Advice From Jayber Crow

This is a reading from Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry. Anyone who interacts with kids about school and academic performance would do well to listen. The passage describes Jayber's adolescent experience in school.

Although I can't say that I liked school, when I wanted to be I was a good enough student.I liked learning, especially learning that could be got by reading. I made fair grades, but I and my teachers knew that I could have done better. I was, they said, like a good horse who would not work; I was a disappointment to them; I was wasting my God-given talents. And this gave me, I believe, the only self-determining power I had: I could withhold this single thing that was mine that I knew they wanted.

From Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Carry the Fire

I read The Road a few years back and have begun rereading it for a book discussion I am hosting in a few weeks. The book is about a father and son on the road after the apocalypse. So basically, it has my two favorite things in it: significant and meaningful relationships and an exploration of "the end times." I grew up in a faith system that was moderately preoccupied with the "end times," prophecies found in the book of Revelation, and our faith group's important role in this. Relationships, particularly family relationships, have always fascinated me. The book focuses on the survival of this pair, physical, emotional, spiritual. Throughout the story, the father reminds his son that they are people who"carry the fire." They remain good in a bad world. They choose right when wrong is everywhere. They go hungry instead of eating people (yes, this is a dark, dark book). On the eve of father's day (and my youngest son's first birthday), I am faced with this question: If I carry the fire (and I hope I do), how do I help my kids learn to carry it? Thanks to my three littlins for reminding me there is a fire. Thanks mom and dad for teaching me to carry the fire. Thanks Cormac McCarthy for writing such an amazing and haunting book. Thank God for the fire.

John Steinbeck on the Progression of Mystery

I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

John Steinbeck from The Winter of Our Discontent

I don't know why, but the religion/science question has heated up in my circle lately. Everything I've been reading has been coming back to the question. Even when I'm just trying to read a novel, there it is.

Today, I was thinking about what I was like when I was a teenager. Regrettably, I was one who knew it all. It wasn't until my early twenties that I was able to make decisions out of my vast knowledge and wisdom...and it wasn't until the last few years that some of these decisions have come home to roost. I wonder if science (I'm talking about the ideology/religion of science that pervades our culture) is in that early twenties phase. The knowledge has been met with resources and now it's on like Donkey Kong.

A list of scientific accomplishments whose conseqences are mostly unknown:

1. Genetically coded plants who only respond to proprietary fertilizer and herbicide.
2. Cell phones vs. brain health
3. The long-term effects of an industrialized diet
4. The internal combustion engine and its possible link to climate change

I'm not saying we throw out science, scientific progress, and cell phones, I'm just wondering what science's 30s will look like. Will we be too far gone?

Walker Percy on Suicide

The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. An illness should be treated...

Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you'd be deranged if you were not depressed. Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved for once and all. Would you trade your depression to be any one of these?...

Percy goes on to describe the true choice for the depressed when considering suicide. You can either become a non-suicide, avoiding the pain, treating symptoms, running, or you can become an ex-suicide, pushing into the pain, searching for your truth, stopping.

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

From Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

I've been in deconstruction mode in a lot of areas of my life--religion and my work in specific. I was taught in school and in the profession at large to help people avoid suicide. I give people suicide contracts which state that they will not kill themselves until X-date. We keep the ball rolling (and protect ourselves legally). While there is merit in this (it is good that people do not kill themselves), I am realizing that it does not get the job done.

Percy confirmed this feeling with his essay on suicide and the way depression and suicidal ideation is treated by therapists. He makes the case that rather than helping people avoid suicide, stepping aside and then walking with them into the despair is the only chance at peace. Instead of asking, "What needs to happen for you to not kill yourself?" What if we asked, "What needs to die?"

Or to put it another way, to gain your life you must lose it.

Inherent Unmarketability

This is from the introduction to Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr. I'm rereading it for Lent. It's a wonderfully butt-kicking book. As some of you may know, I've got a lot of questions about the church. This little poem/list gets at a lot of the tension I feel for how we (at my home church and the church at large) do things.

How do you make attractive that which is not?
How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?
How do you talk decent when everything is about ascent?
How can you possibly market letting go in a capitalist culture?
How do you present Jesus to a Promethean mind?
How do you talk about dying to a church trying to appear perfect?
This is not going to work.
(admitting this might be my first step)

Walker Percy Quote

The word boredom did not enter the language until the 18th century. No one knows its etymology...Question: Why was there no such word before the 18th century?
a. Was it because people were not bored before the 18th century?
b. Was it because people were bored but did not have a word for it?
c. Was it because people were too busy staying alive to be bored?

