Now There's a Man

I just read the chapter in David Brooks's The Road to Character on George C. Marshall, the ubiquitous mid-twentieth century general, chief of staff, secretary of state, diplomat and Red Cross president. Marshall is best known for his work as Roosevelt's, and then Truman's, chief of staff during the Second World War. That's about all I knew; that and the work of the Marshall Plan in reshaping Europe after the war's conclusion.

Each of Brooks's chapters focuses on a different virtue on the road to character. Marshall's virtue was self-mastery. And, boy, was he good at it. One of the more inspiring examples of this came when he refused to ask for control of the Operation Overlord (D-Day) plan when everyone on both sides of the Atlantic assumed command would be his. It is clear that he could have had it if he wished, and he wished, but he refused to advocate for himself. He wanted Roosevelt to do what he felt he needed to do and not bend to popular support or a feeling of indebtedness to Marshall. Freed by Marshall's reticence, Roosevelt tapped Dwight Eisenhower for command of Overlord. 

This same reticence that prevented Marshall from sounding his own drum in an epochal military event colored his life. No biographer has been able to find evidence of major moral failure throughout his life. An unexceptional student, Marshall worked hard to control what he could control. What he could control was how he carried himself. So he worked and mastered the art of carrying himself with dignity and gravity. More than fifty years after his death, he is still an exemplar of these qualities. 

After I finished reading--the last anecdote from Brooks is about Marshall's refusal of a state funeral; he was buried with only close friends and family in attendance, with the standard Prayer Book funeral service, and no eulogy--I put the book down and muttered under my breath, "Now there's a man."

This is not a feeling I get a lot these days, and most particularly not from myself. I can think of one or two people in my life that I would say something like this about. We don't cultivate this type of manhood in our culture today. To be sure, large parts of our culture are busy denying manhood at all as some sort of virtuous undertaking. We are men without chests in our culture. Men without backbones. Men without self-control. 

Self-mastery, self-control. We don't think of these things very often. And if we do we tend to atomize them. A pastor might show great self-control in reading Scripture, but he eats whatever he wants. An athlete might show great control in diet and training, but he gives vent to anger or has no control of his sexual urges. We need to return to thinking about these things comprehensively. Especially as Christians. The fruit of the spirit includes self-control. God has given us a spirit of power and love and self-control. We resist Satan if we practice self-control. These things are all littered through the New Testament. 

I wonder what would happen if we took this more seriously. If we stopped forgiving ourselves for our infractions and took with grave solemnity the injunction to control ourselves. I imagine more of us would elicit the response, "Now there's a man." And in a world without men that makes for a good testimony.  

A Good Word on Worship

"We live in what one writer has called the 'age of sensation.' We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured."

Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

The U-Curve or Why You Need Failure

In the introduction to The Road to Character, Brooks notes that the lives of each of the people he profiles within the book have a similar trajectory. He calls it the U-Curve. He writes, "They had to go down to go up. They had to descend into the valley of humility to climb to the heights of character." 

True character development seems impossible without this valley of humility. Brooks quotes Kierkegaard: "Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved." The self-emptying that takes place in the valley enables us to be of use when we climb back out, to rescue the beloved. Brooks calls this process "quieting the self." I like that metaphor. We become less through humility and then are able to exemplify the virtues only available through humility. We block out the internal noise telling us that we're great or this suffering isn't worth it or no one understands us or whatever junk is being piped into our brains and we are finally free to experience calm and tranquility. Moreover, we are finally free to actually provide purposeful aid to those around us who suffer and need to learn how to suffer. Tim Keller, in Counterfeit Gods, asserts that "people who have never suffered in life have less empathy for others, little knowledge of their own shortcomings and limitations, no endurance in the face of hardship, and unrealistic expectations for life." These valleys of humility are schools for obedience to God and usefulness to men. 

