Of the handful of perplexing childhood experiences I can recall, I will recount one that still has emotional resonance for me as an adult. It was a restless afternoon, and my second grade classroom could not contain me. I had been dutiful all day, completing my assignments on time. Now, faced with another bluish ink-on-white ditto, I was coming quietly unglued. It was the equivalent of someone telling you to run until you reached the horizon, and spending all day in pursuit of it, the “Aha!” moment comes too late: there is no line to be reached at the edge of the world! I had, of course, hoped my teacher might run out of work to give us. If I finished everything well ahead of many of my peers, I bargained with myself, I might be afforded some time to daydream… This would not be the last time I was devastated by the reality that in life, one never runs out of work—there is always more than can be thought up by whoever is running the show.
Staring at my blank, crisp ditto worksheet, I became aware of my curious, love-hate relationship with it. Worksheets, after all, can give you a great sense of accomplishment upon completion. There, on one page, are contained all the fruits of your labor for the last hour. Turning in the finished product is gratifying, and a tremendous relief if it was a requirement to move on to something else. On the other hand, worksheets represent all things painfully necessary, quotidian, and compartmental. Worksheets are wickets that must be negotiated along a course set out by someone else for you to complete. By what authority do they establish these wickets? Who can say, when a bright, balmy Charleston afternoon is busy convincing you to forget the arbitrary requirements of the classroom and wander outside to discover only what you will, when you will. I wanted to be skating around the cul-de-sac at home, jarring bugs with my sister on the brush trails behind our fence—anything but sitting at a futile desk with the scent of dirt and stale sweat still on my skin from recess (hours ago), staring at the lines on that ditto copy. The purply, blurred edges of the words and shapes on it reminded me of the autumn sunset we would have to be dragged indoors from later that evening. Staring out the window, I forgot my worksheet, leaving it half done.
When I was dragged, unwillingly, back to an awareness of the classroom activities, I scrambled to complete it, realizing that I had slipped behind the others in my work. I recall a small bell ringing from the teacher’s desk, and a shuffling in the row next to ours. Suddenly, I noticed that my desk-neighbors in front and behind were taking their seats. I had not noticed them get up, and swung my head around to follow the stream of feet to the teacher’s desk at the back of the classroom. Mrs. C, our teacher, was intent upon collecting all the completed worksheets as each student passed her desk. She was pleasant, but not smiling as much as usual.
I liked Mrs. C, and often felt very conspiratorial with her because her husband was my piano teacher, and she would send messages about lunch dates and groceries to him by me when I was dismissed from class to attend my lessons in the music department. As I watched her at her desk, I detected that she was also passing something out to students from a bucket as she received their assignments. I turned and looked at the others in my row, busy unwrapping things and popping them into their mouths, and immediately joined the queue since I had apparently missed my chance to turn in my worksheet and receive one of whatever good thing was in that bucket. As I straggled up to her desk, full of expectation, I handed her my work and was panicked to see that the bucket was nowhere in sight. I asked her about it, and explained that I had missed the bell for my row and was just now coming to turn in my worksheet. “That’s fine, H.,” she said, “but you were late. Please pay better attention next time.” She rose to return to the front of the class. I started to point out her oversight, and to inquire about my access to the bucket, but she stopped me and instructed me to return to my desk. I had missed my opportunity, and ought to have been more vigilant.
I returned to my desk out of sorts, my face on fire. I did not cry, but something caught in my throat. I did not understand how my infraction—arriving with another row because I had missed the bell—deserved this deprivation. The candy was still there, wasn’t it? She could take it back out as quickly as she’d put it away, no harm done, and I’d have promised to pay better attention and come when called. The girl in front of me had turned around just in time to see me returning empty-handed, and to save face, I whispered, “I didn’t even want one of those things anyway.” Mrs. C called my name from the front of the class and instructed me to take a place in the back corner facing the wall, until she released me. I had never been sent to the corner in all my life, and this was public humiliation. My face was hot, my hands clammy as I stared at the blank corner until she admonished me not to talk out of turn anymore and to return to my seat. I was still reeling from perceived incongruities and injustices suffered at her hand, but relieved at being allowed to return to my seat to serve the rest of my penance under knowing looks from my peers and the relentless, dragging minute hand on the clock that would release me for the day.
That memories still have the power to recreate the physiological effects of shame, anger, and frustration when recalled years later speaks to the persistence of unresolved experiences. I still blush when I think about this encounter. As crises go, it was a small one with no real trauma associated. But what was the point of it? I was one of Mrs. C’s most consistent high-performers, and I knew this from her comments on my report cards which my mom read with us when they were mailed home. What was the purpose of denying me access to the bucket of goodies she had so industriously meted out to the rest of the class, one by one? Was she trying to teach me a classic lesson, “You snooze, you lose?” Did she think that it would be merciful to teach me early in life not to try and get by on my merits—that I must pay attention like everyone else to deadlines and windows of opportunity that elapse and slam shut without respecting persons? Perhaps she was simply tired that day, and felt the minutes crawling too slowly by until she could escape home to do what she willed, when she willed it. Perhaps she brushed aside my neediness in the aftermath of a mistake, in order to recollect herself in the front of the classroom and to focus on the final tasks of the day. Whatever it was, it still irks me.
It irks me because as an adult I have been on the other side of that desk, at work, and chosen to accept the late product from a subordinate or co-worker, to endure my sense of the five o’clock blues in order to see the relief wash over their faces. I rarely send someone away for arriving even a half-hour late if I can help it. It doesn’t usually serve the purpose of mission accomplishment in my line of work to do so: everyone is on a tight timeline, and chances are they had to wait on someone else who made them late, and will be running late to the next place, too. I might as well help them.
On the other hand, in college and in the Army I have been penalized for missing a deadline, or simply missing out on something that could only be offered for a finite amount of time. Cajoling and eliciting sympathy by arriving out of breath, papers and cell phones fluttering about you will only get you so far. Sometimes the window is just closed, the clock cannot be turned back, and thing proceeds with or without you, no matter how outstanding your performance record is or how well-liked you are. To provide me, perhaps inadvertently, with an early illustration of this in a rather arbitrary fashion does not make Mrs. C a poor teacher, merely a human one. Knowing how and when to respond to students when they err, how to make object lessons intentional and transparent rather than utterly bewildering and confusing is riddled with obstacles. Accurate transmission of a well-guided teaching point is the goal, but there may be many different ways to reach that goal, and none that work every time for every learner. If I were to use an object lesson to enforce a principle (like timeliness) with the aim of developing punctuality in a student, I would keep this event in mind. Even with the best of intentions from an educator, it is just as likely that the student will be so hurt, puzzled, or confused about the consequences that they will either miss the lesson entirely, or feel justified in foisting their own arbitrariness upon future children, students, or employees. Weighing the pros and cons of the candy bucket lesson, I’m not sure that the means truly supported the end, or that the end was achieved: I continue to be a perennial idealist, inclined to think that if people like me and like my work, they will cut me some slack—within reason—when I fail, and I in turn will do the same for them.
