Not all who wander are lost ... unless they are going in circles

The last few days, I have been taking advantage of the milder weather to put in some new fence and clear out an old fencerow so I can put in some more. Perhaps the pain put me in the right mood to hear what the Preacher has to say.

All the streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. The streams are flowing to the place, and they will flow there again. All things are wearisome; man is unable to speak. The eye is not satisfied by seeing or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. – Ecclesiastes 1:7-9

We like the idea of progress. There must be something in the human psyche that craves moving forward, getting bigger and better. “New and Improved!” invariably gets our attention.

The Preacher tells us that we do not move forward but in a never-ending circle. He says that nothing is ever really new and very little is ever improved. Having more is not the same as having better, or even different. In the view of Ecclesiastes, life is cyclical, and each day is a wearisome round like the one that went before it, and like the one to follow it. Nothing is ever really accomplished in this world, for the best efforts of man will wear down, wear away, crumble and fall to the relentless, cynical work of time and decay.

Progress, as the world system uses the word, is meaningless. It simply moves us further around the circumference of the circle. It neither moves the center, nor moves us toward the center. In The Two Towers, Sam and Frodo find themselves in the mountains trying to get to the Black Gate of Mordor. Between the terrain and the overcast sky, it is difficult for the hobbits to get their bearings. “This looks strangely familiar,” Sam says.

Frodo replies, “We’ve been here before.”

My father, brother and I were out coyote hunting with our hounds one cold, snowy day. We left the truck up on a road and walked in a mile or so to where the dogs were running. After the race broke up, we caught the hounds and started back to the truck. The ground was covered with about four inches of snow, the going was a little tough and it seemed to be taking a long time to get to the road.

We came into a little opening and saw a stretch of greatly disturbed snow. “Looks like a herd of deer must have crossed,” my brother said.

My dad was in front and looked down, “And the sneaky bastards have took to wearin’ rubber boots like ours.”

When we are wandering in circles, we need to re-orient. We need something we can go by, a landmark to head toward. Sometimes it helps to reach a higher elevation, to get above the ground clutter that is confusing us. Our hearts are yearning for progress, but it is a “pilgrim’s progress” – not living in the same circle until we decay and die. We seek not change, but transformation, to become whole, rising higher to see the true goal of life. Christ breaks out of the circle.

For the Messiah did not enter a sanctuary made with hands (only a model of the true one) but into heaven itself, that He might now appear in the presence of God for us. He did not do this to offer Himself many times, as the high priest enters the sanctuary yearly with the blood of another. Otherwise, He would have had to suffer many times since the foundation of the world. But now He has appeared one time, at the end of the ages, for the removal of sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And just as it is appointed for people to die once – and after this, judgment – so also the Messiah, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who have been waiting for Him. – Hebrews 9:24-28

The Bible tells us that the annual, endless cycle of sacrifices in the Tabernacle and the Temple served only to remind us of our sin. No one was really released from the human condition, from the circle of ages that never moved us forward.

Jesus said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to Me.” Moses elevated the bronze serpent on a pole so that everyone could see it, and those who looked upon it lived. God raised Christ up on the Cross, He gave us a landmark, a point of orientation to lead us out of the wilderness and get us on the path to home.

Some of Us Grow Up

I have a short week and a lot to do, no FNFFA this week. But Friday night reminds me of Saturday night and Saturday night reminds me of “Saturday Night Live”, which in turn reminds me of National Lampoon, the magazine. I don’t know if it is still published. Somehow, a few decades ago, a copy came into my possession and was stored away in a stack of early ‘70’s vintage Sports Illustrated magazines (I think this was before swimsuits were “sports”) and a single well-preserved copy of Marvel Comics’ “Two-Gun Kid”. The Two-Gun Kid story and art hold up over time. The SI’s are interesting for the history. But looking at the satire magazine, I can’t imagine that I ever paid money for such a disgusting pile of humorless stupidity. My excuse is, if I did buy it, I was probably drunk or high.

Satire is perhaps the most difficult kind of humor to get right. I know. I’ve tried and failed miserably every time. I can sometimes sustain a bit of irony for a sentence or two, but in extended pieces it tends to fall apart, just collapse under its own weight. Maybe it is just a personal problem. Looking through that old Lampoon, I tend to think not. The magazine contains nothing that I would call “satire”. There are some things that are gross and/or shocking. There are a few pieces that turn things around backwards in the tradition of Erehwon, but they don’t really work and they aren’t funny. They are just stupid, and stupid is only funny if you actually respect your subject.

For example, contrast a couple of “minority” comedians: the great Bill Cosby and the, uh, well, extremely bitter Margaret Cho. Essentially Cho hates the people she tries to skewer – people like me. Because she has such a low opinion of her target, she cannot make it real, it has no resonance. Cho and her audience are “laughing” at a caricature that is so far from being real I can’t even identify it as human, certainly not as myself.

Consider Cosby on the other hand. Listen to an old Fat Albert story from some of Cosby’s early records. They are still funny – a little more nostalgic than they were perhaps but still funny, even if you’ve heard them a dozen times. Bill Cosby loved his characters. He could see the humor in what they were and what they did, but he respected them. They were caricatures lovingly drawn and the details overblown made them more loveable – not grotesque.

Cosby is an adult who looks back lovingly on childhood and adolescence, seeing the beauty and the humor and helps us understand ourselves. Cho is an aging adolescent who tries to mock adulthood, wisdom and maturity but fails since she does not understand any of it.

