Out Walking tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-272824 2013-05-10T16:23:20-04:00 looking for the true, the good & the beautiful -- in the world TypePad Thieves Like Me tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2019101e109c2970c 2013-05-10T16:23:20-04:00 2013-05-10T16:22:30-04:00 In Rod Dreher's memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, he begins with a story of his sister Ruthie, seven at the time, and himself, five. He had done something particularly awful, he recalls, and his father had told him to go lie down on his bed, a precursor to one of his "rare but highly effective spankings." He knew he deserved it. He knew that it would be perfectly just for his father to spank him. But then, just as his father entered the room, Ruthie ran into the room, sobbing, and threw herself across him: "'Whip me,' she cried, 'whip me!'" He recalls his father turned away, and Ruthie left, and he remained, wondering what had just happened. And he says, "Forty years later, I still do." All the elements conducive to a life of crime were present in me from an early age. Marry opportunity and rationalization and it becomes easy to break the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." Or any commandment for that matter. As the elements were being passed at Holy Communion this past Sunday, I was meditating on my sin, as I suppose it best to do, a breviary of sin, in fact, and yet this one sin occurred to me: I was a thief. At 12 my friend and I were hired to deliver a free weekly newspaper in our neighborhood. On a good day it took maybe two hours to cover our route. This thin weekend chronicle we bundled up and were supposed to place on each doorstep. In the beginning, we did just that: we rode our bikes up driveways, disembarked, and carefully placed the paper on the doorstep, tucking the corner under the doormat to keep it from blowing away. For this we were paid, as I recall, about two dollars each, a not insubtantial sum for a 12-year old in 1970. One of the first things we discovered was that not everyone was excited about getting this weekend guide. One overweight man in a wife-beater t-shirt, sporting a five-o'clock shadow, threw it back at us. "Get that damn paper out of my yard." Dogs nipped at us. People asked us not to ride our bikes in their yard. We'd find the paper, unfurled, careening and flapping down the sidewalks of streets with names like Fernwood, Robinhood, and Cornwallis, like literary tumbleweeds. "Hey, isn't that our paper?" Yes, of course. Of course it was. There was little positive reinforcement from the recipients. Pretty soon we had to face it: no one wanted our little paper. It was a blight on our corner of suburbia. A rag. From there it was a slippery slope. We deleted a few houses. Didn't want it anyway. Then we knocked off a whole quadrant of the neighborhood. Too many dogs. We got sloppy, lobbing papers into yards, driveways, side porches, in shrubs. Hey, it's in the yard, and they can get it. Pretty soon we're burning through the entire route in less than 30 minutes, stuffing a few excess papers here and there in trashcans. Surplus. Before you know it we're only doing the street we live on, as far as the creek that winds under our street, and one day at the creek we find ourselves toting pretty much the whole load of the papers down to a sandbar, digging a hole, and burying them, thinking we were doing everybody a favor, after all, cleaning up the neighborhood of trash, taking care of it in an unsightly and biodegradable manner. That's how I became a thief. We were caught, of course, our livid employer giving us a tongue-lashing and requiring immediate repayment of a day's wages. "I trusted you. You let me down." Only a day? I broke into my coin collection, wrested free the two dollar bill from its special holder, as well as a few collectible quarters, and paid the woman. And the guilt settled in. And at that point in my life I had no where to go with my guilt. That one sin is indicative of how tainted I am and have been, how bent toward wrong I am, and how easily I can go wrong. But Sunday, at Holy Communion, when that youthful indiscretion rears its head, I realize again that I have a place to go with that guilt, guilt not assuaged by repayment of some of what I stole. The defect is far deeper than that. Total depravity. Every single thing I do is touched somewhere by impure motive. More wrongdoing was to come. But in the body and the blood, my guilt is paid for, Christ substituting Himself for me, getting the just deserts for my thievery (which goes far deeper than a few newspapers). Substitutionary atonement is one of those awesome and awful tenets of Christian faith. God's perfect love and perfect justice meet at the Cross. We like to quote the Apostle John's well-known maxim that "God so loved the world that he sent his son. . . (John 3:16), and yet God also ordained for Christ a suffering and death that we really can't fully comprehend in its horror. As Michael Horton summarizes, "[H]is love had to comply with his justice. The punishment that Christ bore was not an arbitrary act of revenge, but a fulfillment of the standard that God had established in creation: namely, life for obedience, death for disobedience. The cross was a satisfaction of the claim of justice, not of dignity or irrational anger." And justice is fundamental to the nature of God. He cannot act unjustly. What kind of God would not uphold justice? Ruthie's Dad, confronted by the sacrificial love of his daughter, turned away. I understand why he chose not to uphold justice. I suspect I would do the same and for less an appeal than Ruthie made. And yet God did not turn away from his own son. He upheld justice through Christ's substitution for His people. That's awesome and awful, a justice fully swallowed up in love. Ruthie's Dad, perhaps, turned away because he knew, in the end, that Christ died for his son, that justice would be upheld, that the little death his son died that day would be swallowed up in the victory of the Cross. All to say, there is great hope for thieves like me. Steve West

In Rod Dreher's memoir, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, he begins with a story of his sister Ruthie, seven at the time, and himself, five.  He had done something particularly awful, he recalls, and his father had told him to go lie down on his bed, a precursor to one of his "rare but highly effective spankings."  He knew he deserved it.  He knew that it would be perfectly just for his father to spank him.  But then, just as his father entered the room, Ruthie ran into the room, sobbing, and threw herself across him: "'Whip me,' she cried, 'whip me!'"  He recalls his father turned away, and Ruthie left, and he remained, wondering what had just happened.  And he says, "Forty years later, I still do."

All the elements conducive to a life of crime were present in me from an early age.  Marry opportunity and rationalization and it becomes easy to break the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal."  Or any commandment for that matter.  As the elements were being passed at Holy Communion this past Sunday, I was meditating on my sin, as I suppose it best to do, a breviary of sin, in fact, and yet this one sin occurred to me: I was a thief.

At 12 my friend and I were hired to deliver a free weekly newspaper in our neighborhood.  On a good day it took maybe two hours to cover our route.  This thin weekend chronicle we bundled up and were supposed to place on each doorstep.  In the beginning, we did just that: we rode our bikes up driveways, disembarked, and carefully placed the paper on the doorstep, tucking the corner under the doormat to keep it from blowing away.  For this we were paid, as I recall, about two dollars each, a not insubtantial sum for a 12-year old in 1970.

One of the first things we discovered was that not everyone was excited about getting this weekend guide.  One overweight man in a wife-beater t-shirt, sporting a five-o'clock shadow, threw it back at us.  "Get that damn paper out of my yard."  Dogs nipped at us.  People asked us not to ride our bikes in their yard.  We'd find the paper, unfurled, careening and flapping down the sidewalks of streets with names like Fernwood,  Robinhood, and Cornwallis, like literary tumbleweeds.  "Hey, isn't that our paper?"  Yes, of course.  Of course it was.  There was little positive reinforcement from the recipients.  Pretty soon we had to face it: no one wanted our little paper.  It was a blight on our corner of suburbia.  A rag.

From there it was a slippery slope.  We deleted a few houses.  Didn't want it anyway.  Then we knocked off a whole quadrant of the neighborhood.  Too many dogs.  We got sloppy, lobbing papers into yards, driveways, side porches, in shrubs.  Hey, it's in the yard, and they can get it.  Pretty soon we're burning through the entire route in less than 30 minutes, stuffing a few excess papers here and there in trashcans.  Surplus.  Before you know it we're only doing the street we live on, as far as the creek that winds under our street, and one day at the creek we find ourselves toting pretty much the whole load of the papers down to a sandbar, digging a hole, and burying them, thinking we were doing everybody a favor, after all, cleaning up the neighborhood of trash, taking care of it in an unsightly and biodegradable manner.

That's how I became a thief.

We were caught, of course, our livid employer giving us a tongue-lashing and requiring immediate repayment of a day's wages.  "I trusted you.  You let me down."  Only a day?  I broke into my coin collection, wrested free the two dollar bill from its special holder, as well as a few collectible quarters, and paid the woman.  And the guilt settled in. And at that point in my life I had no where to go with my guilt.

That one sin is indicative of how tainted I am and have been, how bent toward wrong I am, and how easily I can go wrong.  But Sunday, at Holy Communion, when that youthful indiscretion rears its head, I realize again that I have a place to go with that guilt, guilt not assuaged by repayment of some of what I stole.  The defect is far deeper than that.  Total depravity.  Every single thing I do is touched somewhere by impure motive.  More wrongdoing was to come.  But in the body and the blood, my guilt is paid for, Christ substituting Himself for me, getting the just deserts for my thievery (which goes far deeper than a few newspapers).

