Trigger Warning

Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. – Philippians 2:14-16

The advice in these verses is good.  Questioning can also be translated as disputing or doubting.  Jesus uses the same word in Luke 24:38 when He asks the disciples why “doubts arise” in their hearts.  I have a family member who has been going through some difficulties for an extended period of time.  Someone encourages her and says that she should turn her stress and worries over to God.  She responds, “I wish it were that easy.” 

I can understand that, but it does seem strange that grumbling, complaining, and doubting come easier to me than handing the burden off to another.  I know when I am working and someone on the team says that he or she will take care of something I thought I had to do, I feel relief, usually.  The times when I don’t are those occasions when I harbor trepidations about the trustworthiness and competence of the volunteer. 

I suppose that means, if I worry about something God has offered to do, I doubt that He is really up to the job.  That’s Paul’s point in the last part of the passage.  If those he has taught and guided and admonished cannot live without fear and doubt, without whining and moaning and cowering, without worrying and fretting about every trouble that comes along, he has failed in his ministry, and he will be called to account for it. 

I have been binge-watching Band of Brothers which I have enjoyed much more than Private Ryan.  In one scene the recklessly courageous Ronald Speirs explains the “trick” to a fearful soldier.  It amounts to assuming that the worst will indeed happen and that one has no hope of coming out alive.  The way it is framed in the dramatized dialogue, Speirs’ advice doesn’t sound appealing to a Christian.  However, it struck me as very similar to something a Christian has said.  In his parody of self-help books, Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy suggested a cure for depression:  suicide.  If that seems rather extreme, Percy explains that once suicide is actually an option, one is free to live as an ex-suicide, concluding: 

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning:

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

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

Note again, I call this book a parody.  Don’t take it too seriously, and keep in mind that to be an ex-suicide, one can’t actually pull the trigger.  As Percy says, You can elect suicide, but you decide not to.  It is a very important distinction.

Or, as Paul told the church at Philippi as few verses earlier:  For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain (Philippians 1:21).  That sounds a bit more acceptable to most of us, but we should remember that to be in Christ means that we have died to self and identified with Him in His death on the Cross. 

My life is in God’s hands.  I trust my very soul and my destiny for all of eternity to Him.  What are all the troubles of this world to that?

Low Volume

The spirit of a man will sustain him in sickness,
But who can bear a broken spirit? --Proverbs 18:14

It doesn't look like I'll have much time to post or comment this week. When I do have some time, I'll probably be reading Francis Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe. I started it over the weekend and took a break to watch The Last of the Mohicans. "Find yourself a musket."

A good read at First Things comparing Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy on the 20th anniversary of Percy's death.

A Different Way

Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again – John 3:7

In Walker Percy’s novel Second Coming the protagonist goes into a cave intending to make it his tomb. He is, however, driven to seek a way of escape from the cave because of a painful toothache. In his search in the dark, he enters a passage that is very confined. He keeps crawling until he falls out into the open world. It’s been a while since I read the book, but, as best I recall, I didn’t catch on right away, whether through Percy’s skill or my own denseness. I have a feeling Nicodemus had a similar experience in his encounter with Jesus. Sometime later he was probably thinking about the whole conversation along with all he knew about the Lord and had a slap-your-head moment. Or, as Rip Taylor used to say, “You’ll think about this later, and you’ll laauugh!”

Evangelicals talk a lot about how easy it is to be born again. And it is. All one has to do is die first. We baptize people in water because it is so much easier than burying them and digging them back up. Life, death, and rebirth are akin to the dialectic thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. To experience any kind of true growth, we have to be hidden away, enter the crypt, and re-emerge.

Because Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross is a once-for-all carrying away of sin, I want to think that my own long, dark night of the soul is a once-for-all experience from which I should emerge into eternal sunlight and joy. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis mentions the nature of man as being subject to a sort of sine wave shaped “law of undulation”. We gain ground; we lose a little; we gain a little more. It is enough to cause me to think that perhaps it’s all right if I have to keep entering the dark and coming out the other side.

In fact I think we may precipitate a cycle by our decisions to seek God. I believe beyond any question that God hears and answers our prayers. He gives us that which we seek, though it is common – in my case anyway – not to recognize the answer when it arrives. (See JWM’s WFB putting together old bikes) In many cases, an answer to prayer involves a trial or a crisis of opposition that seems to be not only blocking our deliverance but pushing us further away. I am taken aback and discouraged, but I should not be. The way up is down. The road to the light leads through darkness.

Our prayers try us, and the word of the Lord that comes to us as a result will test us, just as the word of his vision tried Joseph (Psalm 105:16-22) before leading to his deliverance and that of his people. Joseph went into the pit, from the pit to the chains of slavery, from slavery to the dungeon, from the dungeon to the throne. The thing I need to learn is, first, not to allow trials to convince me that God does not know what He is doing. Second, the valley of the shadow of death is a very real, very dark place through which my path to enlightenment leads, and I may be there more than once. Third, when in the valley of the shadow of death or the tomb or the pit or the cave, I will not get out if I sit down. I must keep going. Finally, it will not do me any good to take the back track. I cannot find my way out by going back the way I came. I must leave a “different way”.

