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April 29, 2006
having children
You have considered that because Christ was born into this world and suffered and died, He can relate to us. But did it ever occur to you that you have been born into a world of risk and suffering in order for you to be able to relate to Him?
I have never understood the people in my own generation. They don't want children. Ok, obviously a lot of them do, and have them, but honestly, why are there are so many who don't want children or fear having them?
What is this fear? Is it purely a fear of responsibility? If that's the case, the fear comes in two flavors; the selfish and the selfless. The selfish ones patently fear the loss of liberty which having children seems to entail. But the selfless fear is, to be perfectly blunt, more repulsive to me. This is the fear which says, "I'm not able to handle this responsibility, and it would be unfair to the child to be born into my care.
Posh. There may be good reasons not to have children, but if it really does come down to fear, then shame and fie. After all, look at me. I'm a father, and do I have fear? I'm scared shitless.
Shall I enumerate the reasons I'm terrified that I'll ruin my son? They are too many. Suffice it to say my mistakes and shortcomings give me cause for profound, agonizing terror. My family is a broken, rag-tag cadre of lag behinds, starting with the head, me. (I'm only telling you how I feel, not what it may look like to my gracious and encouraging friends.)
Let me say this unequivically: my son deserves better. I so deeply wish for him to have better than the best I can cobble together.
Tough bananas. He didn't get better, he got me. And now for that thing that comforts me in all this miserable angst: my son and I got the same deal. And my father got the same deal. All my friends got the same deal. We were born, utterly without choice or even forknowledge, to sub-par parents. I don't know anybody who got perfect parents.
But we all got life. And as tough as this life is --and as painful as it is to see how tough it is and will continue to be for my son-- I can honestly say that every single day I am thankful to be alive. I'm thankful for both the pain and the joy, for both are a gift, and I'm thankful that my Heavenly Father is also a father for my son.
Having children is like agreeing to go over Niagra Falls in a barrel. And not just any barrel, but this barrel right here: this shoddy-looking, banged up barrel with the brackish water sloshing around in the bottom. And you're going right now, right this second, with barely enough time to hand your car keys, wallet and cell phone to your new, shady looking friend standing nearby. That's what having children is like. In some sense that's what it'll always be like, no matter how long you put it off, or how well you try to prepare. If it's God's time for you to have children, there is no such thing as getting prepared first because He has already prepared you in ways you cannot percieve.
Besides, c'mon: it's Niagra Falls. As you step into your unworthy craft, the corona of spray makes the sunlight dance even as its damp chill raises bumps on your arms. You couldn't go on a better adventure. You couldn't go on a better day.
Posted by joel at 03:03 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
April 26, 2006
congregation consternation
There was, in the deep, unfinished parts of the Cimmarron Church of God, an elevated baptistry which opened upon the congregation, and basked in the glow of the electric cross which adorned the brick wall above it. After the hymns were done I would tuck my violin under my arm and exit by the louvred door behind the baby grand, and, navigating slowly through the darkness like a cat on the hunt, I would make my way to the hidden stair that led to the baptistry. I'd climb until I was afraid I would be seen by the people on the balcony, and then, quietly, carefully, slowly, I'd settle myself upon the last four steps.
It may be such experiences which have led to my mental regimine when I sit under the sound of the gospel's teaching. My mind seems to wander, but in actuality it rushes along on parallel tracks, sometimes pacing the sermon step for step, and sometimes ducking through hedgerows of current events to wander far afield. Most sermon's are staid and predictable --at least I could nearly always predict them. My years of Sunday School seldom leave me surprised.
Of course, sometimes I am surprised, and I am always peculiarly delighted when that happens. At the tail end of one series of revival meetings, our pastor calmly walked up to an enormous paper banner which my parents (and others) had labored many hours to create --a banner which commemorated those very revival services-- and tore it down as we all watched. I don't remember exactly the point he was trying to make, but of course I shot a glance at my mother and father --were they offended? Not in the slightest. My father had a serene and slightly amused smile upon his face, and my mother's face was animated with suppressed laughter, as if someone had said something hilarious, something true but something not to be openly laughed at. They clearly liked surprises too.
Years later another such surprise came in an evening service in a small house church where my parents had but recently become the pastors. The church was excited, expectant and hopeful now that our family had come. My father handed each person in the little group a piece of paper and a pen. "Write down your vision. Write down everything you believe this church should do and be." After a few moments he gathered up all the papers, shuffled them into a stack and settled himself as if to read them. As he began speaking, he picked up the first sheet of paper, and crumpling into a ball, he dropped it to the floor. The next sheet he also crumpled as he continued talking. He continued this distruction as he spoke; some he ripped, some he crumpled, one or two he burned. And all the while he spoke to us about the requirement God had for us as a church. All our ideas and notions and visions and plans must yield to God's vision for our church. I was ecstatic with shock.
