The Coffmans have arrived safely in Colorado. We have settled into my parents' house while we look for a home of our own on the south side of Denver, so I am living with my parents for the first time since moving to college in 2002. They will probably let me stay out as late as I want these days, though my mom will probably still call to check on me if I am out past dark.
I have been preoccupied with the logistics of the move and have had little time for reflection or writing. So, I am pawning off someone else's thoughts on you. I am rereading Tim Keller's book The Reason for God and here is what he has to say about miracles:
"The most instructive thing about this text [the stories about Jesus' resurrection] is, however, what it says about the purpose of Biblical miracles. They lead not simply to cognitive belief, but to worship, to awe and wonder. Jesus' miracles in particular were never magic tricks, designed only to impress and coerce. You never see him say something like: 'See that tree over there? Watch me make it burst into flames!' Instead, he used miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and raise the dead. Why? We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus' miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming." (99)
I find that beautiful, the distinction between suspension and restoration. One day our Lord will make all things new. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
26 June 2014
19 June 2014
On Leaving Kansas for What I Hope Will Be the Final Time
The first time I moved from Kansas to Colorado I was 10 years old. Nearly 11. Ten and three-quarters. I had just finished the fifth grade. I remember wanting to walk home from school that final day, enjoy one last slow amble with Joe Mabon and Brad O'Bryhim and whoever else walked with us whose names I have now forgotten, loping down the middle of the street in a town where that was still safe. But it was raining instead. Brad's mom met us at the school offering us all a ride home. I looked out the window of her minivan as the town flashed by us too quickly, chewing up in seconds what we could have stretched to minutes. And then I was home. Alone. Mom and Ty were still at the elementary school, mom wrapping everything up for the year. Tyler causing trouble, undoubtedly.
I came inside our house and slinked out of my jacket and backpack and lay down on the couch and looked out the window and stared up into the gray sky through the branches of a tree that had yet to bloom in the late spring. My life was ending. A new one would begin. And I had no idea what that meant or what it would look like. I only knew I had loved what I had in that little town in that little school with my little group of friends and that I might never have anything so good again.
When you are 10 years old you have no conception of something like The Rest of Your Life. I remember wishing that we could be living in Kansas again in time for me to go to high school with all of my friends. Play football together. Drive to school. Kiss the girls who would allow it. But I was leaving and those dreams of mine were dying in a way I only half-understood.
Fifteen years later I moved back. Not to that little town. But back to Kansas. Chasing a degree and a half-discerned dream, trying to plant a church. Those were the intentions anyway. Mostly, God gave us two kids and the trial by fire that is a Master's program.
And now I stand on the cusp of leaving again. This time I am not stretched out on the couch, feeling nostalgic in the way only a sensitive pre-adolescent can, but as grateful as I am to be returning to Colorado, as much as it feels like answering a call and bringing my dreams to fruition, I would be remiss not to look out of our bay window at our chicken coop and the rabbit picking its way through our Bermuda grass and not feel something. To watch my son run through the yard, shirt covered in sweat from the humidity, laughing and playing and mowing the yard with me. Every time we leave a place we give up something, even if at the time we cannot discern what that may be. For as much as my life in this place wasn't all that I wanted it to be, it was a great life.
This is where I learned how badly I needed to be a parent. How wonderful contentment in the home can be. How true it is that happiness is largely a choice. Leaving a place you don't like very much (Salina, not Kansas itself) is like going to the funeral of someone you didn't like very much: still sad. And no time to be petty. I have great hope for the future, trusting that this is God's will for our family and his vocation for my life. I am not sad in the slightest to be going to Colorado, only sad to be leaving Kansas. And, I trust that is right.
To the next step, my friends, may it be the last for awhile.
I came inside our house and slinked out of my jacket and backpack and lay down on the couch and looked out the window and stared up into the gray sky through the branches of a tree that had yet to bloom in the late spring. My life was ending. A new one would begin. And I had no idea what that meant or what it would look like. I only knew I had loved what I had in that little town in that little school with my little group of friends and that I might never have anything so good again.
When you are 10 years old you have no conception of something like The Rest of Your Life. I remember wishing that we could be living in Kansas again in time for me to go to high school with all of my friends. Play football together. Drive to school. Kiss the girls who would allow it. But I was leaving and those dreams of mine were dying in a way I only half-understood.
Fifteen years later I moved back. Not to that little town. But back to Kansas. Chasing a degree and a half-discerned dream, trying to plant a church. Those were the intentions anyway. Mostly, God gave us two kids and the trial by fire that is a Master's program.