This brings me back to reflect on the original purpose of the ditto worksheet. As a drill or rehearsal, the worksheet can be viewed as preparation for what is arguably the most joyless aspect of adult life: paperwork. The more I think about that ditto sheet, its insipid disguise as a stepping stool into the tedium of sundry request forms, staff estimates, periodic reports, memoranda, and proposals, the more frustrating the scenario replays in my mind. What is the point of a worksheet, but to beat people down at an early age, to teach them the necessary evil of a paper trail to show that they actually exist, that they have a seat in the room, that they actually know something, that they can contribute, learn, or make progress? Of course, life, work and education as we know them would be impossible without documentation and deadlines. The challenge, then, is to teach students how to observe and employ them without becoming cogs in a machine of well-documented work. If one can teach a child, or an adult, how to do this while still regarding the person as more than a representative slip of paper, or a late customer, I would judge that person to be a successful teacher.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
lone star
When you occupy a piece of ground early in the day, and watch it shift from afternoon into twilight, you experience an unexpected intimacy with the landscape. When evening comes, and the lengthening shadows constrict your easy movement around roots, holes, and sylvan debris, your senses are quickened but you still feel at home in that space. Not so when thrust into a place where night has already come before you. There are other eyes that watch you comfortably, alert, having spent the day where darkness has fallen. You are the one who doesn't belong--you have not become a part of the landscape and your clumsiness in the night gives your near-panic away.
I saw so many shooting stars this week, out in the field with my Soldiers. Each night we were in a different location, but whether in the slick, humid woods or out in the open grass we could see the stars. Do stars shoot through the sky all the time, and we just can't see it because of all the light pollution around us? There may have been an extraordinary amount of meteoric activity lately, but I didn't waste a single shooting star. I wished I was home, I wished I were a better wife, I wished my mother were still alive. Wild horses checked our perimeter, and I wished I could coax one into letting me ride.
I asked my platoon sergeant, who also noticed the extraordinary stellar activity, if he ever felt overwhelmed by a feeling that he married someone so wonderful that it was hard to believe they ever fought, or did anything but stay very, very close to each other for hours on end. He said that this feeling snuck up on him often while he was away from her. He and his wife have children and are decades ahead of me in life, but I was contented to hear him say this. It does keep growing, the needing and loving and wanting not to be apart. It made me feel less childish that I was really, deeply, missing my husband while on a short training event less than an hour away. Sometimes I wonder what we will do if/when either of us deploys. How did my parents do it? I have no answers, only the vague apprehension that it is virtually uncharted territory, and the only existing maps are lopsided and contain warnings that "Beyond Here There Be Monsters." It is one thing to miss your dad for six months every year, as I did growing up. This will be another thing entirely.
I saw so many shooting stars this week, out in the field with my Soldiers. Each night we were in a different location, but whether in the slick, humid woods or out in the open grass we could see the stars. Do stars shoot through the sky all the time, and we just can't see it because of all the light pollution around us? There may have been an extraordinary amount of meteoric activity lately, but I didn't waste a single shooting star. I wished I was home, I wished I were a better wife, I wished my mother were still alive. Wild horses checked our perimeter, and I wished I could coax one into letting me ride.
I asked my platoon sergeant, who also noticed the extraordinary stellar activity, if he ever felt overwhelmed by a feeling that he married someone so wonderful that it was hard to believe they ever fought, or did anything but stay very, very close to each other for hours on end. He said that this feeling snuck up on him often while he was away from her. He and his wife have children and are decades ahead of me in life, but I was contented to hear him say this. It does keep growing, the needing and loving and wanting not to be apart. It made me feel less childish that I was really, deeply, missing my husband while on a short training event less than an hour away. Sometimes I wonder what we will do if/when either of us deploys. How did my parents do it? I have no answers, only the vague apprehension that it is virtually uncharted territory, and the only existing maps are lopsided and contain warnings that "Beyond Here There Be Monsters." It is one thing to miss your dad for six months every year, as I did growing up. This will be another thing entirely.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
wedding dress
My dad's girlfriend recently emailed me an interesting quote, attributed most often to Rev. Sam Pascoe (the former priest of Grace Anglican Church who was defrocked for having an inappropriate relationship with a parishioner, was repentant, rehabilitated, and later reinstated under the bishop of Uganda):
Christianity started in Palestine as a fellowship;
it moved to Greece and became a philosophy;
it moved to Italy and became an institution;
it moved to Europe and became a culture;
it came to America and became an enterprise.
(It might be added that, where it has gone from the West to the East, from developed countries into developing ones, Christianity has manifested itself in many combinations and extensions of all five of these.) While the quote itself is insightful, I was more impressed by a particular response to the quote, recounted by David Ryser, founder of RawReligion.com, which "seeks to explore topics surrounding nontraditional expressions of Christianity, commonly referred to as 'organic church' or 'simple church.'" The site generates "content that looks at the implications of life outside the four walls of the institutional church," including book reviews and website introduction. The site heralds what it terms an “ecclesiastical revolution” that is "far-reaching and has the momentum to change the expression of Christianity in a single generation... [the revolution] draws on the principles and concepts of the early church, and may rightly be called instead a 'returning'":
It is not about building a new structure or marketing edge. It is about returning to the natural, simple, and organic expression of the Body of Christ. The book of Acts and Paul’s epistles display timeless principles about the spiritual DNA of the ekklesia (or “Church”).
Back to the quote, when Ryser shared this simplified version of how Christianity has progressed from fellowship to enterprise, he paused for dramatic effect, and then reminded his class that an enterprise is essentially a business. He was stunned by the insightful response of a student in his class:
She asked such a simple question: "A business? But isn't it supposed to be a body?" I could not envision where this line of questioning was going, and the only response I could think of was, "Yes." She continued, "But when a body becomes a business, isn't that a prostitute?
Christianity started in Palestine as a fellowship;
it moved to Greece and became a philosophy;
it moved to Italy and became an institution;
it moved to Europe and became a culture;
it came to America and became an enterprise.
(It might be added that, where it has gone from the West to the East, from developed countries into developing ones, Christianity has manifested itself in many combinations and extensions of all five of these.) While the quote itself is insightful, I was more impressed by a particular response to the quote, recounted by David Ryser, founder of RawReligion.com, which "seeks to explore topics surrounding nontraditional expressions of Christianity, commonly referred to as 'organic church' or 'simple church.'" The site generates "content that looks at the implications of life outside the four walls of the institutional church," including book reviews and website introduction. The site heralds what it terms an “ecclesiastical revolution” that is "far-reaching and has the momentum to change the expression of Christianity in a single generation... [the revolution] draws on the principles and concepts of the early church, and may rightly be called instead a 'returning'":
It is not about building a new structure or marketing edge. It is about returning to the natural, simple, and organic expression of the Body of Christ. The book of Acts and Paul’s epistles display timeless principles about the spiritual DNA of the ekklesia (or “Church”).
