot to show me how to do these things so that I can lead the life I ought to lead. Perhaps this is too much 'ought' for some, but Tweedy's words ring true with the call to lay down my life and pick up something much larger, much better, for the sake of so much more.
And so, if working as a school bus driver can teach me a bit more about humility and patience, and if driving also gives me the odd half hour to play Legos with Margot, then for the spring semester of 2007, I'll say, So be it. Amen and amen. What else can I say?

A Unified Theory of Everything: Merry Christmas

2006-12-24T05:39:00.000-06:00

Everyone is looking back over the year, compiling lists, rehashing debates, etc. I look back over 2006, and I make a sad little list of my own:
My cousin killed a person,
my best friend's mother was killed while crossing the street,
my ex-girlfriend's brother died in Paris from a sudden attack of cancer,
a young man (18?) from my home church crashed his car and died,
friends of friends have taken their own lives, have overdosed, have lost family members I've never met,
and I could list, but won't because of my midwestern propriety, a litany of infidelities and abuses between people who were supposed to love each other.

My parents are down for Christmas, and I said that 2006 hasn't been that great. Mother was more succinct. She said, "Shit-bucket." Same difference.

(Julie, here's the part, even if you still don't believe in God, that you might enjoy, if you're reading)...

I've been thinking about Bono too. Here are some lyrics that get me every time:

"Grace makes beauty out of ugly things
Grace finds beauty in everything
Grace finds goodness in everything."

And here is a paraphrase of something he told a Rolling Stone interviewer once about Christianity:

That the logic of the entire universe can be wrapped up in the coming of something so beautiful and simple as a baby - that's something I [Bono] can get behind.

Or something pretty close to that.

When I look back over this shit-bucket of a year, through Bono's not necessarily rose-tinted designer shades, I realize that I'm too quick to forget the one event that ought to be at the top of any of my retrospective lists: Margot's birth. And when I do think of all the death slithering toward my family, all the bitterness and outright meanness of people toward each other, I can see how Margot's birth covers those thoughts for me, redeems them, makes them a little more bearable, even. And though it's difficult to understand, Margot's birth might even make them beautiful. And what I mean by beautiful is the possibility that the universe, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, may still be characterized by creativity, fecundity, life, and most of all, love. But it can only be characterized this way if we choose to do so. I think of what Bono has seen, what he has done, where he has been, and I don't know if I'd still be able to speak about the universe in the same way...he must have to make a conscious effort to see through all the fly-ridden and emaciated bodies of the world to the logic behind it. Admittedly, it is often a sick logic to me. A logic I hate, one at which I cringe. And after 2006, I most often want to give it the finger and move on to really losing hope.
But I can't do that.
I can't attempt to construct a logic of suffering either. I don't really appreciate books about why bad things happen to good people, because I can't imagine actually handing them to good people who are experiencing bad things. So this post is not one of those things: I cannot explain away 2006. I simply want to say that I have not lost hope, even though I kind of want to sometimes. Some might say this is the essential function of "faith" - to give people hope. And I agree with that, in part. But when I look at Margot, I feel the hope go deeper, further back, toward the way things actually are, and that puts the shit-bucket into perspective.
Here's another lyric from Bono that might help:

"Jesus, Jesus help me,
I'm alone in this world,
and a fucked up world it is too."

This Christmas, I choose to affirm that there is a logic behind the things that happen, and I confess that the logic does not preclude hope, but instead can inspire it, and I believe that when everything falls away, this logic is what we will know, even as we are fully known, and I have faith that it will be love.
Perhaps this only makes sense to me because I am a new father - you can post a comment if that's the case - I'd love to hear how it doesn't make sense. But right now, with the tree all lit up, and Margot jabbering over the monitor, and Andres Segovia twiddling away on his guitar, I am finding rest in this unified theory of everything - the inbreaking of actual, concrete, blood and guts hope.

Masculine Moment

2006-12-21T10:15:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I walked to the IGA in my new blue suede shoes (the 2nd pair of my life), and bought some lavender-scented Pine-Sol. I came back and put Margot down for a nap, filled my bucket, and began scrubbing the kitchen. I had the iPod on shuffle, and Martha & the Vandellas came on with "No Where to Run." I felt like dancing. And then I stepped back and looked at myself for a bit, and thought that maybe there weren't a lot of guys in Kentucky, at that moment, scrubbing their kitchens and listening to Motown singles and revelling in the smell of strong, almost industrial, lavender.
This isn't to say that I think I'm somehow set apart or over and above the guys of Kentucky. It's just to say that I had a moment, and I laughed to myself, because there was no one else around.