Substitutionary atonement is one of those awesome and awful tenets of Christian faith.  God's perfect love and perfect justice meet at the Cross.  We like to quote the Apostle John's well-known maxim that "God so loved the world that he sent his son. . . (John 3:16), and yet God also ordained for Christ a suffering and death that we really can't fully comprehend in its horror.  As Michael Horton summarizes, "[H]is love had to comply with his justice.  The punishment that Christ bore was not an arbitrary act of revenge, but a fulfillment of the standard that God had established in creation: namely, life for obedience, death for disobedience.  The cross was a satisfaction of the claim of justice, not of dignity or irrational anger."  And justice is fundamental to the nature of God.  He cannot act unjustly.  What kind of God would not uphold justice?

Ruthie's Dad, confronted by the sacrificial love of his daughter,  turned away.  I understand why he chose not to uphold justice.  I suspect I would do the same and for less an appeal than Ruthie made. And yet God did not turn away from his own son.  He upheld justice through Christ's substitution for His people.  That's awesome and awful, a justice fully swallowed up in love.  Ruthie's Dad, perhaps, turned away because he knew, in the end, that Christ died for his son, that justice would be upheld, that the little death his son died that day would be swallowed up in the victory of the Cross.  

All to say, there is great hope for thieves like me.

 

 

 Changing the Weather tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2017eeabc6245970d 2013-05-02T21:57:26-04:00 2013-05-02T21:57:26-04:00 There are chilly winds blowing in the world. And yet we have a way of selectively reading reality, filtering out or minimizing the things we don't want to think about, turning up our collar to a frigid truth if we venture out, warming ourselves by the glow of hearth and home. But sometimes reality gushes in, and we realize that indeed a hard rain is falling. Two recent articles in First Things changed the normally sunny weather I travel in. In one by Wesley J. Smith, entitled "Medicinal Murder," the author documents the steady expansion of euthanasia in Europe. As case in point, he cites Belgium, where suicides are termed by many in the medical community as a "beautiful death," not merely suicides of terminally ill persons but even of those who, because of depression or lack of will to live, are ready to end it all. Furthermore, he documents the ungodly linkage of euthanasia with organ harvesting. Society now benefits from mercy killings. And when there are legal violations of euthanasia laws, enforcement is lax or nonexistent. Thus, a cultural shift has ocurred where death is celebrated as one more benefit of human autonomy: you can choose when to die, and society and the medical profession will help you and even profit from your death. Smith notes that once euthanasia is legalized, the categories of people eligible for it expand, but the rest of society ceases to think it matters. He believes this trend is symptomatic of cultural nihilism. Perhaps you know this. Perhaps the essay only confirms what we already know. But it is worth reading for the last paragraph, where Smith offers the antidote: What is the antidote? Love. We all age. We fall ill. We grow weak. We become disabled. Life can get very hard. Euthanasia raises the fundamental question of whether our culture will retain the moral capacity to sustain a culture of care for those who have entered life's most difficult stages. On that question, it seems to me, hangs the moral future of Western civilization. For as the Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne has cogently warned: "A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured. So that's it? Love? Not taking to the courts, mounting advocacy for life, passing laws to protect the elderly and infirm? Just love? In that same issue of First Things, in an article entitled "Lena Dunhams's Inviolable Self," Alan Jacobs contrasts the moral world of Jane Austen and the apparently amoral world of Girls, an HBO series in its first season. He describes a sexual fantasy that one of the main characters, Adam, has about his rape of an 11-year old heroin addict. As shocking as this is, what Jacobs focuses on is even more shocking: In all the reviews of the show none of the journalists admit to the possibility that there could be a moral dimension to Adam's reverie. And apparently fans have no problem with all this either. They continue to watch. This is in contrast to the moral world of Jane Austen, where there are categories of right and wrong and we all know what they are. Once again, however, the antidote to this amorality is not, Jacobs says, to meet it head on. He concludes: "To someone who thinks Adam's fantasies are unproblematic, or even commendable, there is nothing for me to say. I confront a linguistically unbridgeable gap; I confront incommensurability." In other words, these two worlds do not connect. As I said to someone I was having a heated discussion with many years ago, we have lost the ability to communicate, at least propositionally, as we do not share the same understanding of the world and, in a sense, the same language. We talk past each other. So what do we do? Jacobs says that what we need "is not condemnation. . . but better art and better stories --- better fictional worlds. . . . [N]ot the abolition of mythic sandboxes but the making of sandboxes in which to play with true, or truer, myths." Rather than simply condemning the fictive world of Girls, we can write and film truer stories that capture the imagination, that give viewers or readers a vision of a different reality. Rather than shows about the "beautiful death" of assisted suicide, we offer up excellent stories of the reverberating compassion and love that might surround the disabled or aged, stories that help people imagine that compassion grows in the face of suffering, in standing with the dying, not in ending their lives. We may reach some people by arguing propositional truth. But in this time we may reach more by telling better stories, by opening a portal to the True Truth at the heart of Reality. In a culture that no longer speaks our language, our venue for persuasion has shifted. A decade ago I was standing at the back of the Acoustic Stage at the Cornerstone Music Festival when a muddied grunge-rock fan ambled up. He stood gaping at what he heard. "This is beautiful, man, just beautiful. What is it?" The acoustic, story-driven songs resonated with him. All he had heard was the loud and gutteral screaming of the bands playing in the tent next door. He was mesmerized by the different reality of the Acoustic Stage. And as a result, I was able to tell him what he was hearing. "Art," Picasso said, "is the lie that tells the truth." "Tell it slant," said Emily Dickenson. Christians, get busy lying. And get busy loving. That's the antidote for a culture gone wrong. That just might change the weather. Steve West

Cover_May2013_120-04-15-2013-101005There are chilly winds blowing in the world.  And yet we have a way of selectively reading reality, filtering out or minimizing the things we don't want to think about, turning up our collar to a frigid truth if we venture out, warming ourselves by the glow of hearth and home.  But sometimes reality gushes in, and we realize that indeed a hard rain is falling.

Two recent articles in First Things changed the normally sunny weather I travel in.  In one by Wesley J. Smith, entitled "Medicinal Murder," the author documents the steady expansion of euthanasia in Europe.  As case in point, he cites Belgium, where suicides are termed by many in the medical community as a "beautiful death," not merely suicides of terminally ill persons but even of those who, because of depression or lack of will to live, are ready to end it all.  Furthermore, he documents the ungodly linkage of euthanasia with organ harvesting.  Society now benefits from mercy killings.  And when there are legal violations of euthanasia laws, enforcement is lax or nonexistent.  Thus, a cultural shift has ocurred where death is celebrated as one more benefit of human autonomy: you can choose when to die, and society and the medical profession will help you and even profit from your death.  Smith notes that once euthanasia is legalized, the categories of people eligible for it expand, but the rest of society ceases to think it matters.  He believes this trend is symptomatic of cultural nihilism.

Perhaps you know this.  Perhaps the essay only confirms what we already know.  But it is worth reading for the last paragraph, where Smith offers the antidote:

What is the antidote?  Love.  We all age.  We fall ill.  We grow weak.  We become disabled.  Life can get very hard.  Euthanasia raises the fundamental question of whether our culture will retain the moral capacity to sustain a culture of care for those who have entered life's most difficult stages.  On that question, it seems to me, hangs the moral future of Western civilization.  For as the Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne has cogently warned: "A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death.  A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.

So that's it?  Love?  Not taking to the courts, mounting advocacy for life, passing laws to protect the elderly and infirm?  Just love?

In that same issue of First Things, in an article entitled "Lena Dunhams's Inviolable Self," Alan Jacobs contrasts the moral world of Jane Austen and the apparently amoral world of Girls, an HBO series in its first season.  He describes a sexual fantasy that one of the main characters, Adam, has about his rape of an 11-year old heroin addict.  As shocking as this is, what Jacobs focuses on is even more shocking: In all the reviews of the show none of the journalists admit to the possibility that there could be a moral dimension to Adam's reverie.  And apparently fans have no problem with all this either.  They continue to watch.  This is in contrast to the moral world of Jane Austen, where there are categories of right and wrong and we all know what they are.

Once again, however, the antidote to this amorality is not, Jacobs says, to meet it head on.  He concludes: "To someone who thinks Adam's fantasies are unproblematic, or even commendable, there is nothing for me to say.  I confront a linguistically unbridgeable gap; I confront incommensurability." In other words, these two worlds do not connect.  As I said to someone I was having a heated discussion with many years ago, we have lost the ability to communicate, at least propositionally, as we do not share the same understanding of the world and, in a sense, the same language.  We talk past each other.