Back to the quote, when Ryser shared this simplified version of how Christianity has progressed from fellowship to enterprise, he paused for dramatic effect, and then reminded his class that an enterprise is essentially a business. He was stunned by the insightful response of a student in his class:
She asked such a simple question: "A business? But isn't it supposed to be a body?" I could not envision where this line of questioning was going, and the only response I could think of was, "Yes." She continued, "But when a body becomes a business, isn't that a prostitute?
This is precisely the sentiment expressed by songwriter Derek Webb in "Wedding Dress":
If you could love me as a wife
and for my wedding gift, your life
Should that be all I'd ever need
or is there more I'm looking for
and should I read between the lines
and look for blessings in disguise
To make me handsome, rich, and wise
Is that really what you want
I am a whore I do confess
But I put you on just like a wedding dress
and I run down the aisle
and I run down the aisle
I?m a prodigal with no way home
but I put you on just like a ring of gold
and I run down the aisle to you
So could you love this bastard child
Though I don't trust you to provide
With one hand in a pot of gold
and with the other in your side
I am so easily satisfied
by the call of lovers so less wild
That I would take a little cash
Over your very flesh and blood
Because money cannot buy
a husband's jealous eye
When you have knowingly deceived his wife
What concerns me is that Martha and Derek are both quite right--many facets of the American church exhibit a shameless kind of advertising and overall seductive behavior. I don't ever get the feeling in Scripture that Jesus was schmaltzing people like a used car salesman--if anything, he warned fully of the liabilities involved in following his teachings. Yet so many Christians seem to be trying to sell you something when they evangelize. I have even been in the awkward position where I felt that I, too, had to propagandize others in order to be faithful to the mandate of sharing the Gospel. But in the end, sharing the gospel without sharing life with people, getting to know them as fellow human beings, brothers and sisters, is like stripping down and having sex with a total stranger. Even the Sinner's Prayer with which some quickie evangelists like to "seal the deal" feels purely transactional and not relational at all. It is like the money or the awkward words exchanged after making a purchase: "Thank you, come again!" While some groups of believers make a whore out of the Church by this dubious "selling" of the message of Christ, others (as I have tried to discuss in other posts here) exhibit a haggardness--the resignation of a lazy housewife who is selling herself short. Neither the prostitute nor the mumu-clad matron are aiming for the total vitality, virtue, and radiance befitting a bride of Christ. So when we go to church on Sunday in many American churches, we either go to be seduced by their hustle act, or to be spiritually complacent, chubby, and tired. Those of us who can endure neither of these options are tempted to avoid church. These two choices are, of course, a false dilemma: living out our faith in the context of Christian community is still a worthy endeavor, even if it seems elusive. The third option, and what that might look like, is the question of the day.
If you could love me as a wife
and for my wedding gift, your life
Should that be all I'd ever need
or is there more I'm looking for
and should I read between the lines
and look for blessings in disguise
To make me handsome, rich, and wise
Is that really what you want
I am a whore I do confess
But I put you on just like a wedding dress
and I run down the aisle
and I run down the aisle
I?m a prodigal with no way home
but I put you on just like a ring of gold
and I run down the aisle to you
So could you love this bastard child
Though I don't trust you to provide
With one hand in a pot of gold
and with the other in your side
I am so easily satisfied
by the call of lovers so less wild
That I would take a little cash
Over your very flesh and blood
Because money cannot buy
a husband's jealous eye
When you have knowingly deceived his wife
What concerns me is that Martha and Derek are both quite right--many facets of the American church exhibit a shameless kind of advertising and overall seductive behavior. I don't ever get the feeling in Scripture that Jesus was schmaltzing people like a used car salesman--if anything, he warned fully of the liabilities involved in following his teachings. Yet so many Christians seem to be trying to sell you something when they evangelize. I have even been in the awkward position where I felt that I, too, had to propagandize others in order to be faithful to the mandate of sharing the Gospel. But in the end, sharing the gospel without sharing life with people, getting to know them as fellow human beings, brothers and sisters, is like stripping down and having sex with a total stranger. Even the Sinner's Prayer with which some quickie evangelists like to "seal the deal" feels purely transactional and not relational at all. It is like the money or the awkward words exchanged after making a purchase: "Thank you, come again!" While some groups of believers make a whore out of the Church by this dubious "selling" of the message of Christ, others (as I have tried to discuss in other posts here) exhibit a haggardness--the resignation of a lazy housewife who is selling herself short. Neither the prostitute nor the mumu-clad matron are aiming for the total vitality, virtue, and radiance befitting a bride of Christ. So when we go to church on Sunday in many American churches, we either go to be seduced by their hustle act, or to be spiritually complacent, chubby, and tired. Those of us who can endure neither of these options are tempted to avoid church. These two choices are, of course, a false dilemma: living out our faith in the context of Christian community is still a worthy endeavor, even if it seems elusive. The third option, and what that might look like, is the question of the day.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
premonition of grief
I was watching " Seven Pounds" with my husband several weeks ago. The scene is irrelevant, but at one point during the movie, something washed over me that is barely accountable in words. The kind of desperate sobs I emitted are by now not strange to my husband; he tightened the circle his arms made around me and pressed his head closer to mine, as if to better hear and interpret my reverberations and gurglings. I felt, with a surety that clenched my whole ribcage and sucked the air from my lungs, how unbearable it will be to lose him to death. Beyond that, I have run out of words. To account for how long and how deeply this feeling racked me, this glimpse of a particular, eventual bereavement, I have to borrow words from Stuart Townend's hymn "How Great the Father's Love for Us":
How great the pain of searing loss...
Perhaps it is my conviction that very few of us actually have one single "soul mate" to find in the world, but rather a handful of people with whom we could find love and happiness. Perhaps it is my utter lack of certainty in nearly all worthy endeavors prior to making that leap of commitment, and taking the first steps that, gaining momentum, convince me that this was my path all along. Perhaps it is the happy contradiction that my husband defies the model of compatibility I would have chosen when we first became friends, and when I was looking elsewhere for love--that our friendship, and then our romance, have been a pleasurable experiment across culture, affiliation, lifestyles and temperament. Each of these things precludes for me the kind of immutable "in love" experience where we are both deadsure that "we are meant to be together." I deal in endless possibility, and so am able to hypothesize what life would have been like if we had chosen different people, different paths. But in the aftermath of losing my mother and grandmother--two women who I could not have chosen but who rather chose me--I have encountered a new kind of certainty about the people I am committed to. It would be morbid to base everything on this, but allowing the possibility of someone's absence to sneak up on me, to imagine for a moment life after their departure, is quite helpful in determining how much they mean to me, how intertwined our lives have become. The strength of my grief parallels the strength of my love for my husband: I know only that without him, life would be shabby, so many shades of grey, that my howling would go on for months--even years--upon discovering his absence. It is proof of the thing's existence by the vacuum, the shockwaves felt in its absence--about as close as I can get to being deadsure of anything.