This segues, somehow, into something else I've been thinking about after Hannah and I watched Osama the other night. First off, I recommend it without reservation. It's very good. This is Netflix's (how awkward is that to say?) synopsis:
"This stunning film, the first to be made in a post-Taliban Afghanistan and inspired by a newspaper account read by director Siddiq Barmak, recounts the efforts of a family of women to survive under an oppressive regime. To eke out a meager living, they dress up their 12-year-old girl, Osama, as a boy so she can work."
This scheme falls apart though, and Osama ends up given to a mullah in marriage, against her will, locked away, and separated from her family.
For a while, during the film, the events seemed so distant, even if they were pretty disturbing to watch. The Taliban, Afghanistan, radical Islam, etc. - these are things that are easy to shelve in my mind. I can feel, if I choose to, completely divorced from them. But then, afterward, Hannah and I were talking about things, and I recalled three episodes from my own past, and I could no longer shelve Osama's story.

1. When I was young, I would visit my grandparents' farm in Michigan. My parents raised me to share all household responsibilities with the rest of the family, and so after dinner one night at my grandparents', I began to clear the table. My grandfather stopped me and told me that I should sit back down - it was grandma's job to clear the table. I said, "No, that's okay. I can help," and went on doing what I was doing.
This is obviously a minor incident, and there was no heat or meanness in his voice, but my grandfather's words betray something unforgotten even in our contemporary and supposedly progressive setting: the desire and ability to separate the genders arbitrarily. Perhaps somewhere in our distant past, there was a function to separating work by gender, but clearing tables in the 90's is not a task requiring special, gendered skills or dispositions.
I suspect that Islam, for some, represents something antiquated and exotic - a religion that sort of forms an unbroken bridge to the past. The turbans, the desert, the obvious oppression of women, the polygamy, the distance from suburbia, and the trans-historical continuity of Muslim religious observance - all these seem to me to represent a convenient and simplistic characterization of a faith as the same as it always has been - and so it is also easy to, with a flip of the wrist, say that all the "problems" we're having with radical Muslims are an outgrowth of Islam's inability or unwillingness to change, to modernize, to get with gentle and progressive American ideals. But then I think of my grandfather, telling his adolescent grandson not to help the woman of the house, and I wonder who indeed has embodied the progressive, modernized, and obviously better ideal.

2. In high school, my family took a trip to Maryland to visit my maternal grandparents. My grandfather was the district superintendent of the Chesapeake district of the Wesleyan Church at the time. One of the pastors in his district took us out on his fishing boat in the Bay. This was his main source of income, as his church was rather small, rural, and unable to support him and his wife. After some fishing, we came back to his house, where his wife was preparing a dinner of soft-shell crabs for us: the whole thing: newspaper on the table, big bowls for the remains, butter and lemon, etc. We sat down to eat, hungry as fishermen. After the wife put everything on the table, she retreated to the kitchen, where she sat on a stool and ate at the kitchen counter. My mother said to our host, "Your wife can come in here and eat with us. There's room at the table." But the host replied, "No, she'll eat in there." And that was obviously that. I don't know if my memory is tainted, but now, when I think of the man, I can only see a fat, sweaty, buttery mess of a guy, sucking on the legs of crabs and shooting the shit with his d.s.
This, to me, is the extension of my paternal grandfather's words. If there are jobs for women and jobs for men, then there are obviously spaces for both. Masculine and feminine space is the topic of a lot of work in lit. theory, and I'm not going to try to add to that here, but I think it's fascinating, and not a little disturbing, that a pastor, a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, in the late 90's, in America, on the East Coast, would reinforce the separation of the genders, and the exclusion of someone from one of the most significant social experiences: the shared meal.
I think of a scene in Osama after she's been given in marriage to the mullah. He holds up a length of chain in front of her, and from the chain dangle multiple locks. He tells her to choose her lock, and she whimpers and says nothing. Seeing she won't, he puts the chain away, and produces another lock - this one large and ornate - and he presents it to her as a sort of gift. The next scene is of him performing ablutions, presumably after his first night in bed with her. Lock imagery crops up here and there throughout the film, and only serves to reinforce the distance or barriers between masculine and feminine spaces.
But once again, who is excessively patriarchal? At least the mullah presents the locks obviously and directly. The Chesapeake pastor needs no locks, no doors, no chains. He can simply count on the submission of his wife, on her adopting the consciousness of the oppressed, and on her assumption that this consciousness is natural to her, given her gender.