And so, always longing for that fresher, surprising kind of communion, I have become a haunt of the outter corners of God's church: not because I dislike church or eschew unity, but because I love the church enough to hate any substitute for true unity. This unity is as far beyond doctrinal cohesion as a living creature is beyond a pile of charred meat. This unity is a miracle as spontaneous as a waterspout; it cannot be coordinated, contained or reallocated. Committees cannot inspire it. Colleges and synods cannot summon it forth, for by it's very nature it must come unbidden, uncommanded, even unexpected. It must be a surprise.
I don't know any way to make it happen, except to seek to make it happen in me. Meanwhile I lurk in the deep, unfinished parts of the Church of God, sometimes creeping through the unfrequented passages, and sometimes bolting across deserted pastures, the booming voices of our preachers fading through my thoughts, seeding the rocky soil of my mind and heart with seeds that have fallen there so often before. We have so much of the seed, and it falls in such even rows. But I am anxious for the shoots to begin to show.
Posted by joel at 01:44 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 24, 2006
babel bound
I hear hammer blows falling upon our mother tongue: pounding the sharp edges into smooth concensus. But also the smooth round contexts endure the hammers' blows, thinning our words and splitting definitions apart like the peninnsulas that appear in a hamburger which was smashed too flat before it hit the griddle. Today I can see across a turbulent bay of spattering grease other persons standing on the same words I use. Once we were neighbors; now we must travel further than the distance between us if we would meet.
Language evolves; any moderately literate English speaker is keenly aware of this. This is not a good thing or a bad thing, any more than cold-rolled steel is a good thing or a bad thing. Steel can be used to build bridges or weapons of war. To take it a step further, it isn't only what you make of it, it's also what you do with what you've made. Weapons of war can be used to defend one's homeland, and bridges can be used as access for an invasion. But perhaps I've oversimplified the complexity of the problem of language's evolving nature.
There are, to be blunt, many people who use language to divide rather than to unite. This is the paradoxical soul of language; it is the bedrock of our species' ability to teach; and from that stone we fashion fortresses which hold our enemies at a perplexed distance. The Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel depicts what Man might accomplish when everybody's on the same page, and how a simple matter like language brings our greatest works to nought.
The ruin of Babel still hulks on our horizon today; what a grand tower Europe was poised to become in the summer of 1914. Indeed the paradox consumed the League of Nations, and engulfs the halls of the United Nations today. Everywhere in the world are those who believe, if we could just speak the same language, we could accomplish anything. And yet it never quite happens. There are too many at the UN who are drunk on despotical power and the blood of their own people, who pound and shape their words in duplicitous ways to lead by the nose those who really want to believe that everybody thinks the way we think. And so we have diplomats who carefully craft their statements as if to take for granted the principles of Christian Charity in whose cultural soil such charitable impulses never flourished. It is a false and rickety bridge as we learned at Tiananmen Square.
One gulf seems to be growing wider and gapes along the fault line of race relations in America. I know I am not alone in viewing Martin Luther King Jr. as a sort of high-water mark. In his day there were real enemies who stood on the porticos of the State and directed violence upon peaceful protesters. His message was fresh and full of hope and he urged us all, both black and white, to climb out of the darkness on the strength of character and love for our fellow man.
Today the bitterest evil is in being too white if you are black, or in being too friendly to those who are if you are white. In a stunningly racist irony, whites are told they harbour racism if they protest otherwise. And if they really have no trace of racism, then they are utterly beyond hope, for it is buried in their subconsious. All of which leads us to ask, what does the word "racism" mean these days?
The bigotry of some Black Americans, inflicted upon other black people who have succeeded is staggering. There are no mainstream, credible voices among American Whites who use the language of the slave trade to put black people down into a lower place, but Harry Belafonte freely invoked those dark days, denigrating Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell as priveldged, pampered slaves serving in the master's house instead of in the field. And this, 140 years after slavery was abolished in this country.
We have new terms like "race card" and "blaxploitation" while old words like "niggardly" and even "picnic" are put away in shame and dishonor. And as these words shatter beneath the hammers' blows I grieve to think the day is coming, and in some instances, has already come when I no longer have the words I need to tell my neighbor how I feel and what I think. This is the sort of tragedy which might lead to pride; after all we're both misunderstood. But somewhere to the east is a crumbling pile of bricks which mocks us all; whoever is to blame in any specific case, it happens at the foot of the great failure of our common race. Maybe we don't love our neighbors well enough, or maybe our grandfathers didn't, or their grandfathers didn't. Or maybe we're just cursed.
Posted by joel at 01:33 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 04, 2006
how i learned to love ebola
"Your commie has no regard for human life. Not even his own." --Dr Strangelove
There is something about the Texas Academy of Science giving a standing ovation to a man who has just advocated killing 90% of the human population on the earth by means of a contrived Ebola epidemic which reminds me of C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength. Jack was prescient, I tell you.
Posted by joel at 01:56 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack