in nomine Patri

In re: The Efficient Operation of Schools

2009-06-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

I am an educator, exasperated already with the system of education. This means less than nothing in some ways; I’m one of thousands – probably millions – of the 8.3 million teachers in America who finds himself insulted and angered by an institution which systematically rewards the tame and marginally effective while weeding out the challenging, the extraordinary, the new, the bold, and the good.

There is an article by Walter Karp titled “Why Johnny Can’t Think” which makes the claim that the real problem with schools is not that students don’t take enough math or science, or that we need a new literacy program, or that we need to be more reform-minded, but rather that schools are constructed to actively tear down children’s will and capacity to think for themselves. For all of the high talk of critical thinking and out-of-the-box ideas, the system itself grinds them underfoot with twelve years of witheringly dispassionate opposition. With trained, military-style response to bells, intercom announcements, and sharp commands from teachers and administration, students stumble through their school days in a sort of mindless haze. Their interest only seems active as they wander the halls between classes, in the ten minutes they have before they need to be in their seat, facing forward. And now, some twenty-five years after Karp’s article was published, even the halls have been cracked down – more schools every year require ID badges, metal detectors, and armed guards.

Safety and order, safety and order. The efficient operation of the system. These are the tried-and-true excuses for everything from random locker checks to school uniforms. But there can be no legitimacy to protecting the order and efficiency of a system that doesn’t work. We aren’t producing students capable of well-reasoned critical thought – we’re producing students who know that the surest way to succeed is to keep your head down, keep your thoughts to yourself, and do exactly what you’re told. It requires an almost Nietzschean will-to-power for a student to express him/herself in this atmosphere, and if the form of expression is deemed at all inappropriate for any reason, the student will likely find him/herself suspended – removed for the efficient operation of the system. The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.

But I don’t intend to focus on the students’ plight here – Walter Karp did a fine job of that. What is on my mind is one level up – the teachers. How can we expect critical thought from the students if we stamp it out of their educators?

Little more than a week ago, I was told that one of the finest teachers I have ever had was being removed from the school in which he has taught for more than ten years. There were no complaints, his personnel file was clean, and he had even won the Educator of the Year award from the county. All it took was a request from the new principal to the director of schools, and he was “transferred” to the other side of the county. Why go through the hassle of finding a legitimate reason to fire somebody when you can simply break their will?

This man – a teacher of government and economics classes – was legendary for his ability to engage a class. Students began hearing about him years before they would have his class, even before they were in high school, through older siblings and friends. Parents finagled their children into his class just so they could know that they would actually be challenged to exercise reason and debate to express their beliefs – not just cough up a name and a date on a scan-tron test. Classroom discussions were famously spirited – students discovered passions they had never known before as they were finally allowed and encouraged to treat their own ideas with respect.

In other words, it was a class begging to come under “administrative review.” When students actually begin to question the object of their education and the effectiveness of their school, when they actually begin to look at their government and wonder if it is disingenuous, when students are actually able to take a hard look at the system and realize things could be better, it throws a kink in the conveyor-belt assembly line of public education. The instigator must be removed like a cancer.

God help me, I just can't figure out why. I do not understand why all subjects of any life and vitality and passion are removed from the classroom. It’s not just Government teachers – it’s any teacher that opens a portal to ideas that matter, whether in English, Art, Science, Theatre, or even Math. Sooner or later, their number comes up, and it’s their time to go. The efficient operation of the system requires they be “relocated.”

So who is left behind? All of the other teachers. All of the teachers you don’t remember when you’re 40 – or even 25 – because you didn’t pay ten minutes of attention in their entire class. They didn’t ask you to, and there was even a vague impression that if you paid too much attention – if you actually looked into the subject yourself and understood just how shortchanged you were by this teacher – you would get in trouble. You sat – or slept – in the room, you didn’t speak up, you didn’t answer the teacher’s rhetorical questions aimed at a fifth grade intelligence level.

These were the classes in which you got an easy A, in which you watched movies like “Gladiator” because they had a tenuous connection to historicity, in which you were given maps to color. These were the classrooms in which the teacher read an entire book aloud over the course of two weeks while the entire class daydreamed or fiddled around with their personal electronic devices. These were the classrooms where the only learning that happened was taking place in the back corner, where a bored student thumbed through a textbook or a library book on his own, and the student next to him scrawled a poem onto her desk.

And these are the classes that will remain forever. Since they raise no red flags, they will never, ever catch the eye of anyone higher up. All the administration knows is that the students go into the room, they are reasonably quiet for an hour, and then they exit the room. 90% of them pass, and the ones who don’t – well, no one is all that surprised they didn’t. On the occasions that such a class is observed by the administration, the teacher is duly warned ahead of time, and actually plans something of a lesson for his class after asking them to be good for the principal. Next week, they’ll get a free day as a reward.

And we still wonder what’s missing in our schools? For God’s sake, we’re missing teachers – they’ve all been replaced by warm, gelatinous babysitters. The real educators stirred up too much trouble to be bothered with – they assigned a book that had a sex scene, they discussed the inherent hazards of capitalism, they challenged a student to defend his or her political beliefs, they questioned the unilateral country-first approach to history, they actually got a reaction out of some of the twenty-seven bodies sitting in their desks – and with a few complaints from a handful of students or parents (or even other teachers, shamefully), the principal threw his hands in the air and cried uncle. Take this teacher somewhere else – we don’t want to deal with him anymore.

Does the whole system need to be scrapped? I hope not. There are some damn fine teachers out there, and they are still making a difference. And they’ve usually got a solid principal behind them – one who has enough backbone to fight for the positions of teachers who take risks, one who has enough personal character to understand that even if he or she has a personal disagreement with a teacher, the students’ educational experience trumps all other concerns. We’ve got a structure in place that could theoretically allow students to be challenged in more directions and exposed to more points of view than in any other time of their life – what we need are the teachers, the principals, the directors and superintendents and school boards with the guts to do it.

Gut-pour

2009-05-20T03:51:00.000-07:00

For years – probably since high school – I have categorized the worthwhile paths a person might take in one of two ways: either they would strive to change the world in a grand and impersonal fashion, by, say, curing a common affliction, or they would make it their goal to change lives personally, one at a time, face to face – like a teacher might. It was a handy distinction. People who weren’t all that keen on the luvy-duvy side of things could spend their whole lives in a lab if they wanted to, and I didn’t have to discount that, because their efforts change lives by the millions. People who didn’t really have much to offer science or literature but found themselves gifted with an overabundance of heart could do any kind of work they enjoyed, and could pour their hearts into meeting the less easily defined needs of those around them. Everybody fits; everybody’s got something they can do.

I gave up most of my big ideas when I learned to make this distinction. I figured I was the guy with the heart, so why should I waste time chasing after ridiculous ideas when I could be focusing on the people around me? We all know how people become the top actor, or the top writer, or the top photographer – they cut off every extraneous thing in their worlds in order to focus on their art. And for many of them, that means cutting off extraneous human relationships, extraneous hobbies, extraneous…hell, everything.

Well here I am. I teach now. Could I put more into my lessons, into my planning time, into researched teaching strategies? Absolutely. But could I invest more of myself into these kids? I’d be surprised if I could. If it weren’t stalkerish and weird, I’d show up at their sporting events and their birthday parties. I’d join their families. I’d wave goodbye to them at the airport. Just because I love all of these kids.

So why does this not feel even remotely like “enough”? Why do I still want to be the guy who does all of this, and creates a generation-defining work of art (or saves a few busloads of children, or revolutionizes international diplomacy, or…)? How is it that after spending so much of my life talking up the value of the everyman, I won’t let myself be happy as one?

I am as convinced that I have more to give as I am convinced that I have no idea what direction to take it. I’ve got a good mind and a few worthy talents and I’m standing around like an idiot, wasting the only time I’ve got. You want to know my deepest fear? What poetic lines will plague me till I die? I’ve got a few (they’re all worth asking about), but here’s the appropriate one for now. By Edgar Lee Masters, written from the perspective of a dead man:

“And toward the last, when I thought it over,
There by my window, growing clearer
About myself, as my pulse slowed down,
And looked at one of the mills I bought--
Which I didn't have the slightest need of,
As things turned out, and I never ran--
A fine machine, once brightly varnished,
And eager to do its work,
Now with its paint washed off--
I saw myself as a good machine
That Life had never used.”