...
The stone was semiprecious
We were barely conscious
Two souls too smart to be
In the realm of certainty
Even on our wedding day
We lit ourselves on fire
Oh, God not deny her
It's not if I believe in love
but if love believes in me
Oh, believe in me
...
U2 "Moment of Surrender" from 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon
How great the pain of searing loss...
Perhaps it is my conviction that very few of us actually have one single "soul mate" to find in the world, but rather a handful of people with whom we could find love and happiness. Perhaps it is my utter lack of certainty in nearly all worthy endeavors prior to making that leap of commitment, and taking the first steps that, gaining momentum, convince me that this was my path all along. Perhaps it is the happy contradiction that my husband defies the model of compatibility I would have chosen when we first became friends, and when I was looking elsewhere for love--that our friendship, and then our romance, have been a pleasurable experiment across culture, affiliation, lifestyles and temperament. Each of these things precludes for me the kind of immutable "in love" experience where we are both deadsure that "we are meant to be together." I deal in endless possibility, and so am able to hypothesize what life would have been like if we had chosen different people, different paths. But in the aftermath of losing my mother and grandmother--two women who I could not have chosen but who rather chose me--I have encountered a new kind of certainty about the people I am committed to. It would be morbid to base everything on this, but allowing the possibility of someone's absence to sneak up on me, to imagine for a moment life after their departure, is quite helpful in determining how much they mean to me, how intertwined our lives have become. The strength of my grief parallels the strength of my love for my husband: I know only that without him, life would be shabby, so many shades of grey, that my howling would go on for months--even years--upon discovering his absence. It is proof of the thing's existence by the vacuum, the shockwaves felt in its absence--about as close as I can get to being deadsure of anything.
...
The stone was semiprecious
We were barely conscious
Two souls too smart to be
In the realm of certainty
Even on our wedding day
We lit ourselves on fire
Oh, God not deny her
It's not if I believe in love
but if love believes in me
Oh, believe in me
...
U2 "Moment of Surrender" from 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon
Monday, June 22, 2009
whose arm doth reach the ocean floor
Growing up the daughter of a submariner, I was always fascinated by the raw beauty and power of the sea. Its proximity was partly to blame; until I went off to college, I had never lived in a land-locked place. The other reality that inspired my awe, however, was that the ocean was my father’s livelihood. Even as he knew how to navigate and operate within it, he lived constantly at its mercy.
As a little girl when I spoke of my father as being “at sea,” I really had no notion of the dangers he faced—he had helped teach my sisters and I how to swim, and for all I knew that’s what they did out “at sea,” diving off the deck and swimming with dolphins. The water, as I knew it then, was all glee and shimmer and launching off of his shoulders in the deep end. It was not until later that I began to appreciate the grisly possibilities associated with his seafaring deployments.
At a navy base chapel we attended when I was in 4th grade, I learned to sing the lines of a hymn which hung, cross-stitched by one of my mother’s friends, in the hallways of various homes we lived in:
Lord God, our power evermore
Whose arm doth reach the ocean floor
Dive with our men beneath the sea
Traverse the depths protectively
Lord, hear us when we pray and keep
Them safe from peril in the deep.
Its hauntingly beautiful melody gave me my first inkling of the risks involved in sea service. The second was when Dad began taking us to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I remember being speechless after viewing the new exhibit, “Planet of the Jellies,” where it first occurred to me that there were places in the ocean so dark that the creatures living there possessed their own bioluminescence as a substitute for sunlight. There was a theater where a mysterious woman narrated our odyssey into “The Deep Water,” and we learned that there were many strange creatures in the deepest, uncharted parts of the ocean where no human had ever been. When my father brought me home a compressed Styrofoam cup which had been subjected to the pressures of deep water, I began to see the ocean in the same way that I saw the moon: and I saw my dad as an astronaut. Even when his deployments waned to occasional crew drill assessments that lasted only weeks, I saw him as braving the elements, brandishing his grit and skill against the entropic forces of nature and human error.
When in high school, I attended the dedication ceremony for a local submarine veterans park commemorating all U.S. submarine crews ever lost, and I was struck by how many of them had fallen during peacetime due to fires, accidents and the relentless, unpredictable sea. It became clear to me that the fragility of my connection with my father during periods of sea duty was something I had not fully appreciated for much of the time he was gone. As I reconstruct my childhood deployment memories with this in mind, it strikes me that there were a few habits my father kept which made our relationship deceptively easy, and fostered an intimacy which I took for granted.
My father’s being frequently underway became so passé to me at an early age, that in a casual tea party with my grandfather at the age of three or four I commented, pinkie deftly poised in the air after a sip of air from my cup, “So anyways, my husband’s going to sea.” Clearly, I had heard my mother say something with her friends and was, customarily, mimicking her. I took all my cues from her regarding this otherwise strange arrangement whereby Dad disappeared for half of the year. I wore his t-shirts to bed at her suggestion, anticipated his rare phone calls when the boat had pulled into port, and planned all the things we would do when he got home. I recall my mother joking with other wives about the short, sound-bite messages called “family grams” periodically wired to the ship’s crew. There were running jokes of family grams that didn’t make sense or had been cut off and left with absurdly scant details, with unwitting double-entendres and accidental homophones. You eventually ran out of room for all the things you wanted to say, and had to make the most horrific cuts to squeeze a coherent message into those lines.
I also heard her talk about “mail drops,” which I envisioned as happening through some great tube lowered to the submarine through which the mail was shot or sucked into the great, central hatch I had often capered down on visits to the dock. (It was not until I had seen a helicopter perform a real mail drop on the Discovery Channel that it occurred to me the sub would have to come to the surface periodically.) What I always knew was that the preparation for a mail drop was very intentional, and required at least a day. There would be cards, pictures, and tapes of my sisters and me. These all required Mom’s patient arbitration between competing speakers, all eager to recite the newest rhyme and sing the newest song from school or church. My mother was a master at managing mood swings and petty squabbles to get each one of us to shine for our moment of expression on the stage she had created between the A and B sides of the cassette.