3. This past summer, we were visiting Maine to see Hannah's family. I can't remember how the conversation came up - I think we were talking about a family acquaintance of theirs - but my mother-in-law informed me that I'm half a man. (Perhaps she foresaw the lavender Pine-Sol/Motown episode, perhaps not). New England directness/frankness aside, I was sort of taken aback. What could that possibly even mean? One testicle? Parttime drag career? Women's undergarments fetish? What? Obviously she had adopted as normative some sort of view of masculinity that did not allow for my full participation, but when I pursued this, the logic was a little muddled. My mother-in-law is a lovely woman (and I'm not just saying that), and we get along swimmingly, but I questioned her on this. She could only come out with vague attributes of mine that did not quite fit with some other, un-named attributes, belonging to some other man, or idea of a man, who remains, to this day, for everyone, the world over, nameless, formless, and nevertheless, ubiquitous and powerful.
Who is he?
Does he clear the dirty dishes? Does he stay with his woman, going with her in and out of every place, as a friend? Does he feel whole himself? And what's more - does he enjoy scented cleaning products and Motown beats?

Or is he really the guy who sits at table, after dinner, belt unbuckled, picking his teeth and looking out the window while his wife burns her hands in the dishwater?
Is he really the guy who shuffles his wife off into the kitchen for entire meals and only enjoys the company of his pals?
Is he really the guy who feels completely and utterly masculine and male and manly? Not unsure of anything, guided by the voice of his rational mind and the bio-desire of his firm and true penis?
I sure hope not, because I'm never going to live up to him, and I'm never going to know what to say when someone asks me why I can't.

New Song

2006-12-19T12:30:00.000-06:00

For a good time, click here.

Christmas Mix

2006-12-18T12:18:00.000-06:00

Thought I'd post the track list for the Christmas Mix I made for this year. And then I thought maybe some of you would want to make suggestions of your own. The point, for me, is to communicate Christmas without necessarily relying on all the old carols and AM Gold hits. Some of these made it onto the Advent Mix last year, and so I suppose they're still doing the same thing for me.
Here goes:

1. "Creole Love Call" - Duke Ellington & his Orchestra
2. "Winter Song" - Eisley
3. "Baby, Please Come Home" - U2
4. "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)" - Arcade Fire
5. "Silver Rider" - Low
6. "Where is My Love" - Cat Power
7. "Waitin' for a Superman" - Flaming Lips
8. "People Get Ready" - Curtis Mayfield
9. "Something in the Air" - Thunderclap Newman
10. "Chariot" - Page France
11. "O Holy Night" - Vienna Boys Choir
12. "Recuerdos de la Alhambra" - Andres Segovia
13. "Wayfaring Strnager" - Johnny Cash
14. "Gentlest Hammer" - Mason Jennings
15. "I'll Keep it with Mine" - Nico
16. "Shooting Star" - Bob Dylan
17. Cello Suite No. 1 in G, BWV 1007: Prelude - Bach
18. "Hey Jude" - The Beatles (Thanks, Mary)
19. "Scarlet" - U2

McCarthy Attack

2006-12-17T13:54:00.000-06:00

From Blood Meridian, a terrifying description of an attack on the troop:

"The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horses' whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Oh my god, said the sargeant."

McCarthy Sunrise

2006-12-17T13:45:00.000-06:00

I've been reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and it is startling.
Read this description of the sun rising on a troop of soldiers in a Mexican desert:

"They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like stands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come. They rode with their heads down, faceless under their hats, like an army asleep on the march."

2006-12-13T20:21:00.001-06:00

Greg Bond, what are you wearing?