Brooks argues, and I mostly agree here, that we've "left this moral tradition behind. Over the last several decades, we've lost this language, this way of organizing life. We're not bad. But we're morally inarticulate. We're not more selfish or venal than people in other times, but we've lost the understanding of how character is built." I would quibble with the claim that "we're not bad." We are. We're awful. But I do think he is right that for most of us this transition has been unintentional or unwitting. We did not intend to create a culture that fears precisely the valleys of humility that allow us to be men and women of deep character. We did not intend to make it the goal of our lives to obviate suffering. We did not intend to create a culture of narcissistic, spoiled know-nothings. But, here we are.

A few months ago I wrote that one of my goals for the new year was to fail more. This is what I mean. I want to experience these valleys and embrace them. Not because they are pleasant or easy, but because they are not. I took a group of kids backpacking a couple of weeks ago. It is always illuminating to me to put kids in that position and see how they do. You can tell the ones who have experienced suffering and embraced it and those who shy away every time something gets difficult. 

We confuse ourselves easily on this score, too. I was talking with one of the kids who embraced suffering on the trip about this and we decided that there is a basic deceit at work in these situations: the people at the back of the pack are convinced that they are suffering more than the people at the front. This might be true, but it is not logically necessary. Take me, a 32 year-old suburban dad who has done virtually no cardio for the past eight months due to plantar fasciitis. Yet, I was slaying those kids who work out three hours a day. I don't say this to toot my own horn, but to point out that the ability to suffer can make up for all other sorts of defects. I am overweight and out-of-shape, but I don't mind the feeling of screaming lungs and burning quads. I like it, actually. It invigorates me and makes me feel alive.

And I know this because I have trained myself to know it. I have walked into those physical valleys time and again and kept going. There is something wonderfully democratic about this. Are there variances in talent? Of course. But, for those willing to put their heads down, grit their teeth, and quiet the self, a lot of ground can be made up. Our world tells us we can shortcut the valley and go straight to the mountaintop. Our world is a liar.

A Poem for Easter

Here is the poem I have kept coming back to during this Lenten season. This is John Updike's poem, "Seven Stanzas at Easter." I will avoid the temptation to perform a line-by-line analysis of the poem (you're welcome). In lieu of that, I will simply make some larger comments and mostly trust the poem to speak for itself. So, here it is.

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

The subordinating conjunction "if" in line one might cause us to think that Updike is expressing doubt here about the reality of the resurrection. I don't think he is. I am basing that on the rest of the poem, which doesn't really strike me as doubtful in tone. After that, Updike focuses on the utter physicality of the resurrection, a physicality we can lose sight of all too often. This is a problem, I think, for any person or culture saturated in Christian imagery. We are so used to seeing mangers and crosses that the monstrosity of the incarnation and resurrection eludes us. Updike will have none of that. At the resurrection a real body was reanimated, molecules reknitted, amino acids rekindled, the strength of that pierced heart regathered. 

Updike wrote this poem when he was younger to be read during his church service at Easter. Considering this audience, it is clear that he is addressing believers here. Believers for whom, perhaps, the stark reality of the resurrection has turned into a cold fact, even a metaphor, as he says in the fourth stanza. I do this. I don't think I square with the reality of the faith very often. Not really. Not deeply. Every week I repeat the words of the creed and declare my belief in the hard physicality of the resurrection. Every night when I tuck my kids into bed I end our prayer telling our Lord that we long for his return and his eternal kingship over the earth. 

But I still miss it. I still twist it in order to suit my own sense of beauty. I still escape the event through transcendence, not through denial. I make it esoteric, spiritual, almost gnostic. And I avoid that rock hard reality of the "monstrous" nature of a man coming back from the dead.

Updike's warning in the final stanza alludes to Christ's eventual return. I was talking with one of my classes last week about end times' prophecy. They are not growing up in the heyday of Left Behind nonsense like I did, but they are growing up still with people trying to make everything apocalyptic. We talked, though, about how in the teachings of Jesus the whole point is that we don't know and can't know when this will happen. He tells us that he doesn't even know. His warnings are consistently that we be prepared at all times because we do not and cannot know. We must be vigilant, lest he returns and finds us unprepared. For Updike here, the concern is that those of us who considered ourselves faithful (another theme of Christ's) will ultimately be embarrassed when we realize how much we have short-sold the miracle at the center of our faith. 