I recently heard a Father’s Day special on NPR’s This American Life entitled “Ask Your Father,” in which a grown man shared a collection of his tapes, which he had made for his father who was frequently at sea with the merchant marine. The recordings, ranging from 1st to 7th grade, quiver with a palpable yearning that his father would eventually use the B side of the tape (which he always left blank) to send him back a message. His father never did. When, as an adult, he asked his dad why, there was no good answer, only deep regret. Of course, he had listened to the tapes—he just never took into account that his son was really devastated that he did not reach back to him across the long distances.
I simply can’t imagine what having such a disengaged father would be like. If my mother bent over backwards to make deployments seem normal, my father more than met her halfway. I still have many of his postcards in my possession, which used to arrive monthly while he was away, even though the submarine did not have mail drops or pull into port as frequently. Some of them are postmarked from the exotic places whose pictures they bear; others of them are not postmarked at all. Rain or shine, birthday cards and flowers appeared, all bright and thoughtful. The best card I’ve ever received came on my birthday in Charleston , South Carolina
When my dad finally did come home each year, these same special occasions, missed once or twice before were doubly celebrated. He made us his priority when he was onshore—soccer games, dance classes, piano recitals—he was there. Math homework was suddenly not so intimidating, except for his periodic reminder that there was “no crying in math.” He seemed remarkably equipped to return from long absences and reestablish immediacy in his relationships with us, to affirm us, to amuse us, to hold us accountable and to talk us down from ledges. Perhaps his intuitive, highly verbal way of relating to us was thrust upon him, being surrounded with daughters. Maybe it was the hallmark of being his mother’s son—she had always been a highly expressive, passionate model of womanhood from the first. Whatever the source of my father’s knack for good communication, even from long distances and depths, I have found it to be a rare gift. It is noteworthy that this man who was absent for almost half of my childhood, has remained one of my closest friends in adulthood.
This friendship has been possible because my parents raised us on a rigorous policy of candor, in which there was little room for pouting or sidestepping when faced with the truth. I have learned to appreciate this, because you always know where you stand, and valuable information is never withheld, if you will dare to ask the question. This was never more comically obvious than when, at the mature age of six, I asked to know where babies came from. I knew that the bedroom played a part, but I thought that perhaps the event could occur while husband and wife held hands—their arm-skin forming a sort of semi-permeable membrane through which the baby-making materials could pass. My father quickly banished all such sci-fi renditions from my mind: we would have a meeting about it after the younger girls were in bed. That night, pulling the H encyclopedia from the shelf, he showed my sister S. and I its transparent layouts of the human body, complete with cardiovascular, muscular, digestive, and reproductive systems. That was how we got the birds and the bees talk—straight up, no chaser. These night conferences occurred whenever we had serious business to transact (a very similar one had taken place just a year before, when after my persistent nagging, my parents had prayed the sinner’s prayer with me one stormy Guam night in our living room). When invited to these powwows, we felt as if we had been initiated into some privileged world of mature responsibility—partly because we helped my parents convince my sisters we were still in bed, and also because we were treated as if we had a right to understand and discuss whatever was being presented there.
Predictably, my father has not always been a perfect communicator. There were times where the “honeymoon” period after his homecoming was followed by an abrupt adjustment for everyone. After being in the highly regulated world of a deployment, he could not fathom why the recycling wasn’t sorted properly, why everything wasn’t ship-shape. My mother jokingly referred to him as “Captain von Trapp” on such occasions. There have also been times, as each of us came of age and went off to college and the wide world beyond, where communication with Dad became strained, confusing, and full of power struggles. He has become famous for anchoring his perspective in a sea of hormones and emotions with such gems as “This offends my common sense!” and, “Can we all stop emoting here and just be rational?” (In recent years I have begun to deprive him even of those classics, rebutting him with recent neuroscience findings that the female brain is more highly adept at processing emotion, and therefore it is possible to be both emotional and rational at once. His point is well taken, however, that men and women view and solve problems quite differently, and that they ought to learn from one another constantly to avoid crippling extremes.) His attempts to remain himself while struggling against a swirling tide of changing, independent young women are admirable—a lesser man might have jumped ship long ago, settling for mediocre conversations and emotional distance.
Every god-fearing dad in some way strives to image our Heavenly Father, and I believe mine has done so most notably in his use of words—both spoken and written—that reach to us even from a long way off and remind us of who we are…who we are becoming. Even as I have struggled not to lose my faith in recent years, I carry a persistent image of God as an affirming and affectionate parent who does not shy away from the tough conversations, but confronts them with dignity and compassion. When I cannot hear God clearly or when it seems He has deployed His Spirit elsewhere and left me—de profundis clamo (“out of the depths I cry”), and I have fair certainty because he is my Father, that what is hidden will be made known in good time, that there is a postcard coming soon in the mail, that there is a late-night conversation that will elucidate things, and that our relationship will be continually made new.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
the great satchmo
I spent the weekend in New Orleans with my husband and friends. The last time I visited the Mardi Gras Museum in Jackson Square, I recall being absorbed all day after with just a handful of photos and captions displayed there. They pertained to the Zulu tradition within Mardi Gras, and when I went back this week to discover a whole exhibit on the subject, it was automatic that I should go. I have compared this compulsive interest to my affinity for flamenco music, which strikes me as having a similar role in Spanish culture as that of jazz in America. Arising from the marginalized, vilified classes of Moors, gyspies, and Jews, flamenco became part of a rich oral tradition that preserved their answer to the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition. Flamenco is achingly beautiful in a way that is kindred to the blues in my ear, and I linked the two almost from the first time I heard it, while in Spain. Growing up, my music teachers taught us the haunting antebellum spirituals, "Follow the Drinking Gourd" and "Wade in the Water," right along with the Americana of "Git Along Little Doggies," "Shenandoah," and "Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal." My husband, who is far more attuned to the latter collection, as he is to the plight of Bob Dylan's "poor white man," to the State's Rights argument of the Civil War, and to the dignity of all things Southern, obliged me and went along. We had very different but complimentary reactions, as I might have predicted. The photo above is one of three that I cannot shake from my mind, but which disturbed my husband in a way he would rather dismiss as counterproductive.