So what do we do?  Jacobs says that what we need "is not condemnation. . . but better art and better stories --- better fictional worlds. . . . [N]ot the abolition of mythic sandboxes but the making of sandboxes in which to play with true, or truer, myths."  Rather than simply condemning the fictive world of Girls, we can write and film truer stories that capture the imagination, that give viewers or readers a vision of a different reality.  Rather than shows about the "beautiful death" of assisted suicide, we offer up excellent stories of the reverberating compassion and love that might surround the disabled or aged, stories that help people imagine that compassion grows in the face of suffering, in standing with the dying, not in ending their lives.

We may reach some people by arguing propositional truth.  But in this time we may reach more by telling better stories, by opening a portal to the True Truth at the heart of Reality.  In a culture that no longer speaks our language, our venue for persuasion has shifted.

A decade ago I was standing at the back of the Acoustic Stage at the Cornerstone Music Festival when a muddied grunge-rock fan ambled up.  He stood gaping at what he heard.  "This is beautiful, man, just beautiful.  What is it?"  The acoustic, story-driven songs resonated with him.  All he had heard was the loud and gutteral screaming of the bands playing in the tent next door.  He was mesmerized by the different reality of the Acoustic Stage.  And as a result, I was able to tell him what he was hearing.

"Art," Picasso said, "is the lie that tells the truth." "Tell it slant," said Emily Dickenson.  Christians, get busy lying.  And get busy loving.  That's the antidote for a culture gone wrong.  That just might change the weather.

 

 

 

 My Little Mid-Life Crisis tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2017d42ebe7c6970c 2013-04-19T23:30:07-04:00 2013-05-10T16:27:37-04:00 I recently bought my daughter a cool blue 2005 Mini Cooper SE Convertible. It's hot. Really hot. When she leaves for college in August, I'm going to drive it. Yes I am. I've been thinking about this: I want to practice jumping in the drivers seat and screeching out without opening the door. I've seen it done in the movies. It may be anatomically difficult, and I may injure myself, perhaps irreparably, but it goes with the turf. You see, I gotta get myself a little mid-life crisis. My crisis is I never had a mid-life crisis, and I wonder what I'm missing. Clothes? Same old, same old. Hair? Less. Same house, same job, same church, same wife (yes, honey) and so on. But I love all those things. What to do? I figure I can kick-start the process with a supped up car. Right? It takes me back, way back. My first car was the gold '72 Camaro I bought in 1974. Oh yeah. I went right from dirt bike to a "What you got under that hood a 350 V-8?" Camaro. And I was dangerous. I'd crank up the 8-Track of Led Zeppelin and let it go. The night I turned 16 my friend (who was a whopping three months older and had his license) and I drove all night over four counties. Just because we could. 9 mpg. Gas at $.32. So, I guess I had my mid-life crisis at 16. I want to drive top down. Play Fountains of Wayne. Get an attitude. Drive between the pumps at gas stations. Parallel park in spaces the size of my inbox. Connect. Chat with the drivers at stoplights. Wear 24/7 sunglasses. Out there. You gotta get out there. Try out extroversion, see if it's all they say it is. Stop listening to myself think all the time. Play "Traffic and Weather," by Fountains of Wayne, with their frothy attitude and roadside hipness. Turn it up. When my daughter leaves home, I'll cruise the high school lots, hang out in her favorite coffee-shop, trace her absence all over the place. Even listen to her music. The Blend. Sirius 20 on 20. Summon up her smile, her wit, and her 18-year old life in the present tense. Existential. I'll drive her car to work, to lunch, to get ice cream, to the mall, to church. I'll hang out in parking lots. I'll do nothing. I'll post statuses like "what's up i'm in my car eating at taco bell how about you?" or send pithy or inane or innocuous 140 character text messages to other people who like to send 140 character text messages. Because that's just how they do it. Stay connected. Watch YouTube silly videos, because she did. Drive just to drive and on cool nights leave the top down and turn the heat up high. I'll drive downtown and think of all the conversations we had and all the things "dad you don't understand" and the accomplishment of getting her to laugh at a dumb joke and her hair blowing in the wind. The same wind that blows across her midwest college town. The same wind. And about October, when it's too much, I'll hit I-40 and head due west, her mother and I, queue up a playlist of oh about 400 of my favorite songs, and watch the miles pass. 24 hours. 16 to 17 songs per hour. 400 songs. Lots of sun and wind and particulate matter. Truckers butting each other to establish dominance, says Bruce Cockburn. Rumours of Glory. Plenty of time. Tick off the states --- Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri --- and cross the "miss the mississippi and you" and somewhere out on those Great Plains, amongst the tallgrass and wobbly cowboys, east of the Pecos and West of the Ozarks, I'll find her. Nope. Nope. Probably just stay right here. Drive her Mini. Touch up our empty nest. Practice the rest of life. Decorate her absence with memory. Write letters. Read melancholy poetry. Wash the Mini. Pray hard. Live life. Let go. And miss her. I'll miss her. And when Christmas comes and she returns, soaked in independence, with new vocabulary and a midwest-tinged plain-speak, with stored up life that I missed because she was there and we were here. . . well, so she can have the Mini SE Convertible back, because it suits her and I'm tired of being beat to death by the wind and riding on the ground, numb in my posterior. I had my little mid-life crisis. I'll be over it. But I'll never, never get over her. I won't. We're like "traffic and weather." We just go together. Steve West

I recently bought my daughter a cool blue 2005 Mini Cooper SE Convertible. It's hot.  Really hot.  When she leaves for college in August, I'm going to drive it.  Yes I am.  I've been thinking about this: I want to practice jumping in the drivers seat and screeching out without opening the door.  I've seen it done in the movies.  It may be anatomically difficult, and I may injure myself, perhaps irreparably, but it goes with the turf.  You see, I gotta get myself a little mid-life crisis.

My crisis is I never had a mid-life crisis, and I wonder what I'm missing.  Clothes? Same old, same old. Hair? Less.  Same house, same job, same church, same wife (yes, honey) and so on.  But I love all those things.  What to do?  I figure I can kick-start the process with a supped up car.  Right?

It takes me back, way back.  My first car was the gold '72 Camaro I bought in 1974.  Oh yeah.  I went right from dirt bike to a "What you got under that hood a 350 V-8?" Camaro. And I was dangerous.  I'd crank up the 8-Track of Led Zeppelin and let it go.  The night I turned 16 my friend (who was a whopping three months older and had his license) and I drove all night over four counties.  Just because we could.  9 mpg.  Gas at $.32.  So, I guess I had my mid-life crisis at 16.

I want to drive top down.  Play Fountains of Wayne.  Get an attitude.  Drive between the pumps at gas stations.  Parallel park in spaces the size of my inbox.  Connect.  Chat with the drivers at stoplights. Wear 24/7 sunglasses. Out there.  You gotta get out there.  Try out extroversion, see if it's all they say it is. Stop listening to myself think all the time.  Play "Traffic and Weather," by Fountains of Wayne, with their frothy attitude and roadside hipness.  Turn it up.

When my daughter leaves home, I'll cruise the high school lots, hang out in her favorite coffee-shop, trace her absence all over the place.  Even listen to her music.  The Blend.  Sirius 20 on 20.  Summon up her smile, her wit, and her 18-year old life in the present tense.  Existential.

I'll drive her car to work, to lunch, to get ice cream, to the mall, to church.  I'll hang out in parking lots.  I'll do nothing.  I'll post statuses like "what's up i'm in my car eating at taco bell how about you?" or send pithy or inane or innocuous 140 character text messages to other people who like to send 140 character text messages.  Because that's just how they do it.  Stay connected.  Watch YouTube silly videos, because she did.  Drive just to drive and on cool nights leave the top down and turn the heat up high.  I'll drive downtown and think of all the conversations we had and all the things "dad you don't understand" and the accomplishment of getting her to laugh at a dumb joke and her hair blowing in the wind.  The same wind that blows across her midwest college town.  The same wind.

And about October, when it's too much, I'll hit I-40 and head due west, her mother and I, queue up a playlist of oh about 400 of my favorite songs, and watch the miles pass.  24 hours.  16 to 17 songs per hour.  400 songs.  Lots of sun and wind and particulate matter.  Truckers butting each other to establish dominance, says Bruce Cockburn.  Rumours of Glory.  Plenty of time.  Tick off the states --- Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri --- and cross the "miss the mississippi and you" and somewhere out on those Great Plains, amongst the tallgrass and wobbly cowboys, east of the Pecos and West of the Ozarks, I'll find her.

Nope.  Nope.  Probably just stay right here.  Drive her Mini.  Touch up our empty nest.  Practice the rest of life.  Decorate her absence with memory.  Write letters.  Read melancholy poetry.  Wash the Mini.  Pray hard.  Live life.  Let go.

And miss her.

I'll miss her.