And now I stand on the cusp of leaving again. This time I am not stretched out on the couch, feeling nostalgic in the way only a sensitive pre-adolescent can, but as grateful as I am to be returning to Colorado, as much as it feels like answering a call and bringing my dreams to fruition, I would be remiss not to look out of our bay window at our chicken coop and the rabbit picking its way through our Bermuda grass and not feel something. To watch my son run through the yard, shirt covered in sweat from the humidity, laughing and playing and mowing the yard with me. Every time we leave a place we give up something, even if at the time we cannot discern what that may be. For as much as my life in this place wasn't all that I wanted it to be, it was a great life.
This is where I learned how badly I needed to be a parent. How wonderful contentment in the home can be. How true it is that happiness is largely a choice. Leaving a place you don't like very much (Salina, not Kansas itself) is like going to the funeral of someone you didn't like very much: still sad. And no time to be petty. I have great hope for the future, trusting that this is God's will for our family and his vocation for my life. I am not sad in the slightest to be going to Colorado, only sad to be leaving Kansas. And, I trust that is right.
To the next step, my friends, may it be the last for awhile.
17 June 2014
Book Review: The Fault in Our Stars
The Fault in Our Stars is blowing up both the bestseller list and the box office these days, as hordes of (mostly) adolescent (mostly) females rush to the cineplex in order to cry their freaking eyes out. I mean, we all know how hard it is to milk pathos out of (spoiler alert) kids dying from cancer. It takes a nimble mind to feel sad about such a thing. The author, John Green, was recently profiled in the New Yorker where he comes off as a dumbed-down Malcolm Gladwell for the millennial crowd (which is a complisult). I watched one of his videos and found it cute and it gives you the impression you just learned something. And he is just so derned earnest about the whole thing, messing up his hair and everything!
Typically this would not be a book I would read. However, seeing as I am going to be teaching some of our nation's youth starting in a couple of months I figured I ought to read the book that is currently most popular among that crowd. And believe me, I began fully intending to hate this book. I have written a cynical review in my head and it is awesome and hilarious. But to tear down a book written for 14 year-old girls is not much of a task, and besides my intent in reading wasn't to point out how silly a good chunk of the book comes off to an adult but to try and understand why such a book would mean so much to a 14 year-old girl.
And I think I get it. Green's book is so successful in the teen crowd because it takes teens and teenage ridiculousness seriously. In an infamous example of teenagey things, the protagonist Hazel (a cancer kid) goes on a lengthy riff to her parents about the injustice of scrambled eggs being relegated to breakfast alone and left out of other meals. I guffawed reading this section, but then of course I'm supposed to. I am an adult. If people in their thirties talked about stuff like that it would be even more stupid than a 16 year-old doing the same (which is still stupid).
But you are supposed to be stupidly earnest and tritely philosophical when you're 16 in the hopes that you're earnestness will one day be matched with intelligence and your philosophizing backed by actual thought. In other words, in the hope that you will grow up. I never said anything quite like the scrambled eggs business when I was 16, but I could imagine thinking something like that. I do remember conversations, multiple, with a friend on the comparative merits of Dr. Pepper versus Mountain Dew, a smackdown for the ages. A few years ago while camping by a lake I was even part of a discussion (sideline to a discussion, more accurately) in which college students were asked to ponder, and I so wish I was kidding, how the difference between a log that had fallen out of the firepit for roasting 'mallows and the logs that remained within the firepit reflected certain spiritual truths about our own spiritual fervor for God. The discussion lasted for several minutes. It was one of the first times in my life I remember feeling old. I just wanted to put the blasted log back in and move on.
Another natural complaint about the book is that no teenager in America talks the way the protagonists, Hazel and Augustus, regularly do in their intellectual banter. The characters are walking thesauruses (thesauri? These whip-smart teens would probably know). This complaint is probably true. But I want to say two things on this matter: first, this book is in a certain degree aspirational. Teens want to sound this intelligent, even when they do not or cannot. Hazel and Augustus, with their high-flown phrases and dictionary vocabulary are merely articulating what teens feel in a way the teens themselves are not yet able. Besides, this complaint seems misplaced and doesn't crop up in criticisms of other types of literature. After all, how many people have ever spoken like a Jane Austen heroine? How often in your life have you given a soliloquy? There is an emotional realism to this book even if it lacks, or seems to lack, linguistic realism.
The second thing to note is that teens confronted with death, as the main characters here are, will grow up and mature differently than teens planning to coast from high school into a six year college degree, drink a ton of alcohol and play video games and move back in with mom and dad. Hazel and Augustus stare death in the face and will view life differently for that experience. People who criticize the hyper-maturity of the characters are chronologically snobbish. For centuries before we invented adolescence 100 years ago real people regularly grew up quickly when forced to do so. They went to college at age 11, served as Prime Minister at the age of 24, wrote sonnets lamenting their lack of accomplishment when they turned 23, etc. Hazel and Augustus's disease plucked them out of the normal tenor of adolescent life and they matured quicker than their peers. That makes psychological sense.