I’m 23. I’m a damn kid, barely older than the high-schoolers I was teaching the other year. So why in God’s name am I so convinced that I have already irrevocably ruined my life, and fallen pitifully short of my own potential?

I never believed God would open up a whole life-plan before my eyes, but I always thought He’d lead me to what’s next. Honestly, the sense of aimlessness and meaninglessness, and my perception that I’ll never be able to change or develop into anything more than I am now, do more to dig at my faith than any tight philosophical argument.

And on top of all this, I get to hate myself for being a drama queen.

Ariadne Thread

2009-05-14T02:36:00.000-07:00

Beautiful nomad, beautiful child,
you cannot cut the train you drag.
Cross as many miles as you like, my love,
wend through desert bones and dying forests –
there are always threads from you to me.

And I am tangled up, all arms and legs, and pasted
to a wall in a cold city, near an open window
where a breeze will always blow across our naked bodies,
will curl sometimes into ears wet with crying.

But if one day you turned, and traced
your Ariadne thread, it would not end with me,
or your cousin,
or your father –

it would wind all the way to God.
You would find him bound in it as I am,
silent, loving, melancholy. And at his bleeding feet
you’d see two frayed ends –

One, the beginning of the labyrinth,
one, the end.

Mixing Myself Up with the Characters - Am I Alone in This?

2009-01-14T02:57:00.000-08:00

The first book about which I specifically remember crying was Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows. Gosh darn those stories about faithful dogs – they’ll get you every time. More recently, I had quite a good cry over Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and its protagonist’s beautiful recollection of a life that has passed him by. Who hasn’t lain awake thinking these thoughts? I might also mention Hardy’s excruciating Jude the Obscure, which hurts even more when you believe yourself to be living an unnaturally parallel life to that of the title character.

My first train of thought was that fiction teaches us proper social behavior by modeling it for us: this here is an appropriate time for sorrow, while in this situation we celebrate. We should respect loyalty; we should mourn loss; we should hope to achieve great things. I don’t mean that fiction does this in a vaguely threatening nefarious way – it simply does it. We pick these images up and store them unconsciously (one of literature’s few lessons that actually can be learned virtually by osmosis), and we recollect them or reenact them (again, often unconsciously) when analogous situations arise in our own lives. When we read about them again, we read into them our own actual experiences with the topic, and in doing so we tie in the loop of catharsis, along with reinforcement of social behavior. We learn to live by way of example, and whatever examples we lack in the direct contact of our lives, media is happy to supplement. We often live, then, by the example of the media we intake, and at the end of the day, we seek solace in this same media. I do not make the claim that we are slaves to the general media, as we have an unfathomable degree of choice in what we partake of, and whatever we do choose to read/watch/listen to, we can feel strongly for or against. What I do claim is that we form a bizarre relationship with the stories we choose to listen to, and that far from being simple, useless tales orbiting the periphery of our lives, they become a deep part of our personal identity.

We do this all the time – we pick up a character in a book or film and string along with them for awhile, identify with them, think of ourselves (flatteringly or not) as their avatar on this earth. And when we can convince ourselves thoroughly of our likeness to the characters, things get weird. As I read, I might perhaps notice that Jude the Obscure makes a decision very similar to one I just made, and I might note the next day that I have made a decision very similar to that which I just read about Jude making night before. And then – wait, did I make the next decision, or did Jude? Did I make the same choice that I would have made had I not read the book, or did my self-identification with the character of Jude cause me, even slightly, to choose a behavior more like his, or what I would imagine his to be? After all, I like Jude. But then, I don’t want my life to turn out like his, and so maybe I contradict him after all.

Fiction, or even gripping non-fiction, pulls us along its intricate canals. I wonder whether it would be misleading to say, in this case, that fiction teaches us. Perhaps it is more to my point that fiction lays before us different possible paths – there is nothing that says I ought to act in the manner of such-and-such a character, but there is a book that tells me what might happen if I did. Not “what might happen” in the way that a fable tells us “what might happen” if we are greedy, or kind to strangers, or foolish with our money, but who we might become. In this life, rain falls equally on the land of the just and the unjust. Given this – that things might go well for us whether we act for good or ill – our query tends away from “What is the good?” and toward “Who do I wish to be like?” And in response to this query, each of our stories has its own suggestion.

My best guess is that I’m wading around the territory of psychology when I say that after we choose a character with whom we self-identify, we begin to model behavior on said character. This is one reason we all love great hero stories – Braveheart and the like – and find ourselves deeply disturbed by the probing of our own darknesses in films like, oh, say, The Dark Knight. In the first case, we get to make the satisfying claim that we are acting courageously, like Braveheart, every time we make a somewhat bold decision, while in the second, we find ourselves looking into the consequences of our actions, at our own duality, at the vile closeness between us and the evil around us.

That’s an overly simple statement, and when I look at it again, I would add that it is overly Freudian, with all of its claims of identification and all that rot. Also, if I say that we model our behaviors after characters, it implies a specific intent to do so, when what I mean to say is that once we have identified with a character, the character itself shapes our behavior to a degree, because we have added this character into our definition of who we are and how we behave.

Does anyone else ever feel this way? I think of a few specific cases in my own experience. I’ve already alluded to the example of Jude the Obscure. I found myself, years after having read the book, still making decisions and thinking to myself, “Wait, am I doing this because I honestly think it’s the right choice given my own experience, or because I think this is what Jude should have done in his similar situation?” I still have only partial answers to that. Another text that haunted me for years was the poem “Wild Oats,” by Philip Larkin. Again, the question: “Am I the kind and tender person that my mind probably wants me to think I am, or am I more simply the speaker of this poem, too selfish, withdrawn, and easily bored to love?” In both cases, for the record, believing my supposed identity with the character/speaker threw me into stubborn depressions. In these depressions, I may have acted even more like the characters, though I was at the same time even more conscious of how little I wanted to be like them.

I don’t know where to take this meandering thought-trail. It has very specific feelings attached to it for me, but I seem to be having an unusual difficulty expressing them. I will try one last time to say this simple thing: sometimes I read or hear something that, for whatever reason, seems to announce itself to me like a curse. And like any good curse, it doesn’t matter whether I fight it or embrace it: it all plays out just as the oracle predicted, as tightly wound as Oedipus, Laius, and Jocasta.

I would love to hear any thoughts and impressions from anybody, or questions, or greetings from the black, churning void of the internet.

Does no one at all ever feel this way in the least?

Why Obama, Part 2: A Brief-as-Possible Look at Taxes

2008-09-07T03:15:00.000-07:00

I thought about heading into the territory of “change,” since both candidates have decided to make the word their mantra this election, but since everybody always talks about Obama and change, I think I’ll talk about taxes and fiscal responsibility instead.

[EDIT: If you want an even clearer comparison of McCain’s and Obama’s claims to fiscal responsibility, read this article: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/09/04/2008-09-04_forget_the_pork_wheres_the_beef.html . Frankly, this article says it better than I ever could, and I think you should read it.]

It is the view of the Republican Party that the government should let more people keep more of their own money, should spend less money itself, and should keep a tightly balanced federal budget. It seems to be a tightly guarded secret that, for the most part, Democrats actually agree with all of these tenets. Yes, Democrats tend to support new social programs that do cost money, and are less averse to raising taxes than Republicans, but Democrats aren’t here to steal away your hard-earned house to turn it into a bathhouse for the homeless. And while Democrats tend to spend more on things at home, they tend to spend considerably less on things like the military. And, you know, wars against nations that weren’t threatening us.

Listen to a few facts, take a look at a few numbers, and re-assess what you think. Neither Obama nor McCain plans to raise taxes for the middle class – anybody below the $250,000/year mark. In fact, both McCain and Obama plan to cut taxes for people up to that mark. After that, their plans diverge: McCain’s tax cuts extend all the way to the top, while Obama plans to simply return the tax levels of the top 10% to just below where they were during the Clinton years. McCain’s tax plan results in a very clear and very direct loss of income for the government – that is, less money to fund the government’s most necessary functions. (Actually, of course, all of this money is hypothetical – we won’t actually run out of it, we’ll simply run ourselves further in debt to countries like China, whose ties to us are purely opportunistic.)