And when Christmas comes and she returns, soaked in independence, with new vocabulary and a midwest-tinged plain-speak, with stored up life that I missed because she was there and we were here. . . well, so she can have the Mini SE Convertible back, because it suits her and I'm tired of being beat to death by the wind and riding on the ground, numb in my posterior.  I had my little mid-life crisis.  I'll be over it.  But I'll never, never get over her.  I won't. We're like "traffic and weather."  We just go together.

 In Memoriam: Edith Schaeffer, 1914-2013 tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2017eea0fc9e0970d 2013-04-09T20:41:53-04:00 2013-04-09T20:41:53-04:00 I did not really know Edith Schaeffer, having never resided at L'Abri, the residential Christian study center that she and husband Francis Schaeffer started in the Swiss Alps in 1955. I did, however, meet her on two occasions. Once, in 1992, I attended a L'Abri conference in Rochester, Minnesota, her then home. She gave a rambling talk at the conference, the subject of which I have forgotten, remembered like a verbal abstract painting, I thought, wonderfully passionate and yet not fully connected. A youthful, late Seventies Edith was signing copies of her books afterward, and when I approached her she was alone, amazingly enough, as a throng had been around her most of the time. But it would not have mattered. Others have remarked on how warm and personable she is, and that proved true. In that moment, at least, Edith was genuinely interested in me, smiling, asking about my family and my interests, as if I was the only one in the room, drawing the Alps on a whole page of my copy of L'Abri (her story of that place), signing it to my whole family. She never looked impatient or concerned about the next person in line. It was only me. She was a model of the kind of dead on attention I would hope to give (and yet seldom give) to those I meet and talk with. She embodied hospitality. My next meeting with Edith occurred about 14 years later, in 2006, when Edith was about 92. My business and wirting partner Kevin and I were in Gryon, Switzerland, where Edith lived under the care of her youngest daughter, Debbie, and husband, Udo Middleman. We were to interview Edith for an audio biography we planned. Edith arrived under her own steam, well-dressed, as always, smiling, helped by two Swiss hiking poles but otherwise providing her own locomotion. Sitting down with her inside, talking with her, it was obvious that she did not have a full memory, as some answers were prompted or supplied by Debbie, but her eyes were alert, her voice strong, and she remembered fondly the times when her kitchen work was complete and she sat near the woodstove and listened to the provocative discussions led by her husband. I suspect that this tireless woman was glad to finally sit down. Whatever else the Schaeffers did at L'Abri (and much was done there), it began when they opened the door of their home and of their hearts to people from all walks of life, inviting them into their lives, sharing what little they had with them, and offering them friendship and a place where any question could be asked. Through their words and example, many came to know Jesus. Some were unconvinced. And yet virtually all would have to admire their integrity. They lived what they taught. I have been told that Edith would often be on her knees cleaning the kitchen floor at 3:00 AM, or preparing meals for new arrivals at that hour, and that the Schaeffers were often up late writing personal letters to those who inquired of them, studying, or praying. Though others knew her far better than I, still I will miss her. She taught me to pray in pictures, imagining the answer. She inspired me to be creative in even the most mundane of endeavours. She made concrete a conviction of God's providence, as I read of the tapestry that God was at work weaving in her life. Would that I had such a heart for people, such an open door to the lost and searching. Rest with Christ, Edith. Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter God's peace. Steve West

EdithI did not really know Edith Schaeffer, having never resided at L'Abri, the residential Christian study center that she and husband Francis Schaeffer started in the Swiss Alps in 1955. I did, however, meet her on two occasions. 

Once, in 1992, I attended a L'Abri conference in Rochester, Minnesota, her then home. She gave a rambling talk at the conference, the subject of which I have forgotten, remembered like a verbal abstract painting, I thought, wonderfully passionate and yet not fully connected. A youthful, late Seventies Edith was signing copies of her books afterward, and when I approached her she was alone, amazingly enough, as a throng had been around her most of the time. But it would not have mattered. Others have remarked on how warm and personable she is, and that proved true. In that moment, at least, Edith was genuinely interested in me, smiling, asking about my family and my interests, as if I was the only one in the room, drawing the Alps on a whole page of my copy of L'Abri (her story of that place), signing it to my whole family. She never looked impatient or concerned about the next person in line. It was only me. She was a model of the kind of dead on attention I would hope to give (and yet seldom give) to those I meet and talk with.  She embodied hospitality.  

My next meeting with Edith occurred about 14 years later, in 2006, when Edith was about 92. My business and wirting partner Kevin and I were in Gryon, Switzerland, where Edith lived under the care of her youngest daughter, Debbie, and husband, Udo Middleman. We were to interview Edith for an audio biography we planned.  Edith arrived under her own steam, well-dressed, as always, smiling, helped by two Swiss hiking poles but otherwise providing her own locomotion. Sitting down with her inside, talking with her, it was obvious that she did not have a full memory, as some answers were prompted or supplied by Debbie, but her eyes were alert, her voice strong, and she remembered fondly the times when her kitchen work was complete and she sat near the woodstove and listened to the provocative discussions led by her husband.  I suspect that this tireless woman was glad to finally sit down.

Whatever else the Schaeffers did at L'Abri (and much was done there), it began when they opened the door of their home and of their hearts to people from all walks of life, inviting them into their lives, sharing what little they had with them, and offering them friendship and a place where any question could be asked.  Through their words and example, many came to know Jesus.  Some were unconvinced.  And yet virtually all would have to admire their integrity.  They lived what they taught. I have been told that Edith would often be on her knees cleaning the kitchen floor at 3:00 AM, or preparing meals for new arrivals at that hour, and that the Schaeffers were often up late writing personal letters to those who inquired of them, studying, or praying.

Though others knew her far better than I, still I will miss her.  She taught me to pray in pictures, imagining the answer.  She inspired me to be creative in even the most mundane of endeavours.  She made concrete a conviction of God's providence, as I read of the tapestry that God was at work weaving in her life.  Would that I had such a heart for people, such an open door to the lost and searching. 

Rest with Christ, Edith.  Well done, good and faithful servant.  Enter God's peace.

 The Good Offensive tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2017ee959fd75970d 2013-03-24T23:42:16-04:00 2013-03-24T23:42:16-04:00 That sounds more like a sermon title, and I know better than to preach. I can simply tell what I see. Trees budding. Robins eating from my bird feeder, a gray squirrel gleaning the castoffs. Chickadees stealing the bluebird house, early tenants. Grass stirring from winter slumber. Air wafting into my study hinting of warmer climes, a down payment on Spring. From my window on Creation, good seems on the move. "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good," says Peter. That, however, is a long war, and my contribution pitiable. I have a long rap sheet. In some way or another, I have broken every commandment. Both tablets. I have explanations, rationalizations, and defenses, but in the end my fingerprints are all over. I am a repeat offender. And there are witnesses to my crimes. And yet even in me good is on the move. I am arrested and booked by love, and there is One beyond me who inhabits my smallish efforts, my "working out of salvation." You can look at the world and see absence, or you can look at it and see presence. I see presence, and that is grace. And yet evil --- whether the vapidity of what passes for entertainment or the offense that marches through the statistics we read in the newspaper --- sometimes makes me hover over absence, pausing to complain, like grizzled Habakkuk, who cries out "Violence! and you will not save?," who wags his finger at God and says "Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?" By His grace, not by me, I move on. I see presence. My mother always told me to "be good." I can't be good. I belong to the cult of me. My good is undercut by the desperate hope that someone will catch me in the act. Filthy rags is what I have. But when I consider me, when I contrast the feebleness of me with the all-sufficiency of Him, I have to smile. Oswald Chambers calls it "divine hilarity," Frederick Buechner calls it the "comedy of grace." I have a permanent inner smile, and my failings only broaden that smile. The other day I took my first ride with my teenage daughter at the wheel. I had warned her that I was prone to being nervous, as I had never ridden with her driving, and could be impatient. Still, she wanted to drive. When we screeched to a halt in our driveway, I turned to her and said, "Did I do OK?" She said, "Yeah, you did OK, Dad." That's grace. Salvation. Working it out with fear and trembling. Divine hilarity. God working in me for his good pleasure. When I'm nearly overcome by evil, I hold in my mind that image from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The seemingly eternal winter world of Narnia is about to recede, and yet evil still is ever-present. "Aslan is on the move," the Beaver says. And then Lewis says this: And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in his inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realise that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer. And then there is faithful Sam at the end of the Lord of the Rings, looking up from his bed at the towering figure of Gandalf smiling over him, saying, "Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happening to the world?” What's happening? Wheat and tares growing up side by side, that's what. Evil flourishing in the midst of good, for a season. But it won't always be. Aslan is on the move. The last move. The last battle. The end of the last war. "You did OK, Dad." Thank God. Steve West

That sounds more like a sermon title, and I know better than to preach.  I can simply tell what I see.  Trees budding.  Robins eating from my bird feeder, a gray squirrel gleaning the castoffs.  Chickadees stealing the bluebird house, early tenants.  Grass stirring from winter slumber.  Air wafting into my study hinting of warmer climes, a down payment on Spring.  From my window on Creation, good seems on the move.