I hesitate to even call this post a book review, because I am not really reviewing the book. It was not written for me. As a book it was fine. Two and a half stars, if you must know. I have spent five hours more foolishly in my past. But it is not something I will reread and I will not be joining the throngs at the theater to sob over the death of the young, heart-rending though it is.
But again that is not the point with a book like this. For me it has helped remind me of the sublime awfulness of being a teenager. And hopefully it has given me a window into the world of the students I will be teaching in the near future. And, more importantly, a greater degree of compassion for their plight. You will get through it teenagers. It gets better. And you don't have to die to figure that out.
Typically this would not be a book I would read. However, seeing as I am going to be teaching some of our nation's youth starting in a couple of months I figured I ought to read the book that is currently most popular among that crowd. And believe me, I began fully intending to hate this book. I have written a cynical review in my head and it is awesome and hilarious. But to tear down a book written for 14 year-old girls is not much of a task, and besides my intent in reading wasn't to point out how silly a good chunk of the book comes off to an adult but to try and understand why such a book would mean so much to a 14 year-old girl.
And I think I get it. Green's book is so successful in the teen crowd because it takes teens and teenage ridiculousness seriously. In an infamous example of teenagey things, the protagonist Hazel (a cancer kid) goes on a lengthy riff to her parents about the injustice of scrambled eggs being relegated to breakfast alone and left out of other meals. I guffawed reading this section, but then of course I'm supposed to. I am an adult. If people in their thirties talked about stuff like that it would be even more stupid than a 16 year-old doing the same (which is still stupid).
But you are supposed to be stupidly earnest and tritely philosophical when you're 16 in the hopes that you're earnestness will one day be matched with intelligence and your philosophizing backed by actual thought. In other words, in the hope that you will grow up. I never said anything quite like the scrambled eggs business when I was 16, but I could imagine thinking something like that. I do remember conversations, multiple, with a friend on the comparative merits of Dr. Pepper versus Mountain Dew, a smackdown for the ages. A few years ago while camping by a lake I was even part of a discussion (sideline to a discussion, more accurately) in which college students were asked to ponder, and I so wish I was kidding, how the difference between a log that had fallen out of the firepit for roasting 'mallows and the logs that remained within the firepit reflected certain spiritual truths about our own spiritual fervor for God. The discussion lasted for several minutes. It was one of the first times in my life I remember feeling old. I just wanted to put the blasted log back in and move on.
Another natural complaint about the book is that no teenager in America talks the way the protagonists, Hazel and Augustus, regularly do in their intellectual banter. The characters are walking thesauruses (thesauri? These whip-smart teens would probably know). This complaint is probably true. But I want to say two things on this matter: first, this book is in a certain degree aspirational. Teens want to sound this intelligent, even when they do not or cannot. Hazel and Augustus, with their high-flown phrases and dictionary vocabulary are merely articulating what teens feel in a way the teens themselves are not yet able. Besides, this complaint seems misplaced and doesn't crop up in criticisms of other types of literature. After all, how many people have ever spoken like a Jane Austen heroine? How often in your life have you given a soliloquy? There is an emotional realism to this book even if it lacks, or seems to lack, linguistic realism.
The second thing to note is that teens confronted with death, as the main characters here are, will grow up and mature differently than teens planning to coast from high school into a six year college degree, drink a ton of alcohol and play video games and move back in with mom and dad. Hazel and Augustus stare death in the face and will view life differently for that experience. People who criticize the hyper-maturity of the characters are chronologically snobbish. For centuries before we invented adolescence 100 years ago real people regularly grew up quickly when forced to do so. They went to college at age 11, served as Prime Minister at the age of 24, wrote sonnets lamenting their lack of accomplishment when they turned 23, etc. Hazel and Augustus's disease plucked them out of the normal tenor of adolescent life and they matured quicker than their peers. That makes psychological sense.
I hesitate to even call this post a book review, because I am not really reviewing the book. It was not written for me. As a book it was fine. Two and a half stars, if you must know. I have spent five hours more foolishly in my past. But it is not something I will reread and I will not be joining the throngs at the theater to sob over the death of the young, heart-rending though it is.
But again that is not the point with a book like this. For me it has helped remind me of the sublime awfulness of being a teenager. And hopefully it has given me a window into the world of the students I will be teaching in the near future. And, more importantly, a greater degree of compassion for their plight. You will get through it teenagers. It gets better. And you don't have to die to figure that out.
12 June 2014
Wild Things
This spring I read two books about vanishing species and the people who are trying either to save them from extinction or save themselves from a beast humans have feared for millennia. The first was The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant. Vaillant's book recounts the story of a vengeful tigress in the taiga of far eastern Russia who killed at least two hunters, both of whom it is theorized had antagonized the tiger previously, perhaps even poaching. The vengeance in the title is the tiger's though eventually, of course, a group of hunters tracks her down and kills her. The second, Ghost Grizzlies: Does the Great Bear Still Haunt Colorado?, is different in scope, geography, and emphasis. Author David Petersen tells the story of the grizzly in Colorado and offers evidence that the bear still survives in the backcountry of the San Juan national forest in southwestern Colorado.