The theory is that the low taxes will encourage so much growth and trade and revenue that they will pay for themselves. While I admit that this is quite reasonable, I am forced to say that I am unconvinced by its results in the past twenty years. Our Federal Budget deficit ballooned during the 80s as our economy grew and stabilized with low taxes, and in the 90s, under higher tax rates, our economy grew by leaps and bounds. In fact, those higher taxes left us with a budget surplus, long since evaporated after falling into the hands of a president whom no one, Democrat or Republican, calls a fiscal steward.

A philosophical disagreement with taxes is something worth talking about another time, but let’s stop to look at what we’ve got here: moderate increases in taxes don’t destroy the economy, and they can provide our country with a balanced budget and economic freedom.

Now, back to some numbers: the way McCain’s plan is structured heavily favors the wealthy. That’s not an accusation, it’s number sense (click this link to see just how much: http://nearing.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/28/1797267-mccains-tax-cuts-are-aimed-at-the-rich-even-more-so-than-bushs-were ). The average middle-class family, under McCain’s tax cuts, can hope to save some $325 a year, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (a non-partisan group). If you’re voting to put more cash in your wallet, take a look at this: the same family, under Obama’s plan, can hope to save about $1,120 a year - $795 more than with McCain. [http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/a_new_stitch_in_a_bad_pattern.html ] With Obama, 85-90% of the public is getting a tax cut. Are the wealthy stuck with the tab? Well, somewhat – as mentioned before, their taxes go back to just below the Clinton tax levels. But while their tax levels return to 90s levels, their actual income levels have multiplied since that time by at least five-fold. They won’t be forced to shut down their factories just yet.

But how does it pan out on a national level? Where do these cuts and raises leave our national budget? McCain’s cuts are expected to increase our debt by as much as 4.5 trillion dollars, while Obama’s are expected to increase it by 3.3 trillion dollars. Those numbers look pretty similar in type, but think about the actual difference between 4,500,000,000,000 and 3,300,000,000,000. It’s staggering. [http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates_taxproposals_tpc/index.htm?cnn=yes]

Here are some other things to chew on: McCain and Palin are running on a platform to cut pork-barrel projects and dastardly earmarks. More power to them – if the projects are worth spending money on, they should go through the whole process that everything else does. But cutting pork-barrels and earmarks does not add up to a plan to balance the budget. Do you know how much money is spent on pork-barrel projects? In 2004, it was less than 53 billion dollars. Even if you could eliminate all of that – which, of course, you couldn’t – it would barely put a dent in government spending (we were just looking at numbers in the trillions!). By comparison, our government now spends more than $700 billion a year on military expenses alone. Even as recently as 2002 that number was just about $350 billion dollars. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/01/27/GR2006012700168.html

(If you want to see some really interesting – and scary – charts about military spending, click here: http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending)

Just so you know I haven’t left reality behind me, I’m going to admit that neither candidate is going to balance the budget. It’s not gonna happen. But it is valid to ask which of the two will leave us in a better position at the end of his term, especially when one of them wants to focus so much on the government’s budget habits.

McCain knew that the Bush tax plans were bogus back when they were first being pushed through. He voted against them, and he was vocal about it. Whether Adam Smith has chosen to haunt McCain’s dreams ever since, or whether McCain has chosen to make another considerable concession to his conservative base (as he did with Palin…more on her some other time…when I’ve got a lot more time on my hands…), I cannot say. But the fact that he now not only supports them, but wants to extend them further, confuses me. And it saddens me. Because he’s never given a good explanation for why he switched on this issue, and I’m not sure that he can. (See also: environment, global warming, off-shore drilling, straight talk).

Why Obama, Pt. 1: The Beginning of Something Long

2008-09-02T00:18:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking through some of these things for months, and I wanted to voice them. If they spin out unheard into the void, I don't mind - some of this is just a chance for me to organize my thoughts. They need organizing, because I'm quite given to incoherent babbling when it comes to politics, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm going to try to avoid willfully subjecting my friends to this.

Essentially, my thought is this: whether you are a Republican, Democrat, liberal, centrist, or moderate conservative, I think the case for Obama can be made very compellingly. I'm going to take a crack at it. I don't think any solid conservatives will go for it, but I'd still like them to listen in anyway. While I don't plan to hide my views, I hope to state them in a way that avoids the simple habit of bashing the other party for kicks, slandering people, making unfair accusations, or making straw-men arguments from the opposing view. I respect the conservative Republican approach to things, and I respect people who maintain that approach. But let me tell you why I shifted away from it.

Introduction:
I’ve been vaguely interested in politics for much of my life. When I was younger, I believe my motivation was chiefly that the ability to talk politics seemed to make me sound smarter, more adult. I probably still hope it does these things, but this hope is entirely secondary to my growing fascination of the pure mechanics of it all. In the last two years, politics has become a hobby of mine that consumes a surprising amount of my time, as I spend hours combing through the New York Times, the BBC World News, and sites like www.politico.com.
I might as well tell you now that in 2004, I voted for Bush. I did not know Kerry very well, I didn’t like his voice, and he sounded very suspicious to me. I was not entirely sure that I liked Bush, but at the time I was more concerned that any Supreme Court openings be filled by more conservative judges. As it happened, two openings came up, and Bush appointed Roberts and Alito (aside from his rulings in favor of expanding executive powers, I think I like Roberts. I don’t really know about Alito yet.)
Around 2006, I began to grow very excited about the 2008 elections. Interesting things had been happening. John McCain had been finding his way into the press again, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else getting the Republican nomination in ’08 – which was great, because I loved McCain. I even got to see him speak in person, and he conveyed a message that deeply resonated with me: the needs of America ought to come above the petty squabbles between parties. This same year, Democrats had chased Sen. Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party because he wasn’t against the war – never mind the fact that he had always been a successful, popular, well-loved and well-respected senator. But he, too, rose above: he ran as an Independent, and won his seat back handily.
I began thinking that my dream ticket for 2008 would be McCain/Lieberman (when people actually began to consider this a possibility in recent weeks, nobody believed me when I tried to say I predicted it years ago. This may be why I’m writing my thoughts now, just in case I get the chance to say, years later, “I told you so.”) Both of these men were well-respected, ethically sound men who could – and frequently did – work together to get things done. McCain broke with his party to pursue responsible care for the environment, and Lieberman broke with his to support things like the troop surge in Iraq, among other things. These two men could change the world.
And then, early in 2007, I stopped to watch a little video online. A good-looking young black man with a name I wasn’t sure I could pronounce gave a forty-five minute speech in his church about how faith ought to interact with politics – providing a compelling contrast to our current president’s approach, which has deeply troubled me. I wasn’t ready to let go of McCain, but I had to hear more from this man. Just as I knew that McCain had to be the Republican nominee, I knew that this man had to be the Democratic.

First Things:
I hope there is nobody out there who still thinks Obama is a Muslim. He’s not. (Insert obligatory “Not that it would matter…” here). And I think most people have put the flag-pin incident behind them (although, in truth, he was making a very apropos comment on patriotism). His wife’s “finally proud of this country” statement was nothing more than a mis-phrased gaffe (if you want to hear a gaffe, you should hear some of the things McCain has called his wife in public), and I haven’t heard anybody say anything about Jeremiah Wright in a while. I find this comforting, but I also haven’t been hanging around the people who would say something about these things, and so I imagine these non-issues haven’t completely died for everybody. Particularly Wright. I considered writing full-fledged responses to these ridiculous items, but I find that I can’t bring myself to do so: these topics are just not worth it. None of the above-mentioned topics is in the least bit important. At all. Seriously. I’m open to discussing these if somebody else wants to get me worked up about them, but honestly, I’d rather discuss more interesting things, like tax policies and health care.