 "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good," says Peter.  That, however, is a long war, and my contribution pitiable.

I have a long rap sheet.  In some way or another, I have broken every commandment.  Both tablets.  I have explanations, rationalizations, and defenses, but in the end my fingerprints are all over.  I am a repeat offender.  And there are witnesses to my crimes.  And yet even in me good is on the move.  I am arrested and booked by love, and there is One beyond me who inhabits my smallish efforts, my "working out of salvation."

 You can look at the world and see absence, or you can look at it and see presence.  I see presence, and that is grace.  And yet evil --- whether the vapidity of what passes for entertainment or the offense that marches through the statistics we read in the newspaper --- sometimes makes me hover over absence, pausing to complain, like grizzled Habakkuk, who cries out "Violence! and you will not save?," who wags his finger at God and says "Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?"  By His grace, not by me, I move on.  I see presence.

My mother always told me to "be good."  I can't be good.  I belong to the cult of me.  My good is undercut by the desperate hope that someone will catch me in the act.  Filthy rags is what I have.  But when I consider me, when I contrast the feebleness of me with the all-sufficiency of Him, I have to smile.  Oswald Chambers calls it "divine hilarity," Frederick Buechner calls it the "comedy of grace."  I have a permanent inner smile, and my failings only broaden that smile.

The other day I took my first ride with my teenage daughter at the wheel.  I had warned her that I was prone to being nervous, as I had never ridden with her driving, and could be impatient.  Still, she wanted to drive.  When we screeched to a halt in our driveway, I turned to her and said, "Did I do OK?"  She said, "Yeah, you did OK, Dad."  That's grace.  Salvation.  Working it out with fear and trembling.  Divine hilarity.  God working in me for his good pleasure.

When I'm nearly overcome by evil, I hold in my mind that image from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  The seemingly eternal winter world of Narnia is about to recede, and yet evil still is ever-present.  "Aslan is on the move," the Beaver says.  And then Lewis says this:

And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in his inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realise that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer. 

And then there is faithful Sam at the end of the Lord of the Rings, looking up from his bed at the towering figure of Gandalf smiling over him, saying, "Is everything sad going to come untrue?  What’s happening to the world?”  What's happening?  Wheat and tares growing up side by side, that's what.  Evil flourishing in the midst of good, for a season.  But it won't always be.

Aslan is on the move.  The last move. The last battle.  The end of the last war.

"You did OK, Dad."  Thank God.

 Map in the Mind tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2017ee8d15e7a970d 2013-03-01T09:30:25-05:00 2013-03-01T09:30:25-05:00 In Robert MacFarlane's epic compendium of journeys on foot, The Old Ways, he observes that maps of the Holy Land and West Bank made by the Israelis (or, before that, the British) "each had its own colonial biases of self-interest and misreading." No doubt cartographers face numerous decisions about what to include or exclude, the relative importance of detail, and the value of notation. It would be inevitable, I suppose, that each would bring to the task their own predispositions. Their maps are filtered through their minds and their own presuppositions about reality, through "legends" true and untrue. Naming is, after all, an important and God-instituted means of our knowing and taking dominion over Creation, of obeying the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28 and 2:15, to "fill the earth and subdue it," to "till it and keep it." As theologian Loren Wilkinson reminds us, these twin verses both state in unequivocal terms the rule of man over nature and the role of man as servant of nature: humankind is the ruler of Creation not for self-interest but to help bring to fulfillment all of its potential. That humble rule is marked by a sympathetic "naming." God brings the animals to Adam so that he can exercise his rule by naming each animal. To name them, he must know them. He must have observed their unique characteristics and given them a now unknowable name, one fitting them, one they could grow into. Though we are not told of it, surely Adam also named the plants and trees of his garden, the places where he walked. He was, indeed, the first cartographer, the first taxonomist. So, we come by naming honestly. We make maps. They make us. They are our way of taking dominion. To leave that task to professional cartographers is to abandon our own place-making and, ultimately, to neglect our role to rule over what God has entrusted us. The developers of my small puzzle-piece of suburbia named its streets proper English words fitting its 1970s Williamsburg architecture, names like Winthrop and Gainsborough. They no doubt sought to market the development in part via its courts and lanes, providing an illusion that one was buying into a quaint, English village. I live in the map of their making, one that I have to adhere to for sake of public clarity, so the postal service can find me, so you can find me. And yet I don't believe its the only or best way to map the place I call home. MacFarlane walks the hills of Palestine with his friend Raja, using Raja's "map in the head," one signposted by personal memories and references. Raja made his own hand-drawn map as well, one marked by pictures and event-captions, like "Where Penny and Raja came under gunfire, "Where I found a dinosaur footprint," or "Where Aziz picked up the unexploded missile." MacFarlane is reminded of his walk on the English moor with Anne Campbell and her similar event-mapping: "Where the dragonfly had laid its wings out to dry." "Where the eagle had preened." Each notation bears a rich association with a unique spot, a Global Positioning System of personal observation. I too have a map in my head. There's "Where my children played in the rain," as I remember my then small ones splashing in water from a Summer shower. Or "Daisy's house," for the good-humored golden retriever that greets me as I round the corner. There's the" Last Lonely House," where in the wee morning hours a woman sits alone at a breakfast table, "Pooh-Sticks Bridge," where my stroller-bound son watched a sometimes trickling, sometimes rushing stream. Kill Devil Hill. Raccoon tree. Mockingbird sings. Albino fox crossing. The Three Trees (all that is left of the old couple's home). The Forest where the Fire burned. The Gutter Geese. Silent Chimes. Where I fell over a tree root. Cactus Garden. Pink house. (Thank God, no missiles or gunfire.) It's all there, in the map in my head. I even wrote it down. By doing so, I better know my place. When I talk to my wife or children, we have some of these markers in common, a shared legend, a common story. I might say "I saw the raccoon today," and they see that vine covered tree, or "over by the The Three Trees," and they know the place, the old house replaced by new homes, the forest cleared, the three trees the still visible reminders of another, a couple and their life. One day, no doubt, we'll leave this rude Garden, and you won't find me out walking here. My then grown children may return, find the map I've drawn, or summon up the one in their mind, and remember. The impressions I've made may summon up the past in a way that grounds them and propels them onward toward their own place-making. The map in their minds may just help them find their way. Steve West

MapIn Robert MacFarlane's epic compendium of journeys on foot, The Old Ways, he observes that maps of the Holy Land and West Bank made by the Israelis (or, before that, the British) "each had its own colonial biases of self-interest and misreading."  No doubt cartographers face numerous decisions about what to include or exclude, the relative importance of detail, and the value of notation.  It would be inevitable, I suppose, that each would bring to the task their own predispositions. Their maps are filtered through their minds and their own presuppositions about reality, through "legends" true and untrue.

Naming is, after all, an important and God-instituted means of our knowing and taking dominion over Creation, of obeying the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28 and 2:15, to "fill the earth and subdue it," to "till it and keep it."  As theologian Loren Wilkinson reminds us, these twin verses both state in unequivocal terms the rule of man over nature and the role of man as servant of nature: humankind is the ruler of Creation not for self-interest but to help bring to fulfillment all of its potential.

 That humble rule is marked by a sympathetic "naming."  God brings the animals to Adam so that he can exercise his rule by naming each animal.  To name them, he must know them.  He must have observed their unique characteristics and given them a now unknowable name, one fitting them, one they could grow into.  Though we are not told of it, surely Adam also named the plants and trees of his garden, the places where he walked.  He was, indeed, the first cartographer, the first taxonomist.  So, we come by naming honestly.  We make maps.  They make us.  They are our way of taking dominion.  To leave that task to professional cartographers is to abandon our own place-making and, ultimately, to neglect our role to rule over what God has entrusted us.

 The developers of my small puzzle-piece of suburbia named its streets proper English words fitting its 1970s Williamsburg architecture, names like Winthrop and Gainsborough.  They no doubt sought to market the development in part via its courts and lanes, providing an illusion that one was buying into a quaint, English village.  I live in the map of their making, one that I have to adhere to for sake of public clarity, so the postal service can find me, so you can find me.  And yet I don't believe its the only or best way to map the place I call home.

MacFarlane walks the hills of Palestine with his friend Raja, using Raja's "map in the head," one signposted by personal memories and references.  Raja made his own hand-drawn map as well, one marked by pictures and event-captions, like "Where Penny and Raja came under gunfire, "Where I found a dinosaur footprint," or "Where Aziz picked up the unexploded missile."  MacFarlane is reminded of his walk on the English moor with Anne Campbell and her similar event-mapping: "Where the dragonfly had laid its wings out to dry."  "Where the eagle had preened."  Each notation bears a rich association with a unique spot, a Global Positioning System of personal observation.