The two books really do not have a lot to do with one another. Vaillant's book offers a portrait of life at the edge of humanity, in a place where tigers and men butt up against each other and for the most part have learned to live together. When one tiger attacks a hunter and his dog outside of his illegal cabin the entire region is thrown into chaos. A special force specifically designed to perhaps paradoxically protect the region's tigers and put down tiger threats finds evidence that the hunter had shot and hit the tiger previously and that she had stalked him down, hunted him, eventually killing the man and mutilating his body. Injured and scared she was going to be a danger to anyone she came into contact with. An impoverished young hunter disobeyed the orders of the government, going into the taiga to hunt. He was killed as well. Eventually the tiger was tracked down and killed. And the region was free from at least that one animal.
Petersen's book about the San Juan grizzlies is part cultural history of our encounters with the great bear and part mythic tales of alleged sightings since the last confirmed sighting. In 1979, a full 27 years after the Department of Wildlife declared Colorado grizzly-free a hunter and his guide were bow-hunting elk in the remote San Juans. Hearing a rustle in the bushes, Ed Wiseman, the guide, was attacked. He pulled an arrow out of his sling and stabbed the bear through the freaking heart, like a total badass. The bear wandered a few steps away from Wiseman, lay down and died. Wiseman sustained serious injury but survived and continued to guide. The narrative from the various government agencies in the succeeding 35 years has been the same as it was from 1952-1979: "This time we know for sure that was the last bear." But there is a cadre of folks in the region who beg to differ, insisting that enough virgin land remains for limited numbers of the bears to roam free.
I am neither the first nor the last to lament the loss of wildness from our world. There are pockets of wilderness and creatures still left in our world whose sublimity strikes fear into our collective psyche and for that I am grateful. God commanded us to steward creation and I don't think he meant to kill everything that frightens us and rape the land for profit. However, I am a city boy. For me the idea of a grizzly bear or a mountain lion or a tiger or a shark is a romantic idea. I have never lived in the taiga and had to wonder if I was being stalked by a tiger on my walk to school.
One of the questions each book poses in its own way is, what now? We humans have trammeled the land, hunted these species to extinction, and are still governed by a primal fear of the great predators. If the Department of Wildlife promoted grizzly rehabitation and one killed a hiker a holy poopstorm would rain down on everyone's heads. While my idealistic side says that it is worth it, they are not talking about reintroducing the bear in south Denver so the chances it would have any bearing on my life are quite slim (though my brother-in-law and I intend to use our family camping trip to Pagosa Springs this summer as an opportunity to search for grizzly). So many of us want to know that wildness exists out there somewhere. It is this that underlies the great and persistent appeal of the National Parks: elk! moose! mountains not being razed for coal mining! But then we go back to our climate-controlled environment and read Outside magazine.
In other words, it is really easy for me to say Protect the Tiger! or Bring Back the Grizzly! because to do so costs me very little. And I do genuinely think we should protect these wild species. For one, they act as a much-needed check to our egos. Our reign on the top of the food chain would seem precarious if our sixth sense caused us to intuit a tiger was watching us and determining its next move, no matter the caliber of the gun in our hands. We need things out there that make us feel small. For another, the plight of such gorgeous creatures (I hope I can wrestle with a grizzly bear in the new earth and run with a tiger) underscores the effects of our darker impulse to conquer without thought to consequence.
In the end I don't know what to do in situations like this because I don't know what can be done. Is the population of tigers in the taiga genetically different enough to sustain itself over time, assuming its survival? The same question applies to the San Juan grizzlies. Suppose there are a dozen brown bears roaming the Weiminuche. Left to their own devices would they still be around 50 years from now? Is our intervention going to help or harm? These questions are vexing and necessitated by the way we have treated these creatures for so long.
But the human element must be considered as well. I love grizzly bears and would thrill with the idea of sharing a mountain with one, but if one attacked someone and I had the means to stop it of course I would do so.
Maybe the lesson for Coloradoans pining for the return of the grizzly is the one the denizens of the taiga have learned and one that I am trying to teach my toddler son: sometimes you just have to share.
The two books really do not have a lot to do with one another. Vaillant's book offers a portrait of life at the edge of humanity, in a place where tigers and men butt up against each other and for the most part have learned to live together. When one tiger attacks a hunter and his dog outside of his illegal cabin the entire region is thrown into chaos. A special force specifically designed to perhaps paradoxically protect the region's tigers and put down tiger threats finds evidence that the hunter had shot and hit the tiger previously and that she had stalked him down, hunted him, eventually killing the man and mutilating his body. Injured and scared she was going to be a danger to anyone she came into contact with. An impoverished young hunter disobeyed the orders of the government, going into the taiga to hunt. He was killed as well. Eventually the tiger was tracked down and killed. And the region was free from at least that one animal.