This Easter my prayer is that the concrete reality of the event would not elude us. Let us, together, walk through the door.

A Poem for Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday is a strange day in the church calendar. There is really no Scripture that applies; the Gospels are silent on this day. It was a day of rest, a day of fasting, a day of remembrance. And so it should be. Christian tradition says that Jesus descended into hell on this day, when Christ victorious emptied hell of those who had been waiting salvation. Whatever you believe about this day, it is one that must be approached soberly. We are not yet at the triumphalism of Easter. The image most indelible for me on this day is that of the tomb. The real, rock structure that housed the murdered God. Today's poem is George Herbert's "Sepulchre." 

O Blessed bodie!  Whither art thou thrown?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
                                                Receive thee?

Sure there is room within our hearts good store;
For they can lodge transgressions by the score:
Thousands of toyes dwell there, yet out of doore
                                                They leave thee.

But that which shews them large, shews them unfit.
What ever sinne did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now?  Who hath indited it
                                                Of murder?

Where our hard hearts have took up stones to braine thee,
And missing this, most falsly did arraigne thee;
Onely these stones in quiet entertain thee,
                                                And order.

And as of old the Law by heav’nly art
Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart 
                                                To hold thee.

Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can, 
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
                                                Withhold thee.

Again, I will keep the commentary brief and mostly trust the poem to speak for itself. The poem I have chosen for tomorrow's Easter post is similar to this in its focus on the hard physicality of the event. Herbert is astonished here at the ease with which we discarded Christ, throwing him into a "cold hard stone." Our hearts are, too, like the stone that entombed our murdered Lord. The miraculous fact, though, is that in the same way the cold hard stone in which Christ was laid and which was rolled across the entrance to his tomb proved incapable of preventing his triumph over death, so our own hard hearts are capable of softening. Not because we are good, but because nothing can withhold the love of Christ from turning the heart of stone into a heart of flesh. 

As we sit in the darkness and the waiting of this day, let's not miss this fact. The tomb was real, the rock was heavy and immovable, yet it rolled away at the merest whisper of the being who spoke it into existence. It recognized his voice. May we hear his voice as well. May the heavy and immovable rock covering our hearts be moved aside at a glance.

A Poem for Good Friday

In order to honor Easter weekend, I though it would be good to have a poem each day for Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Today's poem is John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward." I offer it with (blessedly) little commentary.

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, 

The intelligence that moves, devotion is, 

And as the other Spheares, by being growne 

Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, 

And being by others hurried every day, 

Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: 

Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit 

For their first mover, and are whirld by it. 

Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West 

This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. 

There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, 

And by that setting endlesse day beget; 

But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, 

Sinne had eternally benighted all. 

Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see 

That spectacle of too much weight for mee. 

Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; 

What a death were it then to see God dye? 

It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, 

It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. 

Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, 

And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes? 

Could I behold that endlesse height which is 

Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, 

Humbled below us? or that blood which is 

The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, 

Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne 

By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne? 

If on these things I durst not looke, durst I 

Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, 

Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus 

Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us? 

Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, 

They'are present yet unto my memory, 

For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee, 

O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree; 

I turne my backe to thee, but to receive 

Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. 

O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, 

Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, 

Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, 

That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face. 

The conceit at the poem's beginning (and Donne was all about poetic conceits) is that he is like a heavenly body that is out of sync with the motion it should follow, being instead "subject to foreign motions." So, too, Donne, whose thoughts are focused to the east (presumably Jerusalem and the site of the crucifixion) is riding west and away from the place his motions ought to take him. He then moves into a paradox of the place of the sun's rising being linked to Christ's rising and falling and the now "endless day" that we get to live through on the other side of the cross. 

One of my problems with Donne as a poet is that he often feels cold to me. It is all very well and good, immensely talented poetically speaking, but his poetry often feels less like an expression of deep sentiment and more like a guy good at faking it and being awesome. The initial conceit and the paradox of the rising and falling fit into that for me. The poem shifts once Donne moves beyond this and begins reflecting on what it must have been to see God die. The two best lines in the poem, per my preference, are "Who sees God's face, that is self life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die?". There is no relief for the eye in beholding this scene of death and therefore the poet looks away. The rest of the poem focuses on this averted gaze. 