All of that brings me to my actual subject: Robert Heinlein. Admittedly I have lost track of how many degrees of separation that is, but here we are. Generally, Heinlein’s work is divided more or less neatly into two segments. His early novels are sometimes known as “juveniles”, written for what we call today the “young adult” market. These works include Tunnel in the Sky, Starship Troopers, Farmer in the Sky, etc. The later works are themed differently -- Stranger in a Strange Land, Glory Road, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Farnham’s Freehold, and the Lazarus Long stuff.

Tunnel in the Sky is a good little SciFi book – the tone matches the theme and the character. Heinlein’s voice is pitched well for the story. The plot is fairly solid and the characters are adequate. You can say the same thing about Starship Troopers which is a little more “mature”, but is still appropriate to Heinlein’s voice. Honestly, I don’t remember the other juveniles that well -- Tunnel in the Sky was always my favorite.

When it comes to the later novels, Heinlein begins to lose me. Farnham’s Freehold is a deeply flawed book. The plot is not just weak, it is atrocious. I was actually ticked off when I put the book down. I had been scammed. The problem was that Heinlein tackled an idea he couldn’t handle. It might even have been a good idea but it was beyond his voice and capacity. He just flailed using his reputation like water wings and went no where. Give him credit, I suppose, for jumping in but it was painful.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has a better plot with better character development. Again, it’s a good idea and at least manages to convey Heinlein’s libertarian beliefs with some passion. It is probably my favorite of the later novels, along with Glory Road, where, once more, Heinlein’s voice was well matched to the material. It was predictable and plodding at times but I didn’t feel cheated at the end.

Having read Stranger in a Strange Land, I could not bring myself to tackle any of Heinlein’s Lazarus Long works, though Stranger is in some ways Heinlein’s best. The title, of course, comes from Moses when he names his first-born son, Gershom, which sounds like the Hebrew for “a stranger there”, saying, “I have become a stranger in a strange land.” (See Exodus 2.) Heinlein brings his protagonist, a human child born on Mars and raised completely apart from humans by the Martians back to earth. Michael Valentine Smith becomes a Christ-like figure, but one whose morality is skewed relative to human tradition. There’s lots of free sex. There’s cannibalism. Heinlein gives us the word grok. It’s a powerful vision and aligned well with the ‘60’s mentality.

Never trust anyone over thirty.

The trouble is Heinlein was still writing a juvenile. In all of his later works that I have read, his voice never changed. Heinlein never grew up. Stranger probably has the most complex characters Heinlein ever created. His insight on an alien mind in a human body is thought-provoking and well-done. But he just could not keep from being a seventeen-year-old boy. Heinlein carried that chip that most adolescents have on their shoulder around all his life. He never made peace with adulthood. He was never able to say, “Yeah, well, maybe the Old Man was right about a few things after all.”

“Write what you know”, so they say. We’ve all been children. Some of us grow up.

Counting Sheep?

So Moses thought: I must go over and look at this remarkable sight. Why isn’t the bush burning up?

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called out to him from the bush, “Moses, Moses!”

“Here I am,” he answered. Exodus 3:3,4

Sometimes God picks unlikely people for a mission. Sometimes He picks likely people, but instead of turning them loose on the project, He seems to abandon them. Moses, back in the day, was a likely guy. He had been adopted into Pharaoh’s family. He was one of the elite. Legend has it that he was a successful military leader. If I had been God, I would have arranged a coup and put Moses in charge of Egypt. It would have been much simpler.

Instead, Moses winds up a murderer who flees his homeland and is exiled to the backside of the desert, not just the wilderness -- that would have been bad enough – but the desert’s ass. It’s only one rung above New Jersey on the descent to hell.

After forty years following stinking sheep Moses might have been justified in thinking the whole deliverer thing wasn’t working out all that well. Forty years is a lot of tempering and refining. I would wonder if, after all that time, God had not cast me aside and given up on me. I had my chance and I screwed it up royally. I stumbled. I fell from exalted – ok, well, not-so-exalted heights. It was more like I tripped over the threshold but it was still a fall. It still made God look bad. Now I am an outcast just wandering around doing what I can to survive until my miserable spark is extinguished.

But then every once in a while I see some phenomenon. I see a remarkable thing. The question is: will I turn aside as Moses did, or will I go on moseying along behind the sheep? Is it really that remarkable? After all, isn’t that what life is: a fire that burns but does not consume? Is it anything different than the wick of a lamp?

Even with Moses, perhaps other bushes had burned that he had not turned aside to see over the course of forty years. Could he have been too busy or too weary, too hungry, too thirsty, too eager to get home to see the family, or too bored with what looked like a failed life to bother?

I have seen the bush burning. Will I turn aside and get closer? That’s always the question. The remarkable and the mundane will intersect. At that crossroad I must decide to give heed to the remarkable or keep on following the familiar -- one day like another, one sheep like another -- repetitive, familiar. To turn aside and draw closer to the remarkable is the path out of the desert, out of abandonment, out of emptiness.

I will suddenly realize I am on holy ground. I will see the fire for what it is – not some chemical reaction, but the very Spirit of God coming through a common frame. Any old bush will do. It is not the bush that is remarkable. The bush can be well-formed or scraggly and half dead. It doesn’t matter. It is the Fire I have turned aside to see. There I will hear God, at last, at long last, call my name.

He calls my name. He has not forsaken me. He was waiting only for me to turn away from the hypnotic day-to-day dream state, waiting for me to turn to Him, to the Real.

If I find myself complaining that I have no sense of purpose, no mission in life, and no urgent calling, the problem is not that God has overlooked or abandoned me. It is that I have ignored a world on fire but not consumed. I have just kept on counting sheep.