Petersen's book about the San Juan grizzlies is part cultural history of our encounters with the great bear and part mythic tales of alleged sightings since the last confirmed sighting. In 1979, a full 27 years after the Department of Wildlife declared Colorado grizzly-free a hunter and his guide were bow-hunting elk in the remote San Juans. Hearing a rustle in the bushes, Ed Wiseman, the guide, was attacked. He pulled an arrow out of his sling and stabbed the bear through the freaking heart, like a total badass. The bear wandered a few steps away from Wiseman, lay down and died. Wiseman sustained serious injury but survived and continued to guide. The narrative from the various government agencies in the succeeding 35 years has been the same as it was from 1952-1979: "This time we know for sure that was the last bear." But there is a cadre of folks in the region who beg to differ, insisting that enough virgin land remains for limited numbers of the bears to roam free.
I am neither the first nor the last to lament the loss of wildness from our world. There are pockets of wilderness and creatures still left in our world whose sublimity strikes fear into our collective psyche and for that I am grateful. God commanded us to steward creation and I don't think he meant to kill everything that frightens us and rape the land for profit. However, I am a city boy. For me the idea of a grizzly bear or a mountain lion or a tiger or a shark is a romantic idea. I have never lived in the taiga and had to wonder if I was being stalked by a tiger on my walk to school.
One of the questions each book poses in its own way is, what now? We humans have trammeled the land, hunted these species to extinction, and are still governed by a primal fear of the great predators. If the Department of Wildlife promoted grizzly rehabitation and one killed a hiker a holy poopstorm would rain down on everyone's heads. While my idealistic side says that it is worth it, they are not talking about reintroducing the bear in south Denver so the chances it would have any bearing on my life are quite slim (though my brother-in-law and I intend to use our family camping trip to Pagosa Springs this summer as an opportunity to search for grizzly). So many of us want to know that wildness exists out there somewhere. It is this that underlies the great and persistent appeal of the National Parks: elk! moose! mountains not being razed for coal mining! But then we go back to our climate-controlled environment and read Outside magazine.
In other words, it is really easy for me to say Protect the Tiger! or Bring Back the Grizzly! because to do so costs me very little. And I do genuinely think we should protect these wild species. For one, they act as a much-needed check to our egos. Our reign on the top of the food chain would seem precarious if our sixth sense caused us to intuit a tiger was watching us and determining its next move, no matter the caliber of the gun in our hands. We need things out there that make us feel small. For another, the plight of such gorgeous creatures (I hope I can wrestle with a grizzly bear in the new earth and run with a tiger) underscores the effects of our darker impulse to conquer without thought to consequence.
In the end I don't know what to do in situations like this because I don't know what can be done. Is the population of tigers in the taiga genetically different enough to sustain itself over time, assuming its survival? The same question applies to the San Juan grizzlies. Suppose there are a dozen brown bears roaming the Weiminuche. Left to their own devices would they still be around 50 years from now? Is our intervention going to help or harm? These questions are vexing and necessitated by the way we have treated these creatures for so long.
But the human element must be considered as well. I love grizzly bears and would thrill with the idea of sharing a mountain with one, but if one attacked someone and I had the means to stop it of course I would do so.
Maybe the lesson for Coloradoans pining for the return of the grizzly is the one the denizens of the taiga have learned and one that I am trying to teach my toddler son: sometimes you just have to share.
06 June 2014
Snapshots from Parenting: The Boy and the Bible
First, one really cute thing Owen does before
I get into the meat of what I want to say. Owen is simultaneously a human boy
of nearly the age of three, a big giraffe, a small robin, and a small bear.
Giraffes are his favorite animal, robins his favorite bird, and I have called
him Bear since the day he was born so that one is more default. There was a new
animal added to the menagerie this week: a baby fox. Clara was changing him for
bed and he made a slight whimpering sound and then tucked his head down into
her and rubbed it back and forth. When she asked him what in the world he was
doing he told her he was a baby fox. His name is Harold when he is a baby fox.
He keeps a baby fox den beside our bed with two of our throw pillows and an
assortment of his blankets. (This is quite similar, structurally, to his
robin’s nest that he builds on the floor at various times. I am overlooking his
lack of architectural imagination.) Now, onto the other story. . .
Owen, like most young sons, emulates nearly
everything that I do. For better or worse, of course. He parrots my mannerisms,
expressions, language. He is learning to process the world and his emotions
through the way I engage the world and my own emotions. It is very convicting
stuff. And the snapshot I share in this post is not meant at all to puff up my
own estimation of my success at showing him Christlikeness. I fail constantly.
This post is to glorify God for the way he makes up for what we lack.