I too have a map in my head.  There's "Where my children played in the rain," as I remember my then small ones splashing in water from a Summer shower.  Or "Daisy's house," for the good-humored golden retriever that greets me as I round the corner.  There's the" Last Lonely House," where in the wee morning hours a woman sits alone at a breakfast table, "Pooh-Sticks Bridge," where my stroller-bound son watched a sometimes trickling, sometimes rushing stream.  Kill Devil Hill.  Raccoon tree.  Mockingbird sings.  Albino fox crossing.  The Three Trees (all that is left of the old couple's home).  The Forest where the Fire burned.  The Gutter Geese.  Silent Chimes. Where I fell over a tree root.  Cactus Garden.  Pink house.  (Thank God, no missiles or gunfire.)  It's all there, in the map in my head.  I even wrote it down.  By doing so, I better know my place.  When I talk to my wife or children, we have some of these markers in common, a shared legend, a common story.  I might say "I saw the raccoon today," and they see that vine covered tree, or "over by the The Three Trees," and they know the place, the old house replaced by new homes, the forest cleared, the three trees the still visible reminders of another, a couple and their life.

One day, no doubt, we'll leave this rude Garden, and you won't find me out walking here.  My then grown children may return, find the map I've drawn, or summon up the one in their mind, and remember.  The impressions I've made may summon up the past in a way that  grounds them and propels them onward toward their own place-making.  The map in their minds may just help them find their way.

 Once Upon a Time. . . and They All Lived Happily Ever After tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2017d410b399e970c 2013-02-20T21:28:08-05:00 2013-02-20T21:27:39-05:00 Many years ago I wrote a short bit of memoir --- probably no more than 600 words --- about an evening walk with my best friend of 14 on the night of the day my father died. I recall writing something about how we lay on top of my father's station wagon, under a star-punctured sky, as we awkwardly tried to say something to each other, and then, concluding that we couldn't, did what we always did: we walked. What I wrote about that night probably wasn't profound, and yet it seemed that way when I wrote it. That remembrance seemed to capture the experience in a way I have been unable to since. Unfortunately, I lost what I wrote, and I have never been able to reproduce it. It was a very little "death," of course, compared to my larger loss, and yet still I lament the loss. At least one good contribution of post-modernism has been the attention to narrative, to the stories that we all live in and out of. For the disenfranchised, it may be a narrative of loss; for elites, a narrative of power and, yet, soul-gnawing hollowness. For me, it could have been just a narrative of loss and the fallout of loss in the life of a young man, but by God's grace that story took a different turn. To use Frederick Buchner's Gospel trinity, it was a tragedy undone by the comedy of God's grace, one which continues to hold out the (true) fairy tale of resurrection and restoration. That's a story I share with Buechner, one he has spent his whole life pondering. He summed it up like this: "The sad things that happened long ago will always remain part of who we are just as the glad and gracious things will too, but instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret that make us constantly stumble as we go, even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead. It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later." So, I am grateful to have a story to share, one that will stay with me always, one in which is hidden the seeds of new life. I can say "Once upon a time. . ." and have something to say. The alternative is painful to consider. On that fateful day when the Israelites abandoned the worship of God and asked Aaron to make a golden calf for them to worship, God warned Moses that "Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book" (Ex. 32:23). This "book" is God's reality, the story He is telling. It's a reality referred to variously throughout scripture as "the book of the living" (Ps. 69:28), "the book" (Dan. 12:1), "names. . . written in heaven," (Lk. 10:20), and "the book of life" (Phil. 4:3). The point: There is one Author of life. There is one story. If you aren't part of this tale, you are lost. You have no story. Now that is frightening. To lose your own story is not a little death but a big one, a negation of life. And it need not be. Because this is a story which you can opt into, to which you are invited. Imagine that: characters who in some mysterious way actually get to participate in the story, who can stand up on the page and address themselves to the author, who, incredibly enough, can by their petitions move the pen, shape the story. At 14 I had little notion that there was any larger story being told that involved my life, that I had any significant part. My father died. I did not know what to do or say about that. I went back to school. I worked. I looked for acceptance. I didn't know what it meant. Isn't that true of so much that happens to us? Yet, as you get older, you get glimpses of the larger narrative, of a God who imagined, made, and saved and who will deliver and remake and restore, who will tie all the subplots together in one final resolution, who will one day finally close the book, and say. . . "They all lived happily ever after." And we will. Will you? Steve West

Many years ago I wrote a short bit of memoir --- probably no more than 600 words --- about an evening walk with my best friend of 14 on the night of the day my father died. I recall writing something about how we lay on top of my father's station wagon, under a star-punctured sky, as we awkwardly tried to say something to each other, and then, concluding that we couldn't, did what we always did: we walked.  What I wrote about that night probably wasn't profound, and yet it seemed that way when I wrote it. That remembrance seemed to capture the experience in a way I have been unable to since.  Unfortunately, I lost what I wrote, and I have never been able to reproduce it.  It was a very little "death," of course, compared to my larger loss, and yet still I lament the loss.

 At least one good contribution of post-modernism has been the attention to narrative, to the stories that we all live in and out of.  For the disenfranchised, it may be a narrative of loss; for elites, a narrative of power and, yet, soul-gnawing hollowness.  For me, it could have been just a narrative of loss and the fallout of loss in the life of a young man, but by God's grace that story took a different turn.  To use Frederick Buchner's Gospel trinity, it was a tragedy undone by the comedy of God's grace, one which continues to hold out the (true) fairy tale of resurrection and restoration.  That's a story I share with Buechner, one he has spent his whole life pondering. He summed it up like this:

"The sad things that happened long ago will always remain part of who we are just as the glad and gracious things will too, but instead of being a burden of guilt, recrimination, and regret that make us constantly stumble as we go, even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead. It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later."

So, I am grateful to have a story to share, one that will stay with me always, one in which is hidden the seeds of new life.  I can say "Once upon a time. . ." and have something to say.

The alternative is painful to consider.  On that fateful day when the Israelites abandoned the worship of God and asked Aaron to make a golden calf for them to worship, God warned Moses that "Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book" (Ex. 32:23). This "book" is God's reality, the story He is telling.  It's a reality referred to variously throughout scripture as "the book of the living" (Ps. 69:28), "the book" (Dan. 12:1), "names. . . written in heaven," (Lk. 10:20), and "the book of life" (Phil. 4:3).  The point: There is one Author of life.  There is one story.  If you aren't part of this tale, you are lost.  You have no story.

Now that is frightening.  To lose your own story is not a little death but a big one, a negation of life.  And it need not be. Because this is a story which you can opt into, to which you are invited.  Imagine that: characters who in some mysterious way actually get to participate in the story, who can stand up on the page and address themselves to the author, who, incredibly enough, can by their petitions move the pen, shape the story.

At 14 I had little notion that there was any larger story being told that involved my life, that I had any significant part.  My father died.  I did not know what to do or say about that.  I went back to school. I worked.  I looked for acceptance.  I didn't know what it meant.  Isn't that true of so much that happens to us?  Yet, as you get older, you get glimpses of the larger narrative, of a God who imagined, made, and saved and who will deliver and remake and restore, who will tie all the subplots together in one final resolution, who will one day finally close the book, and say. . .

"They all lived happily ever after."  And we will.  Will you?