Walker Percy from Lost in the Cosmos (The Last Self-Help Book)

Percy goes on to propose three additional answers, but they take up pages so I didn't include them. This question haunts me for three reasons.
1. I hear people complaining about boredom. I don't believe there is an answer to this. Most people say, "Well, let's go bowling, or to a movie, or to the mall, or to..." I have found myself saying things like, "You should ponder that" or "Think about what you just said." My responses are not popular. My response from now on: "You know, boredom did not enter the lexicon until the 18th century. HMMM." This type of response is very well received.
2. When I bring up the question to friends, there seems to be an underlying terror about the answer (or lack thereof).
3. I got my mouth washed out with soap by a babysitter when I was 11. My crime? Uttering these infamous words, "I'm bored." Oh, the humanity.

Quote from The Chosen by Chaim Potok

One learns of the pain of others by suffering one's own pain...by turning inside oneself, by finding one's own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said. It destroys our self-pride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend on the Master of the Universe.

This is the second of Potok's books I've read. My Name is Asher Lev was wonderful as well. Both books have profound things to say about family, community, and independence. This was a wonderful book about the importance of friendship and how pain is passed on from generation to generation.

I found the above quote and the content of the book to be helpful in my work. I definitely recommend it.

Bonhoeffer Quote and Lent

It is laid upon every Christian. The first suffering of Christ we must experience is the call sundering our ties to this world. This is the death of the old human being in the encounter with Jesus Christ. Whoever enters discipleship enters Jesus' death, and puts his or her own life into death; this has been so from the beginning. The cross is not the horrible end of a pious, happy life, but stands rather at the beginning of community with Jesus Christ. Every call of Christ leads to death. Whether with the first disciples we leave home and occupation in order to follow him, or whether with Luther we leave the monastery to enter a secular profession, in either case, the one death awaits us, namely, death in Jesus Christ, the dying away of our old form of being human in Jesus' call.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Discipleship

I'm teaching on the season of Lent this weekend. It's a challenging topic to face at my home church. We're a group from many different backgrounds. As I was talking with some friends recently, we realized that most of our people are either from extreme Protestantism (we approach Lent-ish practice with skepticism) or former Catholic (we have had enough Lent already, thanks!) backgrounds. No way to play this one down the middle.

I've found so much healing and peace in Lent. I've experienced a lot of faith growth in seasons past. That said, I never look forward to it. At least not in the way I look forward to summer or the latest Justin Timberlake album. It's hard. It's not fun. I'm going to be talking some about the absolute unsellability of Lent (and really Christianity). If we had to develop a true sub-slogan for Lent (and Christianity), it would be COME AND DIE. Obviously, this is not the kind of slogan that is likely to increase market share...and here I go, getting all mad about the state of suburban faith.

Back to the Bonhoeffer quote. Why is it that deepening of faith is so often tied to deep suffering? If we are inviting people to suffer as Christ suffered, I feel like we need to have lived the answer to this question in some way.

Book Recommendation: The Dip

I read The Dip by Seth Godin three months ago and the lessons from this little book just won't stop infiltrating my life. The gist of the book is that sometimes quitters do win. It's all about quitting the right things and pushing through "the dip" on those things that deserve our energy. I've primarily applied the concept to my work world, but really, it applies everywhere.

The Top Five Books of 2008 (that I read)

1. Tribes by Seth Godin
An awesome book about groups, passion, business, and leadership. A quick read that's well worth it.
2. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
A must read for creative types. Particularly creative types born into family and cultural settings that weren't down with creativity.
3. Silence by Shusako Endo
A book about Catholic missionaries in Japan who experience great persecution. The ending...wow!
4. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
She also wrote one of my all time favorites, The Last American Man. This is the story of the author finding herself after the world was pulled out from under her.
5. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy is pure magic, genius. This is a story of a father and son on the road after the apocalypse.

Honorable Mention: I read Walden by Thoreau. Now I can say I read it. It had a few good moments, but was underwhelming. I'm sure I've broken all kinds of unspoken rules about Thoreau reviews. Oh well.