Christmas Jams

2006-12-10T17:02:00.000-06:00

If you're feeling nostalgic, sort of AM-radio-Nat-King-Cole nostalgic, then click the "Pandora (Music Genome Project)" to the right over there, go start a free account, and search your fav holiday song, and you'll be able to listen to ALL the Christmas music you could ever hope for in the world, at random, ad infinitum. It's easy, and the Music Genome Project is pretty cool.

King of the Jailhouse

2006-12-04T19:52:00.000-06:00

I'm semi-obsessed with this song right now. It's beautiful, and The Forgotten Arm is Mann's best, as far as I'm concerned. Even better, I think, than Lost in Space. The lyrics, as always, are a bit clumsy, but if you have a chance to hear this song, do it. It's gut-wrenching, in the best Aimee Mann sort of way.

The king of the jailhouse
And the queen of the road
Think sharing the burden will lighten the load
So they pack up their troubles
In an old Cadillac
That's her in the mirror, asleep in the back

Baby, there's something wrong with me
That I can't see

And they don't give the answers
At the end of the test
So you can't simply stand there and hope for the best
So wake me up at the border
When we reach Mexico
I'll tell you a secret I don't even know

Baby, there's something wrong with me
That I can't see

Honey, I don't wanna turn around
And go back there – do you?
I think you know something I don't know
That I need to

Baby, there's something wrong with me
That I can't see

Wishing I Were Someone Doing Something More Interesting (Right Now, at Least)

2006-12-03T12:14:00.000-06:00

I was feeding Margot, and listening to Low, and I started fantasizing about what bands I'd join, if I could. Made a top 5 list, of course, and limited the possibilities to bands that are currently touring/putting out records. I don't know why, but it was sort of fun to think about, and I'm curious what some of you might choose. Maybe we could start a fantasy tour/recording schedule, akin to the fantasy sports set-up, though I don't have any idea what we'd do once we set it up.
Here's my top 5, in an order, I think:

5. Matmos
4. Yo La Tengo
3. Tom Waits' backing band
2. Low
1. Sigur Ros

(Contending for position were:
Aimee Mann's band, though the current keyboard player would have to go, because he's a sketch-ball.
Bob Dylan's band, but I wouldn't be able to play, because my hands would be shaking, and I'd be vomiting on myself, out of nervousness.
Solomon Burke's band, but I feel like he'd be too hard on me.
Mogwai, but I'd get the same rocks off joining Sigur Ros, and in a more sonic way).
How about you?

And so this is Christmas

2006-11-30T11:28:00.000-06:00

Went here today.

Full Realizations

2006-11-21T11:18:00.000-06:00

I HATE Aerosmith.

Separation

2006-11-18T10:12:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, Andrew was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. After reading the article, I poked around on the web for a while and found a few blogs that piqued my interest. As I was reading the comments of people who knew Andrew, and of those few who knew Talisa, I was reminded of the obvious perceptive differences between her family and my own. Talisa's is rightly angered and grieved over this, and this sentencing seems to have done little to mend things (what can mend, and how?). My family is rightly baffled and grieved as well, and this sentencing has done nothing but drive things further home. But in the middle of reading the posted comments, I remembered Matthew 25:31-46. I'm not much for throwing around Scripture during times like these, and I've only just begun to find space in my faith for something as titanic as this, but nevertheless, I was reminded that Christ placed himself in prison right smack in the middle of the parable of the sheep and the goats, and so he aligns himself with the very person so many would like to forget, or see beaten, or murdered, and at the very least, sent away for life. For my own part, I have oscillated between absolute frustration with Andrew, and some strange pity for him - a pity that may even be approaching, albeit slowly, compassion. I do not want, here, to presume an alignment of my own with Christ's compassion. However, I do want us to consider our response to the criminal other we discipline and punish, and the criminal self we repress and forget.
Andrew's situation (what else can we call it? 'Ordeal' seems inappropriate.)has me thinking about my own response to sin/evil/harm/violence. It is my inclination to withdraw in disgust, rather than to engage with sadness. I prop myself just enough to condescend, until I realize that both Andrew and I would be better off if I would stop fooling myself and try to start understanding. I realize that I am in a unique position, as a member of his family, and so I'm allowed a little more sympathy for him than if he were a stranger on the evening news. However, we grow in compassion by steps and prostrations, and I refuse to let this pass without learning from it. You'll recall, a few posts ago, some talk about the big questions, and why we ask them, and why we do not simply give up on them. I think this is the reason why. Right understanding here, productive belief during times like these, can produce right behavior, productive and healthy responses in the future, in situations that perhaps are barely shades of this, with people who have done 'nothing' compared to what Andrew has done. He has performed something terrible and momentous in the story of our family, in its history, and we are obviously now in the position to look back on it, and to make decisions in light of it. Perhaps we can learn a new language for 'it' - one that does not involve abstraction, but concrete, real, and meaningful expression, and so one that moves us toward actual healing. It would take memory and generosity, and it would not allow us to separate ourselves from him, simply because he has been sentenced to life away from us, simply because he has done something wrong. Indeed, good, strong language would not allow us to assert ourselves against, or away from, him, in the way that he has asserted his self against another.

(As an aside, I realize that Christ says, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me" (Matt. 25:40), and that this might mean that the imprisoned, here, are not necessarily murderers, or what have you, but perhaps, those who have been put away for the sake of the Gospel. However, I would hate to perform a reading that would take me away from broad, generous compassion, for Christ's sake, and toward a more narrow and less compassionate appropriaton of Christ's words, and their implications, for my comfort's sake).

Anselm of Canterbury

2006-11-13T08:36:00.000-06:00

Read this today, and thought it jived with what I wrote yesterday. Anselm here is submitting and justifying his treatise, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Human), to Pope Urban II, seeking his consideration and approval:

"Finally, since I discern that the understanding which we acquire in this life is a middle-way between faith and sight, I think that the more anyone advances to understanding, the closer he [sic] comes to the actual seeing for which we all long."

And I think, regardless of the faiths we subscribe to, we all long to see someone or something come close, from afar off, eventually, that/who will speak to us gently and assure us that there is a logic to all this after all.

Put it in a Song

2006-11-12T14:18:00.000-06:00

A few posts ago, I responded to a comment by my cousin, Jonathan. He indicated that his partner, Tom, is curious about why I am so blasted interested in questions that don't have an answer. I replied that I find those questions more interesting than questions with easy answers. This sort of goes without saying though. So I thought some more, and then said that not asking questions implies stasis, and questioning implies motion, and I am most interested in motion, if I've got to choose between the two. I also made the sticky suggestion that questioning and motion could possibly imply humility, whereas stasis could possibly imply hubris. (And I must here add that stasis may also imply giving up, throwing in the towel or closing the eyes, none of which I am interested in doing). And then I posted the reply.
But I've thought more about it, and I think that questioning/motion implies hope as well. If I do not ask the hard questions of myself, the people around me, the God I believe is there, then, in some sense, I surrender to a despair. Perhaps that's not true of everyone, but for me it seems accurate. If I do not ask, it is because, somehow, I believe there is no hope of response, no possible answer, no end in sight. But if I claim to have faith, to be faithful, then this cannot be so. I cannot allow it to be so.
This is all blandly abstract; I get tired of thinking about it, and even more tired of writing it. So I will think of it in terms of music:
Derek visited recently, as I've noted below, and we had a wonderful time. Part of that was a visit to Lexington's best (so far as I've seen) record shop, CD Central. Decent prices, new and used CDs and vinyl. Good location. Ideal. I bought the new TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain. We listened to it a lot and talked about being more intentional, more deliberate in our music selection and acquisition. As it turns out, we are both tired of mindlessly consuming music like so many lattes or pieces of bubble gum; and we are both tired of not knowing what we are listening to, where we got it, and/or what to do with it.
Since then, I've been thinking about what I listen to, and why I do, and what it is about a particular act that turns me on and makes me remember. I'm realizing that I've always sort of done this, but that now I'm doing it in a more concentrated way; and it has led me to a desire to open my ears as wide as they can stand it. Derek and I both decided that day that we don't want to only listen to what we're familiar with, to what we've always listened. Indeed, we want our love for music to play itself out in our practice, and that necessarily means enjoying the familiar, but also looking forward to the new, the novel, the unexpected, and the surprising.
And as I've been thinking about my listening habits, I recognize that I am listening hopefully, wondering whether or not I might come across something that will completely blow my mind. Alex and I used to say, at the beginning of whatever show we were at, "What if this is the best thing we've ever heard?" And I'm realizing that this might be the central statement of my listening habits, though I sometimes sink back into a steady diet of familiarity that borders on background music.
And if this is the central statement of something as benign as my listening habits, then what does that mean for the way I make other decisions? The ways in which I know and absorb? I hope this means that I have adopted, somehow, a genuinely hopeful stance when it comes to questions larger than whether or not to buy Bowie or Bunyan (I chose Bunyan this time). I hope further than this though. By choosing to keep my ears open, I am also opening myself to possibility, and so my listening is becoming a gesture of generosity. I ask a question of the music, and I hope for a meaningful response from it. Sometimes it is there, sometimes it is not.
The obvious question is whether or not listening to music has much, if anything at all, to do with asking difficult questions. And the only thing I can come up with is that these are two modes I use to understand the world, two lenses through which I choose to look: the song and the question. And as I am hopeful when I tear off the plastic, and smell the ink of the liner notes, and hold the disc in my hand, and, eventually, press 'Play,' so I am hopeful when I am confronted with the difficulty of life, and cannot get my senses straight, and feel overcome with the weight of my own words when trying to make sense, and hold hopes and fears of others in my mind, and, eventually, put the question to myself, or to my loved ones, or to the God I still believe is there.
I must remain faithful to the thought that there is someone or something on the other end of the question. And it seems to me that honesty, even in perplexity, is the most generous of gestures, because it says, "Let us do this thing together." I think this is the most appropriate stance, whether I'm listening to a new album with friends, or spending the night at Peniel.