The other night we were at our weekly Bible
study and I was leading a conversation on family. We were discussing how it is
the task of parents to shape the affections of our children, not just their
minds. Clara and I are the only parents in the group, and we were expressing
some mild exasperation in the day-to-day specifics of putting Christ at the
center of our home. With a three year-old (almost) and a one year-old (almost)
we can wonder if anything we are doing with our kids—reading the Book of Common
Prayer at mealtimes, singing hymns, praying as a family—are really making any
difference at all, if there is any way they are getting through to our kids and
shaping their affections and desires.
Just as we are having this conversation,
Owen, who had been playing in the living room came up and asked Clara for a Bible.
She didn’t have one in the diaper bag and he got really sad. She told him to
pretend that “Is Your Mama a Llama?” was a Bible (heresy!). He assented,
grabbed the book, and came and sat next to me at the kitchen table. He
interrupted our conversation to tell the whole group his routine:
“First, I read the Bible. Then I sing a song,
like ‘Oh, How He Loves Us.’ Then I pray.”
It was a simple moment, but it was so
touching for us. He wanted to insert himself into our conversation. He sat
beside me for the rest of the time, mimicking my hand motions and agreeing with
another group member whenever I did.
But it showed me that God’s power manifests
not when we are perfect and have everything neatly ironed out, but when in our
weakness we try to be more like him.
Some Brief Thoughts on Alcohol
Christianity Today's recent cover story on N.T. Wright at long last persuaded me to subscribe to a magazine I have long freeloaded from. Which is serendipitous, given that this month's cover story touches on a topic I have been thinking a lot about lately. Alcohol. I thought it would be nice to write about something fun and not at all controversial.
But seriously, what follows is in no way intended to be divisive. I can and do appreciate a variety of perspectives on this issue. However, D.L. Mayfield's cover article on the subject of alcohol consumption ought to be compulsory reading for evangelicals my age. Culture shifts within the church seem to primarily consist of pendulum swings--liberalism to legalism, gospel to law, etc.--and my generation has swung the earlier fundamentalist fear of alcohol completely the other direction. We are almost gleeful in our alcoholic consumption. Mayfield cites the example of evangelical moms talking about needing a glass of wine after a long day with the kids, a comment that regularly shows up in my Facebook newsfeed. Young evangelical men are seemingly expected to enjoy craft beer and bourbon in order to show their all-things-to-all-people bona fides.
As Mayfield points out, though, alcohol is not always morally neutral. Hardly ever, matter of fact. Many people have a disease related to alcohol, called alcoholism. You may have heard of it. One branch of my family has struggled with the disease for generations. Mayfield's contention, then, is that for those evangelicals who pontificate the glories of single malt or who talk about "mommy need[ing] her wine" the most readily available explanation is that they know no one, or think they know no one (or more likely never consider the issue), who struggles with alcoholism. This parochial view allows us to gloss over the dangers of alcohol in favor of a mild form of libertarianism.
Mayfield herself gave up alcohol when she and her family moved into an impoverished apartment complex to reach out to the residents. Alcohol was no longer a fun diversion, but a life-wrecker. It became difficult for her to walk into the neighborhood liquor store and witness the degradation of life surrounding it. And so she gave up drinking. She realized she was free in Christ, which included the freedom to abstain.
Mayfield's temperance emanates from a place of compassion. She is surrounded by the detritus of alcohol and cannot disentangle the substance from its effects in her neighborhood and upon the people she loves. Which is exactly where the impetus for the temperance movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began. Though the movement reached its culmination in the disastrous Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment, the fact that it brought freedom to many from the bondage of alcohol should not be overlooked. The temperance crusaders by and large were not fun-hating puritanical prudes, but people whose husbands, brother, and fathers had been devastated by the drug of alcohol. It was rare in that day to have a drink after work to blow off some steam, more likely to blow an entire paycheck in a drunken frenzy. Notably, it was not only "fundamentalist" Christians who led the movement, but progressive believers as well. Alcohol was seen as a life-destroyer and a guarantor of systemic poverty, a role it still quite clearly plays in many communities.
I am not going to quit drinking after reading Mayfield's article. I find her perspective persuasive and I think alcohol is an important thing to think about. We must be careful to be intentional with a substance as powerful as alcohol. Too many of us seem to have thought very little on the topic, except to ignorantly denigrate the very real concerns of earlier generations.
In reading through the gospels in the One Year Bible, I have read repeatedly the passage in the Synoptics when Jesus shares the Passover supper with his disciples on the night of his betrayal. During that final meal he tells his friends: "I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom." We are going to party with Jesus someday. And among everything else on that glorious day there will be wine. Wine that we can drink without shame or reproach or fear of captivity. And for those teetotaling believers who want to wait for that day, I say, God bless you. For those convicted differently, I say the same. To each other I say practice charity. To not let either the liberties we exercise or our the convictions we hold become stumbling blocks to one another. Remember, there are ditches on both sides of the road.