2008-09-01T02:42:00.000-07:00

I was wandering around the DNC last week with my roommate, enjoying the festive air and the bounty of crazy people doing bizarre, attention-grabbing activities, when I made what I admit is something of a crass joke. "Hey," I said. "Wouldn't it be funny if, every time I passed anyone who looked remotely ethnic, I ran up to them and shouted, 'Yes we can!'?"

The joke, of course, is that it would not be funny at all. It would be really embarrassing and offensive to assume that anybody with slightly different pigmentation in their skin would vote for Obama simply because he's black, no questions asked (Does anybody remember Alan Keyes? There's a reason you have to wikipedia him. He didn't win anything.). So why is it that everybody thinks it's perfectly acceptable to assume that women are going to turn out in droves to vote for a woman, simply because she's a woman?

I grew up in good old conservative Tennessee, and I swear I didn't hear a kind word about Hillary Clinton the whole time I was there. Even from women. I didn't even know people liked her until last year, when I was able to warm up to her a bit myself. The news talked incessently about her picking up the female vote (as though she was born with that vote in the bag), but you know, it all panned out pretty evenly. If she had gotten "the female vote" (as though they vote in bloc!), she would have handily won the nomination.

And now you have McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP, which I think was an incredibly shrewd choice (I just hope it wasn't shrewd enough to tilt things in his favor). I think it was shrewd for a number of reasons, but none of these reasons have to do with Palin picking up the mythical "female vote." Palin will appeal to, oh, I imagine about half of American women. Roughly the same amount as sympathize with her [incredibly] conservative views. She's excited conservatives, she's gotten endless news coverage since the announcement, she's generating much needed attention for the Republicans, but she didn't just sew up the election by virtue of her reproductive organs. Ok?

Oy. So anyway, I've decided that, since I feel far too guilty to actually subject my friends to endless inane political talk, I'm going to broadcast it into the great void of the web, where it will bounce around harmlessly and bore only those who wish to read it. Say, have I told you about the series of articles I'm planning to write...

Variations on a theme: The Original Speech

2008-06-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

This, then, is the original speech I wrote for graduation. Looking back on it, I'm glad I gave the other speech, but I certainly feel this has its place. I would appreciate any attention given to it, any thoughts voiced, but I feel a bit repetitive posting so many similar ideas. Nonetheless, I hope this does something for you.

Several weeks ago, as I was formulating my very first ideas for what to say, it was suggested to me by one of my wise professors that I avoid the common theme of “advice for the young graduate.” I agreed with her - there will be plenty of other people to provide that, and, being no further down the road myself, I would probably tell you something terrible, like “It’s cheaper to move back in with your parents.”

I would like to speak, then, not of where we are all going, a subject of which I am entirely clueless, but of where we have been. I hope to trace for you a narrative of faith from Point A, the day on which we first stepped onto campus, goofy and awkward, to Point B, today, sitting here again goofy and awkward in our funny-looking traditional garb. I should disclaim at this moment that the story I tell may not apply to each individual here today, but it is a story that I believe, if it does not directly apply today, very likely will apply in the future.

If our memories have been kind to us, when we think back to freshman year, we remember the incredible retreats, the sudden and perhaps surprising camaraderie which sprung up in our stairwells or in our classes, or maybe the delight in finding that there was a club, a ministry, or a discipleship group seemingly tailored to our interests. It was a gleeful time. There were plenty of uncomfortable times that year, of course: I imagine nearly every one of us at some point walked into an apartment to find a new couple sitting quietly. They were only holding hands, of course, but they were very clearly, and very awkwardly, waiting for you to leave. Even if it was your own apartment.

May God forgive any of us who actually were one of those awkward couples.

But freshman year, for the most part, I would describe as a year of stunning, blinding, beautiful idealism. The opportunities were spread before us like a tree heavy with fruit – we had only to choose among them. And the truest beauty was this: we found ourselves in a friendly, close-knit community of other people who were as passionate for Christ as we were. What a novel idea it was! Those of us who came straight from public schools found we could suddenly openly discuss the nature of God in the middle of class – and with the professor! Not only that, but we could take entire courses on theology and on the Bible, regardless of our major. What could be more blissful than studying God?

I would like you for a moment to hold onto this image of a freshman I’ve described. When I was a freshman, that is exactly what I was thinking. I, like many around me, was desperate for more of God and more Christian community wherever I could find them – chapel, church, d-group – anywhere. I was full of hope, full of love, full of a supreme confidence that the God I knew, the God I had grown up with, would direct me down a path that would bring about deep, significant changes in the world. If I were to give this image I’ve painted a label at the bottom, it would read “Certainty.”

I don’t remember when the first changes began to occur, but we had to have known that the honeymoon could not continue forever. Perhaps it was toward the end of freshman year, after a few strong disagreements with a roommate and close friend. For many of us, it was in our first theology class, or in Old Testament. But there came a point for most of us when we looked around at our Christian community, at the people all around us in these classes, and we listened to them explain what they believed, and we came to a startling realization: everybody around us was wrong. Usually not on the largest points – we could all sign a similar statement of faith, but on all the little points that made our faith our personal faith, we found ourselves rather isolated. Somehow, it seemed, not everybody got the same memo. And sometimes we found that the disagreements were about the largest, most important aspects of our faith. It’s easy to write off somebody speaking from “outside” the faith. It is far more difficult to ignore the sharp differences within the faith. Could we find room for these people under the banner of Christ? Could we call these people with whom we so passionately disagreed brothers and sisters in Christ?

Around the same time, we began encountering wonderfully strange new situations for which we had not been as prepared as we imagined: mission trips and local ministries, among other things. Personally, I found myself confronted by my experiences with the group Fatboys, CCU’s homeless ministry. I had never thought about the homeless before; I had never needed to. And consequently, I had never thought about how God wanted me to interact with them, what God would have me think of them. There were the drug addicts, of course, and the drunks, and those so fresh from prison their tattoos were still bleeding. There were also those people down on their luck. There were former veterans, victims of mental disorders, victims of physical abuse, victims of economic strain. Oftentimes they stuck together in incredible bonds of friendship, taking turns guarding their few possessions while the others slept. I could never have imagined there were so many kinds of homeless people. I was surprised to find that nearly all of them knew the gospel, many of them expressed belief in it, and some could quote more scripture than I ever could. One night a homeless man who camped next to a bicycle path led me down to the Platte River, where he washed my feet in the cold, living water in a gesture of humble gratitude. If I had missed it before, I knew then that anything I had ever thought about homeless people in the past would need to be completely re-thought.

Before I knew it, I found that nearly everything had to be re-thought – I didn’t necessarily have to change everything I believed, but as I traced all the loose threads of my faith further back, I found more loose threads. And as if working these things out alone were not hard enough, those of us going through this process often found that our friends were also going through it, which meant that rather suddenly and all at the same time, none of us knew anything. If we raised questions in conversation, we got questions in return, and all those people we had previously disagreed with, those friends and roommates who called themselves Christians but whom we had previously doubted – well, they began to seem perfectly reasonable. Or, at least, no less reasonable than ourselves. Actually, among all of us Christian students, it began to become very difficult to tell just who was being reasonable, if any us were.

Parents in the room, friends of the graduates – I am quite sure you have heard us complain about our school work, about exams, about not getting enough sleep at night. These are the cries of the student that everybody hears, and everybody knows. But I wonder if you have heard the cries of the spirit, the cry of the young man or woman whose faith, whose very identity, seems to be unraveling on the floor. An upcoming mid-term may rob somebody of a good night’s rest, but this experience, this slow, torturous stretching, straining, snapping of long-cherished beliefs – this will rob the very soul of peace.

We were learning lessons. We were experiencing life. But on the inside, a little lamp flickered, and at times, went out. The very nature of the struggle was that it removed the only true comfort we had. In the words of writer Franz Kafka, we felt “forsaken like children lost in the woods. When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of my sufferings and what do I know of yours? And if I fell at your feet and cried and told you, would you know any more about me than you know about hell when they say it is hot and sets one shivering?”

Some people find themselves at this point somewhere in the middle of college. Others stumble into it toward the end, and are perhaps at this stage right now, and others still will find that it hits them once they leave the warm, enveloping community of school life. It is a cold and lonely position to be in, especially when you seem to be surrounded by people whose faith is stronger than ever. The questions within you will not lie still, and it becomes clear that something must change, the questions must stop, if you are going to maintain any sort of life.

At this point, it often appears that there are only two options. The first of these is that young person I asked you to keep in your mind: the freshman, armed with certainty. Our old selves – they seem in retrospect so achingly beautiful. We believed beautiful things beautifully, and the memory of who we once were seems almost to haunt us. Our faith was so fresh, so alive. If you have not experienced this yet, I would warn you: there is a terrible temptation to return to what you once knew. But if you are to do so, you must go with greater passion than ever, and never let yourself rest. And you must disregard your experiences; you must forget your doubts. You must erase the person you’ve become.

I think very few of us would choose to simply “go back” – even if we had the choice. But the simple fact is that there is no going back to the way things were before – just as there is no putting new wine in old wineskins.

I tried something else. As I grew to understand my lack of understanding, as every temporary foundation shifted from beneath me while I tried to build my scaffolding upon it, I began to give up the hope and the faith that there was any solid ground into which I might sink my roots. I knew nothing, and I knew that I knew nothing, and I held up this knowledge as the one thing certain. I became proud of a foolishness, one that degenerated quickly to uncritical laziness, and from laziness to bitter apathy.

If we must escape our state of anguish, then, and we cannot go back to the past, there appears to be only one other option: give up. When the questions come, force them down until you cannot hear them. When somebody begins to pray, leave the room, because it is uncomfortable. Put the bible away, because it brings more agony than relief. I have seen many friends reach this point. And I have spent a great deal of time there myself. It can last for months; it can last for years.

Friends, graduates, families: if you find yourselves at this point, now or in the future – have hope. If your efforts to find the God you seem to have misplaced prove fruitless, have hope. But why should you?

Because God will never stop bothering you. I don’t mean the idea of God, and all the questions, although that is perhaps true as well – I mean God, and bother is exactly the word I mean, too. We have all heard the verse in Job which reads, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Seldom do we put it in its context, in which Job says to God, and I quote, “Let me alone; my days have no meaning. What is man that you make so much of him, that you give him so much attention, that you examine him every morning and test him every moment? Will you never look away from me, or let me alone even for an instant?”

The answer, of course, is no. If we ever think we have escaped God, and all of questions that we have, then we have fooled only ourselves. A 19th century poet named Francis Thompson wrote of this feeling in terms better than any others I have found. In his poem “The Hound of Heaven,” which I strongly recommend that all of you read, he describes God as a bloodhound, who literally follows him “down the nights and down the days…down the arches of the years…down the labyrinthine ways of [his] own mind, and in the midst of tears,” all while Thompson continues to run, continues to chase after a life free from God. At the end of the poem, however, he is finally caught like a cornered fox, and God, the hound of heaven, says to him:
“All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home :
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”

The writer Yann Martel, in his book Life of Pi, wrote that “zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.” To return to faith, to accept the extended hand and step out of the despondency that comes of having not been able to completely reconcile your faith with your experience, is not to re-enter a cage from which you have escaped – to return to faith is to release God from the cage you tried to build. Logic and reason are tools with which we understand the world – they are not the world itself, they are not God, and God does not fit within them. The desire to understand God should be pursued, but it is not the chief end of life. Greater minds than ours have tried and failed, and St. Augustine himself, one of Christianity’s most influential theologians, wrote that “If you think you have conceived of something – if you think you have finally understood something - then it is not God.” For anyone who grew up speaking Latin as their native language, that’s “Si comprehendis non est Deus.”

We came to the school with a very reasonable faith and a God we understood. I hope we can say that we leave it with a resurrected faith and a God we love. When God takes our hand, and lifts us out onto the other side of the bleak, trying time – and I must stress that there is another side to reach – we are able to look back with new eyes. The faith and the passion that we remember having from that beautiful, ideal time in our past – they are not gone. They are in the hands of God, who has allowed them to pass away that he might resurrect them anew, just as he allows us to experience – even leads us into – the dark night of the soul, that he might transform our very concept of God. Hopefully, we find ourselves feeling not trapped but released, not defensive and petty, but open, and passionately loving.

Very likely, this is not the last time it will happen to us. I have been speaking of us graduates, but the idea applies to everyone present. Life breaks boundaries. Life, experience, love, conversation, ideas – if we have trouble reconciling these things to our idea of God, it is to God’s credit that he is beyond our comprehension. We embrace God not because God makes perfect sense, or because God fits into a method of thought that we find comforting. We embrace God because, against all reason, God pursues us. When we have given up, even when we would ask God to leave us alone and let us be, God is there, forever and ever, amen.

Si comprehendis non est Deus.

This Is the Speech I Gave

2008-05-15T23:49:00.000-07:00

Hey folks. So I got the chance to speak at my own graduation last week. If you were there, you heard what was, technically, the seventh draft of my speech. The first was about four times longer and completely different in its path, and I'll post it here in a day or two. But first, this is the speech I gave:

Good morning, and congratulations, everybody. In addition to my friends and family who’ve seen me through for so long, I would like to thank our amazing Education and English departments for the incredible work they do. Those of us who have benefited from their service, and from any of our faculty, are deeply indebted to them.

Looking back at my own experience at this school, and that of many of my friends, there were only two things that struck me as being both applicable to nearly everybody, and being located, in one form or another, very near the heart of our existence these past few years: one of these is the struggle of faith, and the other is community. We expected these things when we enrolled – we even looked forward to them – and yet I doubt either of these things manifested itself in exactly the way we thought it might.

Personally, I had imagined that the struggles within a Christian school would be fewer and simpler than those of any other given institution. As I discovered, they were not fewer; they were of a different kind altogether. The question for me was not “What do I do or not do?” but rather, “Who am I, what is this faith I have been professing, and what does it mean to me?” The answers to these questions, if we have found them, are deeply personal to each of us. But I would like to characterize our search for answers with the only story that ever seemed to fit. I read from Genesis 32:

24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
27 The man asked him, "What is your name?" "Jacob," he answered.
28 Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."
29 … Then he blessed him there. […]
and Jacob was limping because of his hip.

How like the conflict that arises in any faith! We find ourselves, sooner or later, alone in the dark night of the soul, and we grapple with a stranger who will not reveal himself to us. The temptation to surrender is nearly unbearable, the pain and exhaustion nearly overwhelming, and yet we know that without this struggle and its promise of a blessing, we have nothing. We feel wrenched apart, and broken, and the night seems never to end. It is only just in time that the glowing fingers of dawn stretch across the horizon.

In the light of the coming day, we find ourselves not destroyed, but changed utterly, and we see that our blessing from God was not some gift at the end: it was the struggle itself, and the transformation it brought. Our new identity is summed up in the meaning of our new name, Israel: “struggles with God.” Our limp reminds us that there will be more wrestling in the future.

We see also that we were not alone at all during our experience – around us in the night were our brothers and sisters in faith, some wrestling as well, and others, unbeknownst to us, supporting us through the hardest times. This is the community of Christ.

As we graduate, many of us will be leaving this particular community. And though each of our experiences with it has been vastly different, these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer bring perspective:

“It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us […]. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.”

Even if nothing I have said of our experience has rung true to your own time here, know that nonetheless, I am as entirely bound to you, and you to me, as any two people on this earth. As Christians, each one of us lives out a small, unrepeatable fragment of an ever-increasing whole that we call the Christian experience. If there is anything I believe CCU has taught me, it is that the Christian experience is infinitely broader, infinitely more complex, infinitely more all-encompassing than I could ever have imagined, and the grandeur of God, in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, will flame out like shining from shook foil.

We have struggled together, and we have found a holy love together. If we leave after today and settle elsewhere, my prayer is that wherever we travel we support those others who grapple with the Lord; that when we struggle ourselves, we allow our brothers and sisters to support us; and that in all situations, we infinitely pour out to others from the infinite love we have received, and continue to receive.

Thank you.

In Defense of Christian Education, or, How CCU Broke My Faith

2007-12-22T23:39:00.001-08:00

This is long. I ask you to read it anyway, and to tell me your own thoughts.