Bluetooth Man

I started to post an old piece I had written, but I just finished the Walker Percy novel, and it has me thinking about philosophers and novelists and what a hard job it is to write a modern/post-modern/post-post-modern book that people will actually read. The various genres of literature – fantasy, science fiction, westerns, historic, etc., take us out of our mundane world in a fairly straightforward way. We move into the writer’s world or into their time, learn the rules and the boundaries, and the story then unfolds before us.

Sometimes things throw us off. I remember several years ago reading a Max Brand western called, I think, The Seventh Man. The hero is not a bad man, but he is a wild throwback of sorts who lives outside civilization. He helps a man sought by the law by taking the fugitive’s mare, Gray Molly, and leading the sheriff and his men away from their quarry. One of the pursuers deliberately shoots the mare in an attempt to end the chase. The hero escapes but vows revenge on all the members of the posse for the mare’s unnecessary death. He is able to carry out his revenge, in part because of his companions -- a magnificent stallion and a highly intelligent wolf or wolf-hybrid. The climax of the story is a long chase across country, and the hero is nearly undone by something he doesn’t understand: technology. Though those who are after the hero have no horses that can match his steed, the telephone has made its appearance, and it is used by a clever official to run down the avenger.

I was ambivalent. I understand the use of new technology as a plot point, whether it is the telephone, the telegraph, railroads, barbwire or whatever – man versus machine, the end of the frontier – all of those things are part of the historical reality. Technology changes and forces the culture to change. Dealing with it can make an interesting story, just generally not one I prefer. I like worlds where there is no GPS, no computers, no cell phones, telephones, or telegraphs, where there’s open space and room to get lost.

The more gadgets you hang on anything, the less it becomes a human endeavor. Sure, humans still build the gadgets – at least I think humans were involved in creating Vista – but many of these devices create limits as much as they create opportunities. I’m obviously not against technology, but I think we have to be careful and choose wisely to find things that make us stronger and more independent rather than weaker and more dependent.

It seems to me that as we have less and less privacy, it becomes increasingly difficult to describe or diagnose the human condition. The more our lives are open and viewable, the less we actually see. Consider the celebrity phenomenon. You can know everything about a sports figure or a movie star or a politician, but their actions, thoughts and beliefs can become contaminated by their own image. We see too much of them, and, they, in effect, see too much of themselves. That is, they see too much of what they are trying to make themselves appear to be. I am afraid we will soon learn this is precisely the case with Obama. He is like a man caught in a hall of mirrors unable to distinguish where he actually stands.

Any literary work that attempts to depict man in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is forced to work with and around rapid technological advances. It is difficult not to get trapped by gadgetry. Take, for example, that classic movie The Thing, made, I believe, about 1982. The computers and some of the other equipment look archaic, but it works for the story. Try to remake that movie and set it in 2010 and the plot would have to change in several points to make sense. I wonder how many recent movies or action/adventure novels set in the current time frame have a conveniently inconvenient loss of cell phone service or loss of the cell phone at some point. Stories often turn on isolation and the lack of communication between various parties. It is going to look more and more contrived for people not to think of Google or not having security videos or not taking pictures with their camera phones.

Look there -- it's a David Gemmell heroic fantasy novel and a guaranteed bluetooth-free zone. I know where I'm headed.

Walker Percy Profundity Accompanied by Silliness

Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war – or the end of the world. That is why Southerners like to fight and make good soldiers. In war the possible becomes actual through no doing of our own. – From The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy

I feel I owe something to the late Dr. Percy. Prior to this, I have read only Second Coming, one of his last novels, dealing with the same protagonist, Will Barrett, at a time later in life. That novel had a profound influence on me, very much the final boot out the back door of frozen fundamentalism. I always felt like a gate crasher there anyway. It was only a matter of time.

Like Barrett I am, in many ways, a reactionary. Some people want to make things happen. I’m more likely to want to keep things from happening. Others create. I fix things. I solve problems – usually problems created by others, but occasionally ones created by myself in an attempt to solve someone else’s problem.

As others have observed, this can be a difference between men and women. Not so much that women cause all the problems, but that they like to talk about situations as if something needed to be fixed. My wife seems to think that talking – endlessly – about anything is somehow beneficial. Not only is it beneficial to her, it is beneficial to our relationship. Ever notice it is the little old men who are most likely to be deaf?

Someone needs to explain this to me. If my wife and I are in the car, and I’m driving, are we not doing something together? Why doesn’t being in the car together listening to music count? Why doesn’t sitting on the sofa or the bed together watching a movie count? Why does it only count if we talk? I cannot enjoy music if someone is talking over it. I cannot follow a movie if someone is talking the whole time.

And this one really gets me: we’re watching a TV show, my wife keeps chattering, paying no attention to what is going on, and then she suddenly realizes something is happening on screen. “What’s he doing? Why is he doing that?” Do you know why I will never give up my DVR? Because I can hit the pause button and not miss the entire rest of the show while I explain what has happened up to that point. Of course, it also means that I now watch television in about five minute increments, but it’s better than nothing.

After all, I'm a problem-solver.