The photo is of “King Louie” Armstrong, honored with the title of Zulu King during the 1949 Mardi Gras festivities. The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was born out of a dark, bitter parody of black stereotypes held by whites, as displayed in blackface shows. Black revellers known as the Tramps began painting their faces in the fashion of one famous vaudeville sketch, titled "There Never Was and Never Will Be a King Like Me." Mimicking its portrayal of the African Zulu tribe, the Tramps at once embraced and turned upside-down white fears of blacks as overly sensuous, violent, less civilized. They even began choosing and parading their own parody of Rex, the white king of Carnival, calling him King Zulu and giving him a lard-can crown and a banana-stalk scepter. When the group was officially founded, Zulu served as a social/civic club and Mardi Gras krewe for blacks. Because of its connection with the owners of Geddes and Moss Funeral Home, who were donors and members, the club also ensured that duespaying club members would receive a decent burial. The krewe's parade for many years was confined to the "black streets" of New Orleans. For a time after the Civil Rights movement it was boycotted by many blacks as a demeaning, backwards tradition too evocative of years under slavery and Jim Crow, and full of farcical customs that might reinforce white stereotypes of blacks. Nevertheless, the krewe was and has remained a beloved tradition and social network for many African-Americans whose love of their city, neighborhood, and traditions has weathered each uncertain decade of oppression, sociopolitical turmoil, or disaster with the spirit of laissez les bons temps rouler intact. This clip from TIME magazine on Feb. 21 of ‘49 sums up the glee on the face of the beloved “Satchmo” during his reign as Zulu king: “The brown-skinned man with the golden horn pursed his scarred lips, blew a short stream of incredibly high, shining notes and then carefully laid the trumpet down. "There's a thing I've dreamed of all my life," he graveled, "and I'll be damned if it don't look like it's about to come true--to be, King of the Zulus' Parade. After that, I'll be ready to die.“
(For the uninitiated, it is thought that Louie Armstrong's nickname, "Satchmo" is short for “Satchelmouth,” which, suggestively derogatory, actually evokes his ample cheeks and broad smile.) I think it appropriate to note here that the classic "King of the Jungle" jazz tribute by Disney in "The Jungle Book" is akin to the mixed bag of feelings we will get if we understand the significance of Louie Armstrong returning to his childhood neighborhood to become the Zulu King. Listen as an adult to the lyrics:
(For the uninitiated, it is thought that Louie Armstrong's nickname, "Satchmo" is short for “Satchelmouth,” which, suggestively derogatory, actually evokes his ample cheeks and broad smile.) I think it appropriate to note here that the classic "King of the Jungle" jazz tribute by Disney in "The Jungle Book" is akin to the mixed bag of feelings we will get if we understand the significance of Louie Armstrong returning to his childhood neighborhood to become the Zulu King. Listen as an adult to the lyrics:
Oh, I'm the king of the swingers oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
and that's what's botherin' me--
I wanna be a man, mancub
and stroll right into town
and be just like the other men,
I'm a-tired of a-monkeyin' around!
These lines painfully remind of the racial epithets used to refer to blacks, to include "zoo ape," "gorilla," and "porch/ghetto monkey." Growing up in different times and places, it might be difficult to believe these words were used in this way, but a quick trip to the Racial Slur Database at www.rsdb.org may prove enlightening. Tell me you can hear your old favorite lines sung as a kid the same way in this light: "...I wanna be like you-ooh-ooh / I wanna walk like you choo / talk like you choo-choo-oo-oo / an ape like me-ee..." Like all things early Disney, this number is woven from the good, the bad, and the ugly of American culture and history, and sterilized-for-children. It draws from a set of stories not incompatible with a framework like Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The proverbial apple has fallen very near indeed, as many of the same intercultural and economic realities resident, latent, and subconscious in Kipling's portrayals of the British Empire have played out on the American continent.
While the photo above is full of unabated glee and revelry, King Louie's face suggests something else, too--a deep hurt, a sadness and a melancholy under wraps that may become ready, eventually, to burst into the streets with new rage and vengeance that would be entirely justified. Maybe it's the paint. Maybe it's the face under the paint. Whatever it is, it goes beyond the hurt of black entertainers who were often forbidden to patronize the same white clubs where they performed, and whose renowned talents were treated as "acceptions to the rule" of black inferiority. Beyond the resentment of black workers whose socioeconomic impoverishment first at the hands of slavery, then under the Jim Crow South, then in the "wage slavery" of industrial northern cities, this hurt is part hot tears of frustration, part laugh-out-loud disbelief. It is the desire to fulfill all the negative prophecies put on one man by another, in hopes that the absurdity of this act will shock the other into remorse. It is also the desire, in case this self-abasing parody of stereotypes should fail to communicate, to kick up one's heels in temporary, reckless abandon. This face seems to say, "If you're gonna put me in a box I can't crawl out of, I might as well enjoy it for a day."
till we have faces
I would like to post here a re-worked version of a conversation held recently after reading and posting on "Letters from the Earth" with attention to the modern (American-Protestant, in particular) church model. What came to my attention is that we don't all agree that developing a sense Christian aesthetics is as important as evangelism, discipleship, acts of compassion, etc. I submit that it is essential to all of these functions that we do aim to image the beauty of heaven and of God himself even as we feed the hungry, worship in song, speak of heaven and hell, and baptize disciples. In his reworking of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche, "Till We Have Faces," C.S. Lewis choses the traditional narrator for the tale, Psyche's unnattractive sister, Orual. The title references a quotation in the book from Orual: "How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?" In the work, Lewis posits that a person must become real before he/she can expect to receive [I would also add "before he/she can expect to transmit"] any message from superhuman beings; "that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona." When we do not strive for our very best in speech, in music, in art, and in presention, or when we imitate someone else's best without having their skill or seeking to add to what they have already revealed, we chose to wear a mask. I would call much of the put-on shoddiness, the kitschy definitions of what is "excellent or praiseworthy," and the lack of esthetic vision and discipline in many churches a mask we present to the world--not the true face of Christ, nor of his bride.
In the same vein as Twain's criticisms in "Letters from the Earth," I find it impossibly distracting that people should talk about heaven, for example, which figures so prominently into our motives and bylines for evangelism, while neglecting to make the place of worship, and the music and message offered therein, beautiful. To neglect the form in favor of the substance is tending dangerously toward a disembodied, gnostic rejection of the five senses. How are we to convince people that the resurrection of the body, for example, is anything exciting at all, if we are not continually striving to give them a taste of what a new heaven and a new earth would smell/taste/feel/sound/look like? (This is NOT to be confused with a Thomas Kinkaid-like attempt to paint the world "without the fall": saccharine, idealizing a bygone era of a more predominant cultural Christianity. Art, music, and speech can be redemptive without being cast in so many pastel shades of innocence.)
If anyone thinks that this endeavor will inevitably lead to idolatry, to a focus on the form and not the substance of the body of Christ and the gospel itself, then they have too high an estimation of their earthly talents. If we are to truly pursue the divine image in corporate worship, in form as well as in substance, we will never be able to feel as if we have arrived, as if we have wholly succeeded in reflecting Beauty himself. Beyond this, if anyone thinks that this endeavor will lead to artificiality in worship as believers strive to pursue a particular convention in music, speech, etc., then they have missed the fundamental process by which beauty is revealed in the world. Sometimes effortless, sometimes quite involved, beauty is constantly being perfected, reevaluated, discovered in unexpected corners: excellent artists are relentless, not satisfied with mere imitation of a thing but always striving to capture the essence of the thing as they see it. If a flower, a melody, or a phrase can elicit this kind of commitment from the artist, shouldn't the goal of becoming the body of Christ spur on the community of Christ-followers toward the essence of bearing his image in all things?