Andrew and I went to CCU together. Though he was a few years ahead of me, he lived in freshman housing at the same time I did, in a one-bedroom apartment awkwardly manipulated to accommodate the dorm’s laundry room on the reverse side. I knew him then only as the Art Garfunkel to his friend’s Paul Simon – they would leave their doors open and sing out from their subterranean home the beautiful tunes I knew by heart: “Many is the time I’ve been mistaken, and many times confused. Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken, and certainly misused…”

Four years later, Andrew and I share an apartment. He works at a company that runs background checks, and comes home with stories regularly resembling episodes of The Office. He plays jazz guitar, and is applying to various universities for graduate studies. I am now graduated as well, and we both find ourselves somewhat unfulfilled.

Andrew and I spoke the other night about something that puzzled us – namely, that we entered CCU as exuberant, conservative evangelical Christians, and left it in moral and theological confusion, with our evangelical drive permanently hobbled. I don’t presume to speak for Andrew on this, but there has not been any part of the faith I have not questioned either directly or indirectly, and if I believe any of it now, it is not from an evidence- or experience-based compulsion, but a simple, and seemingly arbitrary, choice.

I certainly don’t make the claim that our experience is the experience of small Christian colleges, or even that it is a general one. But in my circle of friends, it is one that I see more than any other: as the years of college go by and eventually become the past, so do all of our old ideas. Many of us don’t even go to church anymore. “Disillusionment” sounds too egotistical, as though everybody else remains “illusioned,” but it captures the feeling properly.

The tenets of the faith, the sanctity of all these many things, the truth of these occurrences, the validity of the bible, the moral imperatives scattered throughout – they all seem so optional. We’re not against them by any means – we just don’t know what to do with them. All questions, no answers, and in the end, just a decision to either continue or not.

This is certainly not unique to the small Christian college, but I began thinking about what would have happened had I gone elsewhere. I imagine that at a large state school, I would have shunned the overt partying scene. I would have shrunk away from those places that appeared to be dens of vice, because, aside from simply not being interested in them, I wouldn’t want to be associated with them. My friends would be of broad and various backgrounds, as they always have been, but my core friends, my best friends, would have been Christians. So far this is not any different from my time here at CCU.

This, I believe, is where the difference comes in: on a non-Christian campus, I and my friends would set ourselves up as specifically Christian; we would other-ize ourselves from the normal goings-on of campus life and set ourselves in opposition to them. In this state of opposition, we would hold to a sort of solidarity code – some unspoken idea of sticking up for each other, supporting each other’s faith, and above all, not undermining each other by focusing on prickly doubts or frustrating questions. (Also, we wouldn’t have any bible or theology courses, which do much to transform formerly vague feelings into glaring questions.) As with any self-styled rebel group, the cause/purpose of the group begins to fuse with the maintenance of the group itself, to the point where the good attitude, health, or growth of the group is equated with success, and low morale or shrinking numbers is seen as failure.

In this atmosphere, I would have gone on believing roughly what I believed when I entered. Not only would there have been fewer questions raised, but there would have been an active desire to suppress certain lines of inquiry. Any questions which were raised would tend to fit within the us/them dichotomy (questions from “them” being questions of supposedly deleterious nature), ensuring an easy answer and group solidarity, because given the options of A) making slight adjustments to one’s own belief or ignoring a few nagging feelings, or B) risking group fracture or possible dissolution by focusing on one’s own personal issues, people will tend toward the former. The feelings are swept under rugs or discussed in quiet sessions with close friends which end in everybody agreeing to pray for the doubter, reinforcing the idea that this person is in the wrong, and requires divine assistance to relocate the true path.

Simply put, I would have formed my Christian identity around my actions. I do these things, and not these; I hold to these classic beliefs, and not these watered-down, ear-tickling modes of modern thought. This identity would reinforce and be reinforced by a larger group of similar mindset, and upon leaving the university I would not easily break from these habits and beliefs, because they would have become synonymous with my very self.

Strangely, I found that attending a school entirely composed of a large group of similar mindset to my own had a much different effect on me. I’ll admit the possibility that I and my friends are flukes, aberrations in the system, but all the same I’d like to explore how we turned out as we did.

As I mentioned above, many of us have emerged with a faith battered and scarred from our time at CCU. Our faith has been praised, questioned, evaluated, stuffed into half a dozen different containers, lost in the waste, found among the garbage, and hung on a line to dry while we figure out what to do with it. I’ll mention once more, just to be sure I’ve covered myself enough, that this happens to any number of people in all sorts of places. But how did it happen in a hothouse of “faith and learning,” in what seems Freshman year to be a utopia of common belief?

I believe that the answer lies in our lack of the obvious common enemy of open disbelief and hedonism. In another place, our Christianity would have been forged against these most pernicious evils. At CCU, our Christianity was a given. If we were there, we were Christians (at least, we all signed the same statement of faith), and instead of a single unifying front, we found ourselves at odds on countless smaller fronts within the faith.

Only gradually did the significance of this become clear. As time passed, we were confronted with different faces of Christianity, different approaches to it, different conceptions of it. Differences which would have been eclipsed by a state of war against the “secular” were thrown into relief on this campus, and instead of mingling only with those who attended the same church, we found ourselves daily with Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, a few Catholics and even an Orthodox believer, high-church people, low-church people, no-church people, people and professors who believed every literal word of the bible and people and professors who believed the bible to be a collection of good ideas with a number of human mistakes. And in the right places at the right times, you could find discussions on any of these topics and more, including Calvinism/Arminianism, post-modern approaches to faith, the effects of culture on the writing and reading of the bible, and feminist interpretations of God, Jesus, and the bible. To name a few. The choices were not between Christianity and Secularism, but between 200 different versions of Christianity with a friend’s face behind each.

Truth be told, I wish I had seen ten times the amount of discussion that I did – I make it sound like these debates were ever-present. They weren’t, but the differences were. And for many of us, the exposure to all of this caused our perfectly-sculpted Greek statues of faith to melt. Just melt. Where a different environment would have hardened our ideas into permanent thought, a Christian environment caused them to lose all shape and form. Frankly, the experience was, for me, terrifying.

And for this, I realize, I reluctantly thank God. Reluctantly because I am uncertain of how to approach this God, uncertain what attributes I can expect of Him/Her and how these will be manifested. In some ways, I feel like the first pagan, trying blindly to ascertain the qualities of a perfectly separate being. And yet I thank God that my sculpted theology of old was destroyed, shattered like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. It was only ever an idol before.

I leave the university not with answers but with questions. Now, it is a struggle, as I believe it ought to be. It is the search for balance between the desire for objective knowledge of God and the subjective pursuit of God. As long as I am struggling, I will call it faith. As long as I settle complacently into either a questionless faith or questionless atheism, I will call it evil. I do not propose, exactly, to question all things at all times – who can live in such a state of flux? – but to leave all things open to inquiry. I have spent too much time disengaged lately. I choose now to re-enter the faith.

2007-12-10T17:17:00.000-08:00

Shall I commit to being interesting?

I found myself last night in conversation with one of my close friends, to whom I began to attempt to explain (justify?) this past year of my life. Variously, I said that I had moved out of a sort of existentialist phase and into an unwelcome nihilism. Or I had been depressed. Or I had been removed from established social structures that kept me healthy and thinking. Perhaps my focus had moved outward. Or inward. Or I had lost it altogether.

I gave up trying to explain as I realized that all of these were part of the truth, none were themselves the truth, and that I couldn’t parse out exactly what was the source of my languid, reclusive year. I could, however, say rather firmly that I don’t want next year to be the same.

At the end of the conversation, I found in myself a sort of recommitment to the old existentialist struggle. Mind you, I’ve a fair bit of cynicism and more than a sense of embarrassment attached to this (I can only take existentialists seriously for so long), but while I’m searching for a larger meaning, I’ll continue to create my own.

More basically, I am recommitted to life – to being and doing and interacting, to working, to thinking, to all of the things I have put off for a whole year now. If you are reading this, give me a call – let’s go do something.