Donne's characteristic strong language returns in the final ten lines as the poet demands God's overwhelming intervention in order that he can turn back and view Christ. Donne turns his back to "receive corrections," to be whipped. He wants to be worthy of God's chastisement, to be burned of his dross, to have his deformed image restored to its intended perfection, and be able to turn and face his Savior. Donne is utterly aware that this is all a matter of grace. It is grace, after all, to receive discipline from the Lord (Hebrews 12:4-12). 

It is a beautiful poem that finds its heart as it goes on. I couldn't help but thinking of the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ as I read it this year. The desire to look away. Part of this impulse is obviously due to the fact that the act of crucifixion is revolting and horrific to behold. But part of the impulse stems from the fact of our complicity in this act. We look away because our own impurity is exposed. And since to look on and believe in the Savior as he is lifted up is to be saved, so by grace we need to be cleansed in order to turn back our ashamed eyes and gaze upon our Savior.

Have a blessed Good Friday.

Resume vs Eulogy Virtues

We are redesigning some of the curriculum for our junior level English class at my school. One component that we are going to add next year is an independent reading book that the students will work through mostly outside of class time and then write about and present to the class on. As such, I have been working through some popular-level nonfiction choices that I thought might be enriching for the students. One such book is David Brooks's The Road to Character. Brooks is the right-leaning pundit who writes a bi-weekly column for The New York Times. I have benefited a lot from his work as an editorialist over the years, but this is the first time I have actually read one of his books.

The premise of this book is that there is a notable dearth of character in contemporary America. We are selfish, morally lazy, and egotistical. Part of the reason for this is the distinction between what can be called the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. Our culture accommodates the resume virtues--the things that stand out while we apply for jobs--while it has seemingly little time (or notion of what to say, I would argue) about the deeper eulogy virtues. Brooks is not arguing that we should cast aside resume virtues entirely and withdraw from the world, but that we need to put these two competing poles of virtue back in tension with one another. The goal of the book, then, is to emphasize people throughout history who have excelled in the eulogy virtues to act as a counterweight to our near constant glorification of the resume set. 

Brooks's introduction fleshes out what the distinction between these two ideas of virtue looks like: in large part it seems to boil down to humility. One statistic is worth noting here. In 1950, responding to a Gallup poll that asked high school seniors "if they considered themselves to be a very important person," 12 percent of the survey population responded in the affirmative. In 2005, that number was 80 percent. This lack of humility manifests itself in the utter narcissism of our culture. Brooks notes that out individual greatness is hammered home into young people through every medium available: television, movies, teachers, parents, broader cultural authorities. 

Brooks argues that this turn toward narcissism has prevented us from cultivating the eulogy virtues that our culture so desperately lacks. It prevents this cultivation by convincing us that there is really nothing wrong with us in the first place that requires cultivation to fix. In order to put ourselves on the path of eulogy virtue development, we need to willingly engage in moral struggle and often harsh self-reflection. Brooks quotes the British writer Henry Carlie on the subject: "If we acknowledge that our inclination to sin is part of our natures, and that we will never wholly eradicate it, there is at least something for us to do in our lives that will not in the end seem just futile and absurd." There is a definite paradox lurking in that comment. Our futile and absurd battle over ineradicable sin prevents our lives from being futile and absurd. 

Resume virtues can be accomplished; eulogy virtues cannot be accomplished in the same way. We can grow in humility, self-sacrifice, love, obedience, etc. but our grasp of such things is always tenuous, always subject to change and deterioration if we slacken our pursuit. Resume virtues are easier, in a very real sense. Eulogy virtues demand our whole self. I think it is fairly evident at this point which path conforms most to the Christian faith. As an educator, it is my prayer that I train students to desire, pursue, and fix their eyes upon the resume virtues. In our credentialing culture, we need people who cultivate the inner self.