iWorship

2006-11-09T08:50:00.000-06:00

At The Rock/La Roca, on a typical Sunday, the pastor speaks, very self-consciously, about the congregation, the community it is, and the community it is trying to be. I am in agreement, usually, Sunday in and Sunday out, as he works to inspire the congregation to generous and compassionate works of mercy and love. And I am interested in the balance he is trying to maintain between mercy and love for our fellow congregants, and mercy and love for those "outside" the congregation. In this way, of a Sunday morning, we hear about both discipleship and witness.
But...
What does this healthy balance mean when the worship does not reflect it as well? In my mind, worship ought to balance three elements: doxology, community, and personal piety. What are we to take from our worship, though, when we sing songs made up of lines like this: "It's just you and me...It's just you and me"? What community project can thrive on such narrow, self-gratifying language? And what body can fit, work, and live together, when it is constantly emphasizing its part-ness? Of a Sunday, we are caught between a call to life together and a song that disembodies us.
I've started to think of Feuerbach at church now: I am interested mostly in myself, and so I begin to sing as though God is only interested in me as well. I let the lyric in, and I begin to give into the slithering temptation to believe that it really is just God and me. I can only get so far with this thought, though, before I run smack into the briefly - and ineffectually - suppressed thought of my wife, my daughter, my family and friends, the people standing around me in the pews, and the people driving by on the street, and also the billions of others who have been tempted to think mostly of their selves.
Its gotten so bad in my head that I'm struggling to remember other lyrics and other ideas. But if I try hard enough, and use my memory, I can recall "Amazing Grace" and how it starts with one and ends with many, and "O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing," bobbing and weaving between the many and the singular.
Of course, things won't be fixed - am I even right, do they need fixing? - simply by singing "old" songs instead of "new" songs, but maybe we could take a form/content lesson from Charles Wesley, or John Newton, or really anyone who hasn't tried too write an easily digestible Top Ten hit for the CCM scene. Maybe I'm coming down too hard, being a little to biased, but I'm tired of feeling like I'm petting myself everytime I hear a praise chorus. Maybe someone else is tired too, but maybe not. Some people don't agree with me.
This is all to say that I think church might be more productive, more wholesome, and more Christ-like, if we can keep things juggled, in tension, balanced and in reverence to the God above us, among us, and in us.

Me?

2006-11-01T16:16:00.001-06:00

me?, originally uploaded by Jason Heron.

Margot's classic look, and the precursor to her guilty face, which I won't be able to resist, incidentally.

Ass

2006-11-01T16:15:00.001-06:00

ass, originally uploaded by Jason Heron.

Derek, Hannah, Margot, and I went to the Natural Bridge State Park a few weeks ago. I hauled Margot everywhere, but it was beautiful. Derek took this photo with his super cheap digital camera from Craig's list, and I think he did a nice job.