I’m not sure whether this blandiose “commitment” will amount to anything, but we will see. One of the things I would like to do is write more, which means both blogging more and writing more on my own. Writing does not develop on its own, and it does degrade through lack of use; looking back on papers written in a flurry of activity last year, I am reminded what I can do when the stars are properly aligned. They have not been so aligned lately.

I will force them into place.

Michaelmas '06

2007-09-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

For those I met and delved so briefly into
I have many fine names, many “beloved”s and
“light of my life”s, which are true names if
also untrue, the light being temporary as flintspark
and the beloving only possible during the term of proximity

-- still I think of you all as lovers I have known, male female
and other, other being the designation for you who exceeded
such silly limits and flew burning past them like terrible birds in my mind,
somehow modest all the while. You fly there still, storming
up and down the aisles of books, fluttering ominously the pages of
my fading recollections, overturning them suddenly yet
vanishing when I raise my head.

I hold here a photograph, taken in Wales, and here, in London,
and this oh my treasure is of you, all my many loves, in
these skimming watercraft, myself once at the helm, still
captured in my unbelieving giddiness that you could just then
regard me as I did you, could love me past that silly damn hat,
perched on my head like the lid of
a jar (bursting with hair).

These things, these objects of love and memory I hold
greedily, miserly, amassing and caressing them, crooning night
-time runes and archaic words of summoning,

I cannot accept that this life was in the past, that it, pinpointed,
will never up itself from its Then to walk alongside me in
the constant Now, that the fire of one Guy Fawkes Day
lights only an ancient face in an ancient photograph --

still I look for its flash.

The Latest in a String

2007-04-17T14:51:00.001-07:00

If, somehow, you remain unaware of the shooting at Virginia Tech on Monday, you should check a news site. Any news site – they’ve all got plenty of the latest information up. Who was killed, how many. A timeline of events, a list of complaints from the parents to the police, a section for mourning, a section for witnesses to describe the events.

I write this from Lakewood, Colorado – only a few minutes away from Columbine High School. Columbine wasn’t the first school shooting, but I believe that for many of our generation, it was the most memorable. Almost eight years ago exactly, I walked into my friend’s home after school to see frantic news coverage flashing across the screen, his mother with her hand over her heart, saying, “Oh my Lord, oh my Lord,” just as a bleeding student heaved himself from a window to safety. He left a streak of blood on the wall.

The shock was immense, then. Eight years and many school tragedies later, the display of shock on the news has something of a practiced feel to it. Alessandra Stanley writes in today’s New York Times: “The amazing thing is how familiar campus shootings have become. For viewers, initial disbelief is quickly folded into a methodical ritual of breaking bad news. News trucks race to the scene, witnesses upload images recorded on cellphones and video cameras, students on the scene calmly and patiently recount their impressions in front of news cameras.” We all wait; we all watch to see the tragedy unfold.

I don’t understand the fascination we all feel with such unimaginable tragedies. In the next few days, biographies of the deceased will begin to fill the pages of the news – they have, in fact, already started. And I read them compulsively, unable to control a sharp eye for irony, the tragic twist for each of them. Take, for example, Liviu Librescu, 75 years old, a senior researcher and lecturer who had survived the German Holocaust, only to be killed some sixty years later in an American holocaust.

Once the victims have been bled onto every news page, the climax will arrive: a comprehensive biography of the killer, an analysis of his behavior, a “reason why,” as though there could ever be a reason for such an atrocity. He was angry, or he was hurt, or he was crazy – probably all of these. His mother won’t know why he did it; his friends will say he was a considerate man, going through a period of turmoil in his life. And thirty-three people, including the man himself, will still be sleeping under a blanket of earth.

I extend my heart and my prayers to any affected by this event. And tomorrow I will flip through the headlines, reading the prayers and speeches of others, looking for something, anything, that might indicate why people keep getting the idea to wreak so much havoc within institutions of hope and progress, erasing so many unwritten futures.

A Frost on the Day Before Easter

2007-04-06T22:55:00.001-07:00

A night of falling mist froze
tight around the windows and doorknobs,
lintels and posts, encasing the apartments
and their courtyard garden
in the coldest coat.

Beneath the feeble morning gray, nothing shines
or sparks; the light falls flat
and seems to die within each item that
it shuffles across: a child’s bicycle
fringed with hanging teeth,
an abandoned pail,
the tools left out in yesterday’s sun:
hammer and nail.

No birdsong breaks the shuddering quiet,
The silence of a stillborn spring – yet
what can they all be murmuring,
this row of tousling evergreens? What peasant prayers
or tears does this procession offer,
bowed low in rumpled robes of ice?

No ear to hear, nor any eye to see,
but each plant lies expectant and
the scattered objects wait,
whisper, indicate

to where a fallen statue lies
cracked at head and hands and side,
His shroud of ice shook loose, and sloughing off withal,
beginning to thaw.

A Psalm

2007-03-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

Let us praise You, Lord, with abandon, and let us not restrain our voices,
For You are a walking Truth and a sounding Love,
And You search out Your children without rest.

For I left your ways and said to my heart,
"I am well without Him,"
And I turned from Your voice and said to my soul,
"I am satisfied."
Yet my heart grew callous and firm,
And from my soul there came an arid wind,
And all I believed myself to be withered before it.

Praise to the God of the weak and the ignorant,
For though we do not know our needs, You rescue us,
And You come when we do not know to call.
We praise You, God of the only joy, God in the face of the cynic,
For though you have the strength to bend the knees of the strong-willed,
You use instead a Love more powerful than all force.

For I had sunk deep within myself, and stopped my ears to Your guiding heart-beat,
And though I felt Your germ within, I pressed it down
And streched over it the web of my concerns.
I lived, but sank to dust; I laughed, but my mirth rang hollow.

We will yet praise You, Lord, for You will not be buried;
You will not remain in the tombs we create for You.
For You will resurrect the Christ within us,
And put to death our flesh;
You will stamp the lingering flames of our own will
And rob us of ourselves, leaving only You.

Lord, hear our praise:
You are the path-finding Truth-God, redeeming Jacob to Israel,
And You are the Love-burst of Righteousness,
Who draws the suffering thief to Paradise.
Great is Your name, and forever to be praised.

A Fusillade at the Christian Right

2007-02-27T17:04:00.000-08:00

I suppose I would say first that I don’t think there should be a Christian Right. I think religion is a terrible thing to mix with politics – neither side comes out of this clean. Once a candidate becomes a Christian candidate, everything done by him or under him is linked to Christianity. You know what Christians seem like to the rest of the world right now? Opinionated, intrusive, war-like people who know that everybody else is wrong. Strangely, everything that comes out of America is also associated with Christianity, so along with these traits, people (in the Middle East, particularly) link Christianity with pornography, alcohol, and sacrilege of all types. Advertising ourselves as a Christian nation pulls everything within our nation under the Christian banner, and I find that appalling.

Nor do the politicians come out of this easily, necessarily. If a candidate admits his faith, he has to battle with people who want to put him in the same camp as Westboro Baptist Church (known and vilified for its outspoken stance that “God hates fags”), or as the people who think evolution should be banned from schools. Frankly, I don’t care if the politicians make it out easily or not, but I would like it if these sections of Christianity could stay out of the press for a whole week.

I find it mortifying that the same Christian Right who purports to stand for freedom, democracy, and the “American way” wishes to stifle all opposing voices so that it can form a homogeneous voting bloc with which all must assimilate. The group that wants personal freedom to own guns wants to eliminate the freedom to disagree. [It just occurred to me that those two desires are particularly creepy when put together – who would disagree with the barrel of a shotgun?] But seriously – how can you support freedom of speech in one way (I think of the Right’s disdain for “political correctness”) and at the same time wish to forbid speech acts like flag burning, or, yes, even disagreeing with the president? How can you claim free speech as the basis for allowing the Ten Commandments while trying to ban talk of evolution?