In addition to thinking of ourselves as the body of Christ, we are told to think of the Church as the Bride of Christ. Think for a moment about the aesthetic component of romantic love. Participating in church is like marriage, in that you shouldn't abandon the endeavor once you're in it, and you have to continue to find redeeming things about the Other even when you become disenchanted. Using the marriage metaphor, it would be like a wife who, having secured the marriage vow of love and faithfulness from her husband, got lazy and let herself go. Her husband would still love her, but why settle for good when you can aim for the best? This, far from being a Barbie-like, impossible and untruthful ideal, would involve what many self-respecting women strive for: a healthy, balanced body that is still kept attractive for their enjoyment and their husbands'. It is not an either/or proposition: either he loves me for who I am or he loves my body. Clearly, as the Song of Solomon and many other god-fearing texts on erotic love would indicate, he loves her for both. Many husbands whose eyes wander and lead them to be unfaithful would still say that they love their wives, who are good to them in so many other ways. Let's not even introduce the idea of porn here, but talk about men who just go and lust after other, real women in their workplace, neighborhood, or local strip joints. The wife who has let herself gain that 50 pounds and quit caring about her hair and skin being healthy, and who refuses to present her best to herself and to her husband deludes herself that this is not an integral part of showing her love for him, and is in for a rude awakening. She has settled for less than her best, thinking her good intentions will carry her the rest of the way in her husband's heart. And it might work, but this is not a method we would ever recommend or encourage someone we love to pursue. It is a fallback. We wouldn't, at the end of the day, want to imitate her treatment of her marriage. We would find it gratifying if her husband is faithful anyway, or if he was somehow able to see her through the lens he did when she was young and beautiful. But we would always rather emulate the woman who retained both her good intentions and her ability to age gracefully by caring for her body as an act of self-love and devotion to her husband, who loves her all the more because she is both good and beautiful. So the church must strive to be both good and beautiful for the coming of Christ.
Yet what of the imperfections we each possess in one degree or another--our lack of natural talent, beauty, underdeveloped esthetic sense, lack of resources or education--do these disqualify our offerings before God? Christ's love of the poor, marginalized, and broken people he touched in his ministry is an emphatic "No!" Poorly wrought words, melodies, and buildings can considered beautiful, if they are clearly examples of someone's best work at a particular juncture, the first steps in a journey, an earnest plea for restoration, or the promise of a grand undertaking to cultivate a specific talent in the Lord's service. We would not say that they are compelling at all if we knew that the speaker/artist had decided that that was the best he/she could do, and that now there was no need to try for anything more. We would call it mediocre, and say that that person had settled, as it would seem that Cain did when making his offering to God, for less than our best. This is important, because Christ himself was not content to pass by brokenness without bringing restoration, healing, and beauty back into the lives of lame, leperous, blind, and oppressed people. He only did so where he was welcomed to, however. Does he perhaps extend the same to us: "You not receive because you do not ask"? While the Living Christ may not always employ miracles in every situation, does his Spirit not close and open doors before us, leading us in the way we should walk? If God were leading me to step down from a position of musical leadership, for example, because I am not really gifted in that area, or perhaps to cultivate another gift for the good of his people, would I listen? If God created an opportunity for me to participate in a artistic, philanthropic, scientific, or civic venture with non-believers which might grow me in my understanding of his Truth in a particular field, would I embrace it, or find myself too busy, too afraid, or too lazy to do it? If another believer brought to my attention that our Sunday school curriculum, decor, choice of music, or anything else about my church were somehow out of tune with what that person took to be the image of God, would I engage the criticism in a manner honoring to God? Or would I take offense, entrench, coopt others to reinforce my modus operandi, boycott that person's endeavors, transfer churches, step down in a huff from my position as if to say "Can you do a better job? Let's see it!" I believe to do so is to operate without full use of another part of the body: to put a blindfold on, to ignore pain or nausea, to favor one foot over the other. Anyone who's ever incurred a serious injury by ignoring small symptoms knows how foolish this approach is. Who in their best state of mind would override the very sensations that tell us something is wrong and demands our attention?
What many in the church do is just this. We reason with ourselves that there is no need for change if we overlook these "small" disturbances. We settle, before even struggling much to work through, by discipline and training, the cacophany, the shoddy workmanship, and poor communication that naturally result from not putting much effort into things. That premature resignation is what I cannot stand, and what repulses people who pay attention to such things: we wonder, if this preacher/layperson/worship leader feels that they have no further progress to make towards a better offering to God and his people, than why should I follow/go along with him/her in the pursuit of Perfection Himself? It is already human nature to stop trying once people have recognized some measure of success in your work, to rest on one's laurels and squeeze by without continued efforts toward even further inspiration and skill. It's the "good enough" mentality which people perpetuate in church because they have the false idea that because we are sinners and cannot be perfect this side of eternity, that we are absolved from aiming at perfection with the help of the Spirit. There is nothing transformative about this mindset, yet we are to be the body of Christ, continually made new by his Spirit, committed in love to presenting a blameless Bride at Christ's return.
What seem to be secondary questions of "mere" aesthetics, seen in this light, are not secondary at all. We do the body and bride of Christ no favors if we let ourselves and the Church off the hook for so often accepting such poor musical, verbal, or structural renderings. As long as there are non-believers who can paint better, sing better, build better, and speak better, it is an example of even the stones crying out. We may think we are communicating all we need to about the gospel. We are not reaching, however, a great many people who are sensitive to the bruised beauty of the world around us. We must suggest more often and more convincingly that this world God created bears his image and seal of approval ("It is good"), which in its fallen state it is only a shadow of the real, incarnate splendor of the world to come. It may seem counter-intuitive that paying close attention to this world should draw our minds and hearts into anticipation for the next, but that happens to be my view, an orthodox one, of the incarnation and the resurrection of the body.
In the same vein as Twain's criticisms in "Letters from the Earth," I find it impossibly distracting that people should talk about heaven, for example, which figures so prominently into our motives and bylines for evangelism, while neglecting to make the place of worship, and the music and message offered therein, beautiful. To neglect the form in favor of the substance is tending dangerously toward a disembodied, gnostic rejection of the five senses. How are we to convince people that the resurrection of the body, for example, is anything exciting at all, if we are not continually striving to give them a taste of what a new heaven and a new earth would smell/taste/feel/sound/look like? (This is NOT to be confused with a Thomas Kinkaid-like attempt to paint the world "without the fall": saccharine, idealizing a bygone era of a more predominant cultural Christianity. Art, music, and speech can be redemptive without being cast in so many pastel shades of innocence.)