 

 An Inner Walk tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2017d40aded42970c 2013-02-03T19:57:56-05:00 2013-02-03T19:57:56-05:00 When I walk I am conscious of the ground beneath my feet, whether asphalt or dirt, the soundscape of the city or nature, the space unfolding before me. No doubt our outer landscape has a powerful effect upon our inner landscape. Indeed, in his journal of his own walkabouts, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert MacFarlane says that "[f]elt pressure, sensed texture and perceived space can work upon the body and so too among the mind, altering the textures and inclinations of thought." And so it does. Walk my suburban path, full of green lawns and mature oaks and retirees picking up newspapers on settled driveways and minivans and dog-walking masters and busy bluebirds and robins with my vision limited by the tree-scape, and I feel a deep contentedness, a sense of boundaries, roots, home, blessing, swaddled in my place, wearing my own old path in my circuit like the grooves of a oft-played LP. Jackson Browne. Running on Empty. Seventies. Groove-fatigue. Walk the desert, with unobstructed views that go on for 50 miles, trodding the paths of cowboys and indians and prospectors for gold and those on the move going west, west, west, until their feet lapped the waters of the Pacific, and I feel remarkably different. Free. Boundless. Unsettled. Possibilities, some which may have seemed foolhardy at home, loom large and realizable there, dangerous, like cacti and rattlesnakes, but not so fearful. My "why" becomes my "why not." Some even walked on the moon. They were never the same. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, described the sensation as one of "magnificent desolation," sensing the "eons of lifelessness" in that place. No doubt that overwhelming absence contributed to the deep depression, alcoholism, nervous breakdown, and divorce after his return to Earth. The moon was too boundless, space too empty. Perhaps he began to sense that he was a mere atom amongst atoms unquantifiable. When you walk where hardly any others have walked, maybe you are stymied by the difficulty of not being able to communicate an experience to people for whom that walk would be incomparable, fantastical. MacFarland concludes that, in the minds of poet-walkers like Edward Abbey, Richard Jeffries, or Thomas Hardy, "[p]aths were figured as rifts within which time might exist as pure surface, prone to weird morpholgies, uncanny origami." That all sounds so mystical, like one foot is (as Francis Schaeffer said) "firmly planted in the air." Yet sometimes the unseen world impinges. One's soul is moved. Twelve years ago I was discharged from the hospital after an emergency abdominal surgery. For about nine months thereafter, I had an irrational fear. The slightest discomfort yielded an overwhelming anxiety, a sense that I was going back into the hospital. There was nothing wrong with me, and yet I could not escape it. I prayed. I read scripture. I even took a few anti-anxiety pills. But the thing that yielded the best result was to simply walk, and walk, and walk. I settled into a deep routine where the only thing I had to focus on was putting one foot in front of another, footfall after footfall. Eventually my mind rested, my spirit calmed by the mundane dependability of the unfolding landscape, birdsong, wind murmur, and low rumble of the city. And then, the worry was gone. Somewhere along the way, I let it go. Walking gave dimension to my prayers, gave topography to my spirit. Trust God. Keep walking. Follow the cloud, the star, the inner voice that bids. In the early morning dark, when alone, pray out loud. Pray loud. Cry out to God if you need to. Be the widow pestering the judge until an answer comes, until God comes, until rocks cry out and trees clap their hands, until the road bends upward before you and heaven comes down. Take dominion over the earth. Till it and keep it. Walk on until you meet God coming. Just keep moving. Steve West

When I walk I am conscious of the ground beneath my feet, whether asphalt or dirt, the soundscape of the city or nature, the space unfolding before me.  No doubt our outer landscape has a powerful effect upon our inner landscape.  Indeed, in his journal of his own walkabouts, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert MacFarlane says that "[f]elt pressure, sensed texture and perceived space can work upon the body and so too among the mind, altering the textures and inclinations of thought."

And so it does.

Walk my suburban path, full of green lawns and mature oaks and retirees picking up newspapers on settled driveways and minivans and dog-walking masters and busy bluebirds and robins with my vision limited by the tree-scape, and I feel a deep contentedness, a sense of boundaries, roots, home, blessing, swaddled in my place, wearing my own old path in my circuit like the grooves of a oft-played LP.  Jackson Browne. Running on Empty.  Seventies. Groove-fatigue.

Walk the desert, with unobstructed views that go on for 50 miles, trodding the paths of cowboys and indians and prospectors for gold and those on the move going west, west, west, until their feet lapped the waters of the Pacific, and I feel remarkably different.  Free.  Boundless.  Unsettled.  Possibilities, some which may have seemed foolhardy at home, loom large and realizable there, dangerous, like cacti and rattlesnakes, but not so fearful.  My "why" becomes my "why not."

Some even walked on the moon.  They were never the same.  Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, described the sensation as one of "magnificent desolation," sensing the "eons of lifelessness" in that place. No doubt that overwhelming absence contributed to the deep depression, alcoholism, nervous breakdown, and divorce after his return to Earth.  The moon was too boundless, space too empty.  Perhaps he began to sense that he was a mere atom amongst atoms unquantifiable. When you walk where hardly any others have walked, maybe you are stymied by the difficulty of not being able to communicate an experience to people for whom that walk would be incomparable, fantastical.

MacFarland concludes that, in the minds of poet-walkers like Edward Abbey, Richard Jeffries, or Thomas Hardy, "[p]aths were figured as rifts within which time might exist as pure surface, prone to weird morpholgies, uncanny origami."  That all sounds so mystical, like one foot is (as Francis Schaeffer said) "firmly planted in the air."  Yet sometimes the unseen world impinges.  One's soul is moved.

Twelve years ago I was discharged from the hospital after an emergency abdominal surgery.  For about nine months thereafter, I had an irrational fear.  The slightest discomfort yielded an overwhelming anxiety, a sense that I was going back into the hospital.  There was nothing wrong with me, and yet I could not escape it.  I prayed. I read scripture. I even took a few anti-anxiety pills.  But the thing that yielded the best result was to simply walk, and walk, and walk.  I settled into a deep routine where the only thing I had to focus on was putting one foot in front of another, footfall after footfall.  Eventually my mind rested, my spirit calmed by the mundane dependability of the unfolding landscape, birdsong, wind murmur, and low rumble of the city.  And then, the worry was gone.  Somewhere along the way, I let it go.  Walking gave dimension to my prayers, gave topography to my spirit.

Trust God. Keep walking.  Follow the cloud, the star, the inner voice that bids.  In the early morning dark, when alone, pray out loud. Pray loud.  Cry out to God if you need to.  Be the widow pestering the judge until an answer comes, until God comes, until rocks cry out and trees clap their hands, until the road bends upward before you and heaven comes down.  Take dominion over the earth.  Till it and keep it. Walk on until you meet God coming.  Just keep moving.

 

 

 

 Seven Keepers: Favorite Album Releases of 2012 (Revised) tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451fedc69e2017d3f52a61a970c 2012-12-30T22:10:26-05:00 2013-01-09T16:42:56-05:00 Don't consider this a best of list. That would be presumptuous and impossible anyway, given the element of subjectivity involved. But these are the records from 2012 that I keep coming back to, that seem to offer something deeper than mere ear candy. What I am amazed at is how little of what I listen to actually sticks; most is, sadly, flash in the pan. These will stick. (Note that they are in no particular order.) A Creation Liturgy, Gungor. I nominate this record for the best worship album of all time, and I don't even usually like worship albums! The musicianship, the lyrics, and the beauty simply compel worship. There is rock, a classical guitar solo, a traditional hymn, and much more, a rich palette of songs that are stirring in their energy. I only wish I could have been at one of the live shows this album is taken from. If you want to see what I mean, just listen to Track 2, "Heaven," in its entirety. It's excellent, which is what our worship should be but which, sadly, so often fails to be. Two powerful poetry readings are amazing, like speed preaching. I'm blessed by it all. Release Me, Barbara Streisand. What can be said? Streisand has released 60 albums since 1963 and done far more besides. These 11 tracks, previously unreleased, were the "throwaways" from those many recording sessions. The thing about it is, Streisand's crumbs are food for the gods. There's not a bad track here, from Jimmy Webb's "Didn't We" to the touching rendition of Randy Newman's "I Think It's Gonna Rain Today," with Newman on the piano. On several tracks there are snippets of dialogue between Streisand and a musician or recording engineer. She's witty, funny, and probably quite the diva, but she's also an amazing singer. I love the crumbs. That's Why God Made the Radio, The Beach Boys. While inconsistent, a much anticipated 50th Anniversary reunion of the still living originators of tunes such as "Help Me Rhonda" and "Fun, Fun, Fun" finally came together. While the tour was short-lived, ultimately shut down by Mike Love, who has continued to tour under The Beach Boys moniker as mostly a nostalgia act, the reunion did produce this record, its songs made memorable by the contributions of the fragile genius of Brain Wilson. There is a bittersweet feel to the project, in its best moments hearkening back to Pet Sounds, and yet such writing seems closer to reality, somehow resonating more than the buoyant likes of "Fun, Fun, Fun" or "Good Vibrations." The closer, "Summer's Gone," about says it all: "Summer’s gone/ It’s finally sinking in/ One day begins/ Another ends/ I live them all and back again." With each new album, I always think that Brian Wilson is done, and yet he keeps surprising me. May God grant him many more years. Life Is People, Bill Fay. I think every reviewer of this album by this highly regarded 69-year old English singer-songwriter captures both the humility of Fay in light of his understated brilliance and his spirituality. He reminds me of Nick Drake without his tortured soul. And yet no one seems to pick up on the specifically Christian spirituality that permeates his lyrics. There's Jesus's propitiation for sin: "Every city brawl, every fistfight/ Every bullet from a gun/ Is written upon the palms of the holy one" ("There Is a Valley"); the hope of Heaven: "Ain't so far away, the healing day/ Coming to stay, the healing day" ("The Healing Day") and "I'm waiting for the city of God/ Yeah I'm waiting for the city of God/ When was is will be what was/ Waiting for the city of God" ("City of Dreams"); and a clsing prayer of thankfulness, like a benediction those close to him: "Thank you Lord, for giving life to me/ a river so wide, flowing from you and through me" ("Thank You Lord"). Maybe the state of biblical literacy is so low that reviewers don't even know how to express what he is saying and yet are deeply attracted to the clear-eyed hope of which he sings. Regardless, Bill Fay is one artist whose "little songs" (his words) should be heard. Leonard, the Lonely Astronaut, Andrew Osenga. As I wrote a review just for this album, I cannot do better than sum it up as I did in that blog post: "This is likely the richest album both lyrically and musically that Andrew Osenga has launched. There is a quirkiness in his character, and yet there is profundity in what the man has to say. This record just might resonate more broadly than in just the CCM community, as it touches on many universals and eschews the hackneyed phrases that abound in CCM marketed music. In fact, it strikes me as "acoustically-grounded, lyrically thoughtful, and spiritually provocative," just the kind of music I would have wanted to find and support in my Silent Planet Records days. And yet who needs a record label anymore? Leonard was funded by 365 fans via Kickstarter, and the set, a mock homemade spaceship, built by supporters. That's a testament to community and a new, broader sense of the importance of patronage." All that I said is still true. Give this unlikely record, one that could have gone oh-so-wrong a listen, to see what is oh-so-right. Palindrome Hunches, Neil Halstead. Mojave Three frontman Halstead makes folky, dreamy records, a little like The Innocence Mission. If you don't like the latter, you won't like him, but if you do, you may be all over it. He lacks the undergirding Christian vision of TIM, but he makes up for it in wit. The record is very British, welcoming, warm, and lyrically indecipherable much of the time, allowing space for your own meanings --- in other words, it's "shoegazer" folk. Even the title, "palindrome," meaning a word or line which means the same read backwards as well as forwards, hints that something is up here. You listen. You figure it out. Silver and Gold, Sufjan Stevens. I normally wouldn't include a Christmas album on my favorites list, but Sufjan's Christmas albums are worth playing all year long. Not that every song is a keeper, but there is so much here that you can assemble two good CDs of hymns, carols, original tunes, and more, all rather intimate and homemade, but it works. There are moments of sheer beauty, as in "Justice Delivers Its Death," or in his arrangement of "Joy to the World." I think the point of the whole lot of it is the heavy weigh that Christmas must carry --- sacred and religious --- but the sweet essence of the celebration, the Incarnation, shines through in the hymns and carols. And maybe that's his point. So, that's it for 2012. It's sad that in all the popular music rendered I could only come up with seven albums that will stick with me. I leave you with two videos, one by Bill Fay, the other by Sufjan Stevens, that were simply moving --- beautiful songs and simple images. Enjoy! Steve West