The Christian body is diverse – that’s why it’s a body, and not a colony of single-celled organisms in a Petri dish. The Christian Right does not allow for this in the slightest: the topics of interest are established (abortion, public prayer, taxes – wait, what do taxes have to do with Christianity?), and the others discarded. If you have an interest in using government aid to help house and educate the poor, or to develop the ailing arts, you have no place in the Christian Right, and by their logic, no place in Christianity. Because a true Christian would value lower taxes. (Here’s a sobering verse: Proverbs 22:16 – “He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and he who gives gifts to the rich—both come to poverty.”).

The conflation of faith with politics, the idea that a belief in one area equates certain beliefs in the other, is as dangerous as it is ubiquitous. Even the president of my own educational institution does it. And believe me – that makes me angry. What follows is an excerpt from the CCU Profile section, “Greetings From the President”:

"Colorado Christian University is very different from the typical American university. We hold tightly to traditional values and high academic standards. We strive to impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, and other such causes that preserve and promote high moral and ethical standards." (italics mine)

Regardless of what I personally believe about these issues, I believe it is a terrible thing that our president (a former congressman, incidentally) felt the need to pin down a list of “Christian” stances, and then, of all things, to use our university to support a political platform. How can the leader of a university – supposedly a marketplace of ideas, a center for debate and critical discussion – declare what the body stands for? This is an abuse of the faith, an abuse of the institution, and a crime against the American political system. I might even extend that accusation to the Christian Right.

My own stances on conservative issues are very mixed. Sometimes I even agree with the Christian Right. But the day I let Dr. Dobson read my Bible for me and then tell me how Jesus wants me to vote is the day that...

A loss of words, a loss of respect for the scientific community

2007-02-13T12:23:00.000-08:00

I learned a strange thing today: apparently, genes can be patented. According to an article in the New York Times (contributed, incidentally, by Michael Crichton), about one fifth of all the genes in your body are privately owned by scientists and research institutes. If any other scientists want to do research on these genes, they must pay a royalty to the patent holder. You can’t even donate some of these genes for study without permission.

This inhibits research, it inhibits the development of treatments and accurate genetic testing, and it can raise the cost of treatment prohibitively. And you know why I find this issue particularly galling? Because the companies own pathogens as well, including Hepatitis C. And my mother and I have Hepatitis C.

Just last year, my mother and I finished a forty-eight week treatment study for the disease. We took several pills a day, and every week injected a solution into the skin on our stomachs. Every evening after I’d given myself the shot, I would experience headaches, chills, aching, and sometimes a fever to boot. Other, more constant side-effects included a loss of attention span, loss of energy, some depression, some emotional lability. And in the end, the treatment was unsuccessful, both for my mother and myself – within weeks of stopping treatment, the virus was back to full levels in both of us.

“The owner of the genome for Hepatitis C is paid millions by researchers to study this disease. Not surprisingly, many other researchers choose to study something less expensive,” Crichton writes. Right now, I know of only one available medical treatment for Hep C – the one that didn’t work. Efforts to produce a newer, more promising treatment have been severely hampered and long postponed, and people like me are left just waiting, trying to take care of our livers by other means.

I can think of no more odious way of amassing wealth than from a disease affecting millions of people. There are people who donate most of their income to ending diseases around the world (multi-billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett come to mind), and there are those who ensure that certain diseases remain by charging people to study them.

I’m at a loss. This is absurd.

Of Orchestras and Pathology

2007-02-12T21:06:00.000-08:00

My initial response to the comment on my last post is to say, petulantly, that yes, an orchestra is better than an ensemble because there are more people playing. And if "extreme relationality" is the sort of pathology that the term sounds like, I want it. Being involved with a number of people does make one a more complex person.

I don't intend to discount the value of having a select number of particularly close friends, and developing those relationships over time. That's exactly what I'm missing: relationships that could have been more fully developed. But if I were given the choice of having either A: a small group of close friends, or B: a slightly larger group of close friends, with another ring of friends slightly less close, and another ring of friends slightly less close than that, I would not hesitate to choose B. There is a limit to the relationships one can earnestly commit to, but I am interested in being always at that limit, and nudging it back at all times. I enjoy my time to myself, mind you, but that is another matter.

If I were to go back to that music metaphor, I would say that if you have an orchestra, you can pare it down to a select group when necessary, but if you only have a small group, you can't just grow an instant-orchestra. We could even get extravagant with our metaphor here and say we'd like a piano concerto, where one instrument carries the theme, but couldn't do so without all the others.

Who am I when I'm alone? Well, who is alone? Who is not either receiving communication from an absent other, via music, literature, photo, video, or another form of art? Or perhaps they are themselves communicating to an absent other, as I am now. [No, I wouldn't classify these as the most full types of relationships, but they are relationships]. And there is God, the eternal point of reference. Perhaps it is cheap to invoke the divine in debate. Oh well. But I could say that when I am alone, I am volcanic potential; I am churning waters. I may boil and empty myself into nothingness, or I may surge onto another, and be struck by their own overflow in turns.

Lost Selves

2007-02-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

I tend to subscribe to a relational, interpersonal theory of identity - the idea that how I relate to you is, in some ways, the definition of who I am. You and your history strike against me and my history, and what arises between the two of us is who I am and who you are, whether spiteful, grateful, quiet, thoughtful, or mischievous, whether friend or son or something else. If I think, in the solitude of my own mind, that I am a wise man, yet I give those around me foolish advice, the fact that I give bad advice supersedes the fact that I think of myself as a wise man - what occurs between two people is more important than what occurs in the mind of one alone.

I'm not satisfied with that summary of it - not even sure to what degree I agree with it. Perhaps I can clarify further: I am not solely my thought life or my group of ideas; I am my unique interaction with unique others. Thus, to some degree, anybody I've ever interacted with knows me; I can't put on a false self because to put on a false self is to adopt that self as part of my own. I suppose, then, that I am ingratiating, that I am also sly and evasive, that I am forthright and honest and dour, yet humorous. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." There is a different me for every different you out there, a me that could develop through time and continued relation, or a me that could be cut short and lost.

I have returned from a semester abroad, during which I lived in a house with some twenty-six others, each enrolled in the program, each, by the end, a true friend of mine. Each, in a very real way, a facet of myself, a person who reflected me back to myself in a way that none other ever has or will. I hope that I was as much for each of them. I am now sharing an apartment with one other, and three friends live down the way. And I don't get out much. So my regular, daily identities have shrunk from twenty-six to four, and I feel the void. I feel like an amputee.

I realize how selfish this sounds - that I would like all my friends to return so that I can be a full, twenty-six sided person again. But I state things in this way to emphasize their significance, to say firmly that they were not ephemeral collections of molecules and bodily systems with whom I cohabited for a few months and then departed from; no, getting to know each of those people, and many others, was like being born, coming into existence - and the separation is like death. Not the death of a separate thing, of a man in the news, but a true, internal, personal death.

How was my time at Oxford? I was born in innumerable ways, and on December 9th, much of me died. Perhaps more accurately, they were put to rest - these selves of mine did not cease to exist, but they ceased to develop, they ceased to bear fruit. They are an indelible part of me. I try to keep up those relationships, I do try, and there are some that I trust will last.

It should also be noted that this feeling applies to all of the stillborn friendships in my past, and that I bring it up now only because of the scale of the event. Even if the event is two months past, and I'm the only one still griping about it.

Whatever sense of loss clings to me, I would never assert that it was greater than what I gained from these people. Please do not think me ungrateful - I would break myself again for a similar experience. But I doubt it would hurt any less the second time around.

Cold Eyes, Closed Hands

2007-02-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

Cold Eyes, Closed Hands

What sleep we breathe and love we spend
To feel our voices home again;
These ships that pass in thunder winds
Return to spirits waning thin.

And out from each a finger flies
And darts to where another lies -
Each gapes and hopes to recognize
The touch of one upon their eyes.

But few are they so keen of sense
Can drop their sheathing sorrowments
And grasp a stranger’s soul intent
To make for both a recompense.

Whenver I post anything up here - whether it is a piece of creative work or just a thought process for the day - I'm looking for criticism and insight. If something strikes you as strong or poor, I'd love to hear why. If you think something could have been done better, or if you disagree, tell me. I do love to hear the sound of my own voice, but that's not why I post - I post to hear other people's. After I hear my own. Which is sweet and soothing.