But seriously, what follows is in no way intended to be divisive. I can and do appreciate a variety of perspectives on this issue. However, D.L. Mayfield's cover article on the subject of alcohol consumption ought to be compulsory reading for evangelicals my age. Culture shifts within the church seem to primarily consist of pendulum swings--liberalism to legalism, gospel to law, etc.--and my generation has swung the earlier fundamentalist fear of alcohol completely the other direction. We are almost gleeful in our alcoholic consumption. Mayfield cites the example of evangelical moms talking about needing a glass of wine after a long day with the kids, a comment that regularly shows up in my Facebook newsfeed. Young evangelical men are seemingly expected to enjoy craft beer and bourbon in order to show their all-things-to-all-people bona fides.
As Mayfield points out, though, alcohol is not always morally neutral. Hardly ever, matter of fact. Many people have a disease related to alcohol, called alcoholism. You may have heard of it. One branch of my family has struggled with the disease for generations. Mayfield's contention, then, is that for those evangelicals who pontificate the glories of single malt or who talk about "mommy need[ing] her wine" the most readily available explanation is that they know no one, or think they know no one (or more likely never consider the issue), who struggles with alcoholism. This parochial view allows us to gloss over the dangers of alcohol in favor of a mild form of libertarianism.
Mayfield herself gave up alcohol when she and her family moved into an impoverished apartment complex to reach out to the residents. Alcohol was no longer a fun diversion, but a life-wrecker. It became difficult for her to walk into the neighborhood liquor store and witness the degradation of life surrounding it. And so she gave up drinking. She realized she was free in Christ, which included the freedom to abstain.
Mayfield's temperance emanates from a place of compassion. She is surrounded by the detritus of alcohol and cannot disentangle the substance from its effects in her neighborhood and upon the people she loves. Which is exactly where the impetus for the temperance movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began. Though the movement reached its culmination in the disastrous Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment, the fact that it brought freedom to many from the bondage of alcohol should not be overlooked. The temperance crusaders by and large were not fun-hating puritanical prudes, but people whose husbands, brother, and fathers had been devastated by the drug of alcohol. It was rare in that day to have a drink after work to blow off some steam, more likely to blow an entire paycheck in a drunken frenzy. Notably, it was not only "fundamentalist" Christians who led the movement, but progressive believers as well. Alcohol was seen as a life-destroyer and a guarantor of systemic poverty, a role it still quite clearly plays in many communities.
I am not going to quit drinking after reading Mayfield's article. I find her perspective persuasive and I think alcohol is an important thing to think about. We must be careful to be intentional with a substance as powerful as alcohol. Too many of us seem to have thought very little on the topic, except to ignorantly denigrate the very real concerns of earlier generations.
In reading through the gospels in the One Year Bible, I have read repeatedly the passage in the Synoptics when Jesus shares the Passover supper with his disciples on the night of his betrayal. During that final meal he tells his friends: "I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom." We are going to party with Jesus someday. And among everything else on that glorious day there will be wine. Wine that we can drink without shame or reproach or fear of captivity. And for those teetotaling believers who want to wait for that day, I say, God bless you. For those convicted differently, I say the same. To each other I say practice charity. To not let either the liberties we exercise or our the convictions we hold become stumbling blocks to one another. Remember, there are ditches on both sides of the road.
04 June 2014
Teaching Philosophy
A few of you have asked in conversation about my new teaching position what I wrote about in my Statement of Teaching Philosophy. I mentioned in an earlier post about how the words just flowed out quickly and while I still don't think it is perfect, and it is certainly not polished, here is what I wrote. I was mercifully brief for once in my life:
Teaching Philosophy
I
believe that all knowledge, wisdom, and truth emanates from the triune God. As
such, all education, whether in mathematics or languages or literature is a
striving to know our omniscient God in a deeper way. John Milton put it nicely
in his educational tract, written in 1644 (I will colloquialize the language
and spelling): “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first
parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him,
to imitate him, to be like him, as we may be nearest by possessing our souls of
true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the
highest perfection.” Milton of course goes on to say how difficult of a process
learning is, but that the end is to become like God and so to glorify Him.
I
remember reading that passage for the first time in graduate school and
thinking of how far my experience of education had been from what the old
Puritan divine had in mind for the education of young minds. In my childhood
education the subjects were so atomized. What hath Christ to do with Belial? What
hath reading to do with science? But when all education and all knowledge and
wisdom is under the umbrella of repairing the fall and learning to know God and
the things he has revealed to us then it takes on new life again. Science is a
way to praise God for his power in creation. Math is a way to marvel at his
precision. Literature puts us in touch with the eternal.
For me
this realization liberates education. Time spent learning is never time wasted.