Sufjan Stevens, Anne Rice, Christopher Moore, Etsy, and Foster Care

I submit the following for your Christmas (if that's your holiday...this holiday season) enjoyment/consumption:
1. Sufjan Stevens, Songs for Christmas. This box set of random Christmas stuff will change your opinion of Christmas tunes. If you just want to buy a few songs from itunes. Buy these: The Friendly Beasts; Holy, Holy, Holy; Put the Lights on the Tree (or watch the video below); We're Going to the Country.
2. Read Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, by Anne Rice. A story about Jesus (age 8) coming to terms with who he was and the power that was within him.
3. Read Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus' Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. If you're offended by this book, then I agree, it's horrible. If you laugh and then think, call me and we can talk about it.
4. Buy handmade stuff from this website. I've just started doing my shopping in this way. People like it (if they're a little weird).
5. Consider something like this. My kids are young, but they just packed up a bunch of toys they didn't use/like anymore and we took them here.

Any other recommendations? (Please don't say Jingle Cats)

Silence

I suppose I should simply cast from my mind these meaningless words of the coward; yet why does his plaintive voice pierce my breast with all the pain of a needle? Why has Our Lord imposed this torture and this persecution on poor Japanese peasants? No, Kichijiro was trying to express something different, something even more sickening. The silence of God.

Silence is a novel that does something that most contemporary "Christian" books do not. It describes faith the way it really seems to be: beautiful, hard, complex, and void of formulas. Living in the affluent suburbs of Atlanta where the church scene is dominated by market driven, numbers oriented philosophies, a book like Silence cleansed my palette to put it mildly. I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about the book, but the one, lasting bit from the book is this: There was/is only one Christ. I've known Christians who have spent a lot of time and energy trying to be something (or someone) that they could never be. It's a book that speaks to Job's pain. It's a book that speaks to the pain of feeling the silence of God in times that we feel we need to hear something, anything. It does not wrap up nicely in the end...kind of like life.

Jesus Thinks N.T. Wright is Metal!

Kill Creativity

I just finished Love's Executioner by Irvin Yalom. It is a therapy-related book that goes along with some of the stuff I've been studying. Actually, it came along at a perfect time--a time when I'm feeling really tired. I'm tired of forcing things, I'm tired of pulling things along (a little vague, i know), and I'm tired of school. I entered the counseling program because I want to help people live better. What I'm feeling right now is that the program of study I chose wants to turn me into a little scientist. After a year of classwork I was finally able to do a project that involved creativity-I wrote a song for my traumatology class. It was the first project I was really proud of and it was the first project I got great feedback for. I am not a research-type writer, I'm not a great memorizer of facts, so the projects I've done to this point have received average (and one time below average) marks.

Back to Loves Executioner. Yalom is one of the premier therapists of our day and a great writer. In the first chapter he talks about the orthodox schools of psychotherapy. He wishes he could find his place in those schools. He wishes he could, just once, "know exactly what I'm doing in my psychotherapeutic work." He goes on to say...

But, of course, it is an illusion. If they are helpful to patients at all, ideological schools with their complex metaphysical edifices succeed because the assuage the therapist's, not the patients' anxiety (and thus permit the therapist to face the anxiety of the therapeutic process). The more the therapist is able to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing, the less need is there for the therapist to embrace orthodoxy. The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

Since reading this passage I've been thinking a lot about religion and the way that most versions of religious orthodoxy I have been part of seem to kill creativity. So I'm left wondering how I can hold onto a faith grounded in history and (for me) a fairly orthodox understanding of the Bible, and still embrace the creativity within myself and in the people around me. And more deeply, I'm also wondering why orthodoxy does tend to kill creativity.

Fatherhood v. Cool

I recently read a book called Alternadad. A memoir of sorts by Neal Pollack. The primary question addressed by the book was how does a guy hold on to some semblance of individuality and personality when a kid enters the picture. A lot of the book was silly, but I found myself resonating with a lot of it and laughing quite a bit. The foreword is worth the read--he talks about his 18 month old son ripping off his diaper and throwing poo all over his crib--something that could only be funny to a parent.

So is this obsession with holding onto cool new? Somehow I can't see my dad sitting down at 30 thinking that he should start a band because he's only got a few more young years left. I can't see him thinking for even a second about fashion or any of the cultural stuff I spend time thinking about.

But I can't let it go. Something in me rebels against getting older. I want youth. I love it. But the simple truth is that there's tons that's just not cool about parenting. I ran around a slide today for about 20 minutes screaming like a crazy person with my son. There's no way it looked cool at all, but it was perfect. I often have the choice of doing cool things, or staying home with my kids reading books about caterpillars and playing peek-a-boo, and i have yet to choose cool.

I guess this is my way of saying that I'm making a decision: fatherhood will beat cool.