Don't consider this a best of list. That would be presumptuous and impossible anyway, given the element of subjectivity involved.  But these are the records from 2012 that I keep coming back to, that seem to offer something deeper than mere ear candy.  What I am amazed at is how little of what I listen to actually sticks; most is, sadly,  flash in the pan.  These will stick. (Note that they are in no particular order.)

GungorA Creation Liturgy, Gungor.  I nominate this record for the best worship album of all time, and I don't even usually like worship albums!  The musicianship, the lyrics, and the beauty simply compel worship. There is rock, a classical guitar solo, a traditional hymn, and much more, a rich palette of songs that are stirring in their energy.  I only wish I could have been at one of the live shows this album is taken from.  If you want to see what I mean, just listen to Track 2, "Heaven," in its entirety.  It's excellent, which is what our worship should be but which, sadly, so often fails to be.  Two powerful poetry readings are amazing, like speed preaching.  I'm blessed by it all.

BarbRelease Me, Barbara Streisand.  What can be said?  Streisand has released 60 albums since 1963 and done far more besides.  These 11 tracks, previously unreleased, were the "throwaways" from those many recording sessions.  The thing about it is, Streisand's crumbs are food for the gods.  There's not a bad track here, from Jimmy Webb's "Didn't We" to the touching rendition of Randy Newman's "I Think It's Gonna Rain Today," with Newman on the piano.  On several tracks there are snippets of dialogue between Streisand and a musician or recording engineer.  She's witty, funny, and probably quite the diva, but she's also an amazing singer.  I love the crumbs.

BeachThat's Why God Made the Radio, The Beach Boys.  While inconsistent, a much anticipated 50th Anniversary reunion of the still living originators of tunes such as "Help Me Rhonda" and "Fun, Fun, Fun" finally came together. While the tour was short-lived, ultimately shut down by Mike Love, who has continued to tour under The Beach Boys moniker as mostly a nostalgia act, the reunion did produce this record, its songs made memorable by the contributions of the fragile genius of Brain Wilson.  There is a bittersweet feel to the project, in its best moments hearkening back to Pet Sounds, and yet such writing seems closer to reality, somehow resonating more than the buoyant likes of "Fun, Fun, Fun" or "Good Vibrations."  The closer, "Summer's Gone," about says it all: "Summer’s gone/ It’s finally sinking in/ One day begins/ Another ends/ I live them all and back again." With each new album, I always think that Brian Wilson is done, and yet he keeps surprising me.  May God grant him many more years.

  FayLife Is People, Bill Fay.  I think every reviewer of this album by this highly regarded 69-year old English singer-songwriter captures both the humility of Fay in light of his understated brilliance and his spirituality.  He reminds me of Nick Drake without his tortured soul.  And yet no one seems to pick up on the specifically Christian spirituality that permeates his lyrics.  There's Jesus's propitiation for sin: "Every city brawl, every fistfight/ Every bullet from a gun/ Is written upon the palms of the holy one" ("There Is a Valley"); the hope of Heaven: "Ain't so far away, the healing day/ Coming to stay, the healing day" ("The Healing Day") and "I'm waiting for the city of God/ Yeah I'm waiting for the city of God/ When was is will be what was/ Waiting for the city of God" ("City of Dreams"); and a clsing prayer of thankfulness, like a benediction those close to him: "Thank you Lord, for giving life to me/ a river so wide, flowing from you and through me" ("Thank You Lord").  Maybe the state of biblical literacy is so low that reviewers don't even know how to express what he is saying and yet are deeply attracted to the clear-eyed hope of which he sings.  Regardless, Bill Fay is one artist whose "little songs" (his words) should be heard. 

AstroLeonard, the Lonely Astronaut, Andrew Osenga.  As I wrote a review just for this album, I cannot do better than sum it up as I did in that blog post:  "This is likely the richest album both lyrically and musically that Andrew Osenga has launched.  There is a quirkiness in his character, and yet there is profundity in what the man has to say. This record just might resonate more broadly than in just the CCM community, as it touches on many universals and eschews the hackneyed phrases that abound in CCM marketed music.  In fact, it strikes me as "acoustically-grounded, lyrically thoughtful, and spiritually provocative," just the kind of music I would have wanted to find and support in my Silent Planet Records days.  And yet who needs a record label anymore?  Leonard was funded by 365 fans via Kickstarter, and the set, a mock homemade spaceship, built by supporters.  That's a testament to community and a new, broader sense of the importance of patronage."  All that I said is still true.  Give this unlikely record, one that could have gone oh-so-wrong a listen, to see what is oh-so-right.

NeilPalindrome Hunches, Neil Halstead.  Mojave Three frontman Halstead makes folky, dreamy records, a little like The Innocence Mission.  If you don't like the latter, you won't like him, but if you do, you may be all over it.  He lacks the undergirding Christian vision of TIM, but he makes up for it in wit.  The record is very British, welcoming, warm, and lyrically indecipherable much of the time, allowing space for your own meanings --- in other words, it's "shoegazer" folk.  Even the title, "palindrome," meaning a word or line which means the same read backwards as well as forwards, hints that something is up here.  You listen. You figure it out.

SufjanSilver and Gold, Sufjan Stevens.  I normally wouldn't include a Christmas album on my favorites list, but Sufjan's Christmas albums are worth playing all year long.  Not that every song is a keeper, but there is so much here that you can assemble two good CDs of hymns, carols, original tunes, and more, all rather intimate and homemade, but it works.  There are moments of sheer beauty, as in "Justice Delivers Its Death," or in his arrangement of "Joy to the World."  I think the point of the whole lot of it is the heavy weigh that Christmas must carry --- sacred and religious --- but the sweet essence of the celebration, the Incarnation, shines through in the hymns and carols.  And maybe that's his point.

So, that's it for 2012.  It's sad that in all the popular music rendered I could only come up with seven albums that will stick with me.  I leave you with two videos, one by Bill Fay, the other by Sufjan Stevens, that were simply moving --- beautiful songs and simple images.  Enjoy!