Given that we spend so much of our lives, especially our early lives, in educational
situations this is extremely fantastic news. It is this that I want to impart
to the students that I teach: that all knowledge testifies to Jesus. If, as
Milton suggests, in our quest for knowledge we unite our studies to love of God
and imitation of Christ we will have the type of knowledge that can build up
and not the empty sort of knowledge that only puffs up our own egos.
----
Like I said, short and sweet, at least by my usual long-winded standards. And I mean everything that I wrote and if I had not been intentionally short-winded I would have elaborated on each point. And, of course I quoted Milton. Like I do. However, there is the bare-bones outline for my philosophy both of teaching and learning. The epiphanies I had about education in my mid-20s changed my life and I hope to encourage my students to avoid some of the angst Christians can feel about education as well as to avoid a sacred/secular divide in their views of the subjects. I don't want to create thinkers only, but worshipers who worship our Father in spirit and in truth.
02 June 2014
Getting to Know GW (13): Slavery, Again
I posted earlier about Washington's discomfort with the institution of slavery. For a number of reasons he was uncomfortable with the practice and worked to mitigate some of its harshness on his own estates, but he refused to ever speak out candidly against slavery. This position put the leader of a nation striving towards individual freedom and liberty in not a little hypocritical position. George Orwell said famously in Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," and something like this sentiment abound in early America as it surely does in every other political system in one way or another (Orwell was, of course, satirizing communism).
One of the great myths of Southern slavery is that the abuses and excesses are overblown by our retroactive moralistic judging of the institution and that most slaves were treated well. What's more, they were content in their position and it was only abolitionist agitators that stirred up in their docile minds notions of freedom. Washington held to this notion as well. He believed if he treated his human chattel well and extended a certain amount of liberty to them they would be content in their status as human chattel.
Washington was disabused of this notion toward the end of his life when two of his most trusted slaved, not to mention the two that had the easiest go of it, ran away as soon as they had opportunity. One was the personal chef named Hercules that Washington had brought from Mount Vernon to the presidential mansion in Philadelphia. The other was Martha's attendant Ona. Both decided they would rather have a harder life and be free than an easy life with bondage.
One of the little known facts of Washington's life (at least I had never heard it before) is that he wrote a will in his final months that set all of his slaves free. I couldn't help but wonder if the disappearance of two beloved slaves whom he assumed with all of the blithe ignorance of the wealthy member of a privileged class were happy in their estate finally caused Washington to see through all of the b.s. his society had constructed to justify slavery.
Certainly part of his motivation in this benevolent act was to rectify his image with posterity. He had to know that slavery as a system was unsustainable in the long term and that future generations would judge harshly its practitioners. Washington, as we have seen, was hypercritical of his public image. But part of me thinks that there was a more human concern playing out with the old man. He had always felt uncomfortable with slavery and the disappearance of the two best treated slaves put flight to the notion that well-treated slaves will be content in their confinement. The last moral card he held in his deck was shredded. And he did what was in his power hoping that it would make a positive example to other slaveholders in the region. It did not, and 65 years later America finally had its bloodletting that Washington had helped it avoid during his remarkable career.
One of the great myths of Southern slavery is that the abuses and excesses are overblown by our retroactive moralistic judging of the institution and that most slaves were treated well. What's more, they were content in their position and it was only abolitionist agitators that stirred up in their docile minds notions of freedom. Washington held to this notion as well. He believed if he treated his human chattel well and extended a certain amount of liberty to them they would be content in their status as human chattel.
Washington was disabused of this notion toward the end of his life when two of his most trusted slaved, not to mention the two that had the easiest go of it, ran away as soon as they had opportunity. One was the personal chef named Hercules that Washington had brought from Mount Vernon to the presidential mansion in Philadelphia. The other was Martha's attendant Ona. Both decided they would rather have a harder life and be free than an easy life with bondage.
One of the little known facts of Washington's life (at least I had never heard it before) is that he wrote a will in his final months that set all of his slaves free. I couldn't help but wonder if the disappearance of two beloved slaves whom he assumed with all of the blithe ignorance of the wealthy member of a privileged class were happy in their estate finally caused Washington to see through all of the b.s. his society had constructed to justify slavery.
Certainly part of his motivation in this benevolent act was to rectify his image with posterity. He had to know that slavery as a system was unsustainable in the long term and that future generations would judge harshly its practitioners. Washington, as we have seen, was hypercritical of his public image. But part of me thinks that there was a more human concern playing out with the old man. He had always felt uncomfortable with slavery and the disappearance of the two best treated slaves put flight to the notion that well-treated slaves will be content in their confinement. The last moral card he held in his deck was shredded. And he did what was in his power hoping that it would make a positive example to other slaveholders in the region. It did not, and 65 years later America finally had its bloodletting that Washington had helped it avoid during his remarkable career.
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