If anyone thinks that this endeavor will inevitably lead to idolatry, to a focus on the form and not the substance of the body of Christ and the gospel itself, then they have too high an estimation of their earthly talents. If we are to truly pursue the divine image in corporate worship, in form as well as in substance, we will never be able to feel as if we have arrived, as if we have wholly succeeded in reflecting Beauty himself. Beyond this, if anyone thinks that this endeavor will lead to artificiality in worship as believers strive to pursue a particular convention in music, speech, etc., then they have missed the fundamental process by which beauty is revealed in the world. Sometimes effortless, sometimes quite involved, beauty is constantly being perfected, reevaluated, discovered in unexpected corners: excellent artists are relentless, not satisfied with mere imitation of a thing but always striving to capture the essence of the thing as they see it. If a flower, a melody, or a phrase can elicit this kind of commitment from the artist, shouldn't the goal of becoming the body of Christ spur on the community of Christ-followers toward the essence of bearing his image in all things?
In addition to thinking of ourselves as the body of Christ, we are told to think of the Church as the Bride of Christ. Think for a moment about the aesthetic component of romantic love. Participating in church is like marriage, in that you shouldn't abandon the endeavor once you're in it, and you have to continue to find redeeming things about the Other even when you become disenchanted. Using the marriage metaphor, it would be like a wife who, having secured the marriage vow of love and faithfulness from her husband, got lazy and let herself go. Her husband would still love her, but why settle for good when you can aim for the best? This, far from being a Barbie-like, impossible and untruthful ideal, would involve what many self-respecting women strive for: a healthy, balanced body that is still kept attractive for their enjoyment and their husbands'. It is not an either/or proposition: either he loves me for who I am or he loves my body. Clearly, as the Song of Solomon and many other god-fearing texts on erotic love would indicate, he loves her for both. Many husbands whose eyes wander and lead them to be unfaithful would still say that they love their wives, who are good to them in so many other ways. Let's not even introduce the idea of porn here, but talk about men who just go and lust after other, real women in their workplace, neighborhood, or local strip joints. The wife who has let herself gain that 50 pounds and quit caring about her hair and skin being healthy, and who refuses to present her best to herself and to her husband deludes herself that this is not an integral part of showing her love for him, and is in for a rude awakening. She has settled for less than her best, thinking her good intentions will carry her the rest of the way in her husband's heart. And it might work, but this is not a method we would ever recommend or encourage someone we love to pursue. It is a fallback. We wouldn't, at the end of the day, want to imitate her treatment of her marriage. We would find it gratifying if her husband is faithful anyway, or if he was somehow able to see her through the lens he did when she was young and beautiful. But we would always rather emulate the woman who retained both her good intentions and her ability to age gracefully by caring for her body as an act of self-love and devotion to her husband, who loves her all the more because she is both good and beautiful. So the church must strive to be both good and beautiful for the coming of Christ.
Yet what of the imperfections we each possess in one degree or another--our lack of natural talent, beauty, underdeveloped esthetic sense, lack of resources or education--do these disqualify our offerings before God? Christ's love of the poor, marginalized, and broken people he touched in his ministry is an emphatic "No!" Poorly wrought words, melodies, and buildings can considered beautiful, if they are clearly examples of someone's best work at a particular juncture, the first steps in a journey, an earnest plea for restoration, or the promise of a grand undertaking to cultivate a specific talent in the Lord's service. We would not say that they are compelling at all if we knew that the speaker/artist had decided that that was the best he/she could do, and that now there was no need to try for anything more. We would call it mediocre, and say that that person had settled, as it would seem that Cain did when making his offering to God, for less than our best. This is important, because Christ himself was not content to pass by brokenness without bringing restoration, healing, and beauty back into the lives of lame, leperous, blind, and oppressed people. He only did so where he was welcomed to, however. Does he perhaps extend the same to us: "You not receive because you do not ask"? While the Living Christ may not always employ miracles in every situation, does his Spirit not close and open doors before us, leading us in the way we should walk? If God were leading me to step down from a position of musical leadership, for example, because I am not really gifted in that area, or perhaps to cultivate another gift for the good of his people, would I listen? If God created an opportunity for me to participate in a artistic, philanthropic, scientific, or civic venture with non-believers which might grow me in my understanding of his Truth in a particular field, would I embrace it, or find myself too busy, too afraid, or too lazy to do it? If another believer brought to my attention that our Sunday school curriculum, decor, choice of music, or anything else about my church were somehow out of tune with what that person took to be the image of God, would I engage the criticism in a manner honoring to God? Or would I take offense, entrench, coopt others to reinforce my modus operandi, boycott that person's endeavors, transfer churches, step down in a huff from my position as if to say "Can you do a better job? Let's see it!" I believe to do so is to operate without full use of another part of the body: to put a blindfold on, to ignore pain or nausea, to favor one foot over the other. Anyone who's ever incurred a serious injury by ignoring small symptoms knows how foolish this approach is. Who in their best state of mind would override the very sensations that tell us something is wrong and demands our attention?
What many in the church do is just this. We reason with ourselves that there is no need for change if we overlook these "small" disturbances. We settle, before even struggling much to work through, by discipline and training, the cacophany, the shoddy workmanship, and poor communication that naturally result from not putting much effort into things. That premature resignation is what I cannot stand, and what repulses people who pay attention to such things: we wonder, if this preacher/layperson/worship leader feels that they have no further progress to make towards a better offering to God and his people, than why should I follow/go along with him/her in the pursuit of Perfection Himself? It is already human nature to stop trying once people have recognized some measure of success in your work, to rest on one's laurels and squeeze by without continued efforts toward even further inspiration and skill. It's the "good enough" mentality which people perpetuate in church because they have the false idea that because we are sinners and cannot be perfect this side of eternity, that we are absolved from aiming at perfection with the help of the Spirit. There is nothing transformative about this mindset, yet we are to be the body of Christ, continually made new by his Spirit, committed in love to presenting a blameless Bride at Christ's return.
What seem to be secondary questions of "mere" aesthetics, seen in this light, are not secondary at all. We do the body and bride of Christ no favors if we let ourselves and the Church off the hook for so often accepting such poor musical, verbal, or structural renderings. As long as there are non-believers who can paint better, sing better, build better, and speak better, it is an example of even the stones crying out. We may think we are communicating all we need to about the gospel. We are not reaching, however, a great many people who are sensitive to the bruised beauty of the world around us. We must suggest more often and more convincingly that this world God created bears his image and seal of approval ("It is good"), which in its fallen state it is only a shadow of the real, incarnate splendor of the world to come. It may seem counter-intuitive that paying close attention to this world should draw our minds and hearts into anticipation for the next, but that happens to be my view, an orthodox one, of the incarnation and the resurrection of the body.
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